Ellen Pompeo and Chris Ivery’s Marriage Is the Stuff of Hollywood Dreams

Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

I love an assertive broad (sorry, but I do!), which might explain why I’m so infatuated with Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo’s recent insistence on getting her share of credit for her show’s longevity. Pompeo recently told El País that she had merely stepped back from, rather than fully departing, the long-running show because “If I were to walk away completely, everybody gets to make money from my hard work for 20 years and I wouldn’t make any money. To me, it doesn’t make any sense that everybody [else] gets to profit off of my hard work.” (Pompeo remains the narrator of Grey’s, besides serving as an executive producer.) Hard-working women knowing their worth in an industry determined to rob them of the fruits of their labor as often as possible? I love to see it!

Luckily, Pompeo’s husband of 18 years—record producer Chris Ivery, who’s behind hits including Rihanna’s “Cheers (Drink to That)” from 2010 and the television show Smash (yes, it was a hit, at least in my house. I miss you, Smash!)—apparently also loves Pompeo’s take-charge attitude. “My husband is not at all intimidated by my drive or my bossiness,” Pompeo told People in 2018, and honestly, why should he be? If you’re bummed out that your hot, famous wife makes a lot of money at work, that sounds like a personal problem to me!

The couple at the 2006 Writers Guild Awards.

Photo: Getty Images

Pompeo and Ivery may be Hollywood royalty now, but their courtship was the stuff of low-budget, indie-movie, meet-cute dreams: After a chance encounter in a grocery store, they squabbled over the phone when Pompeo finally returned one of Ivery’s many calls. “We had a fight first, and then, you know, that’s kind of always the way to my heart,” Pompeo told Drew Barrymore in 2022. “Piss me off and I’m all yours.” Same, girl! (Also, am I the only one who desperately wants to know which grocery store it was? The Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake has some down-to-earth romantic appeal, but I feel like Pompeo and Ivery are more the Gelson’s-hot-bar type.)

Pompeo and Ivery are now parents to three children—Stella Luna, Sienna May, and Eli Christopher—and the way Pompeo talked about motherhood during her recent appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy only made me admire her family unit even more. When host Alex Cooper mentioned that she’d been advised against having kids while maintaining a career, Pompeo told her: “People who judge that and make those very ignorant comments, they lack wisdom and they lack intuition and they lack magic…. You cannot be a mother and have children and give a hundred percent to your job. You can’t because…you’re no longer just you. You split into different pieces. And you know what that does? It makes you more soulful. It makes you richer. It makes you funnier. It makes you feel more. It makes you more empathetic. It makes you angrier…. You will be yourself times a thousand.”

Obviously, Pompeo isn’t the first to chafe against the regressive notion that you can’t have a family and work at the same time, but I am so entirely charmed by her promise that working while mothering makes you “yourself times a thousand.” At the risk of chalking a woman’s success and stability up to her relationship, I do feel like this is the kind of confidence that can bloom from a truly connected and equal partnership—one in which your spouse provides genuine support for you and your family. (I mean, what do I know—maybe Pompeo has to nag Ivery to pick up the dry-cleaning all the time—but I can just tell there’s good couple energy here.)

This might sound weird coming from someone who literally writes a column devoted to parasocially peering into celebrities’ private lives, but maybe my favorite part of Pompeo and Ivery’s relationship is…well, how little we know about it. The couple’s recent red-carpet appearance with their kids at Pompeo’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony was a rare one, and I, for one, kind of love that their family life is the antithesis of overexposed. It seems there’s no familial reality show in the cards for their brood—although, let’s be real, I would watch!