Ellen Pompeo says she insulted Denzel Washington on the set of “Grey’s Anatomy”

Ellen Pompeo said she hit back harshly at Denzel Washington when he directed an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy”.

Washington, a two-time Oscar-winning actor, was directing the 2016 episode “The Sound of Silence” when Pompeo said she improvised the line, “Look at me when you apologize. Look at me,” in an exchange with another actor. The out-of-script moment angered Washington.

“Denzel got ham on my ass,” she told former co-star Patrick Dempsey on her “Tell Me” podcast, released Wednesday. “He was like, ‘I’m the director. Don’t tell him what to do. And I was like, ‘Look, motherfucker, this is my show. This is my set. Who are you telling? As if you hardly know where the bathroom is.

The two didn’t speak for a while. Pompeo said he told Washington’s wife Pauletta Pearson that Washington yelled at him and “I don’t agree with him.”

But the two finally made things right, and Pompeo said she now had “the utmost respect” for Washington. The passion of the performers, she added, creates the “magic”.

“This is where you get the good stuff,” she said.

Another juicy behind-the-scenes “GA” plot has surfaced recently. One producer said in a revealing book about the show that Dempsey gave his castmates “PTSD” and “terrorized the set” when he acrimoniously left the show in 2015.