choose me

Ellen Pompeo Submits Her Patent as ‘Pick Me Girl’ Inventor

Photo: Variety

What’s left to do after playing an iconic doctor on TV? Move to Canada? Become the most popular guy here? How about submitting a patent on a cultural innovation you created? On Variety’s Actors on Actors, Grey’s Anatomy’s Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl had a mini-reunion and chatted about Pompeo’s influence on TikTok’s favorite phrase. When talking about quotes her daughter and their friends repeat from the show, Pompeo remembers the scene where Meredith asks Derek to choose her over Addison in season two. She says that as the girls explain what a pick me girl is, they’re quoting her speech. “And I’m like, “Hello?! Do you know who invented the ‘pick me girl’?” Despite fighting against “one of the most famous scenes,” Pompeo hated the speech — she said her tears were because she had to “beg for a man” on camera and not due to the emotion of the scene. The scene lives on the Tok, with over 80,000 videos using some variation of Pompeo’s speech, so the internet did in fact pick her as the official “pick me girl” innovator.

Ellen Pompeo Submits Her Patent as ‘Pick Me Girl’ Inventor