Grey’s Anatomy star teases Ellen Pompeo return in season 20

It’s her first season where she’s not credited as a series regular.

Grey’s Anatomy season 20 is set to be the first not to feature Ellen Pompeo as a series regular, and castmate and producer/director Debbie Allen has talked about how much we’ll get to see Meredith Grey.

Pompeo has mostly exited the role but continued to serve as narrator in the recent season and appeared on-screen in about a third of the episodes.

Speaking to TVLine, Allen didn’t explicitly state how many of this shorter season’s 10 episodes Pompeo will appear in, but she did confirm at least one appearance.

ABC

“She’s in the first episode, and she’s in the one I’m going to direct,” Allen said. “We have to let her go and do some other things, but she’s still our queen. She’s still our number 1 on the call sheet.”

However, Entertainment Tonight has similar quotes from Allen where she says the first episode is the episode she has directed — so does that mean Pompeo is making only one on-screen appearance in season 20?

Speaking about her decision to step away from Grey’s, Pompeo explained: “The show has been incredible to me, and I’ve loved a lot of the experience. Listen, it’s just I gotta mix it up a little bit.

“I’m 53, my brain is like scrambled eggs… I gotta do something new, or I’m literally gonna turn into, like, you can’t do the New York Times crossword puzzle every single day.

“I mean, 19 years — that’s more than people keep their kids in their house, like people keep their kids in their house until they’re 18 and then they send them off to college, so this is like me like going away to college.”

Grey’s Anatomy returns to ABC in the US next March. The show streams on Disney+ in the UK.