Q 1

PLAYBOY: Lots of us know you for roles in Catch Me If You Can and Old School, but playing a surgical intern on Grey's Anatomy has brought your biggest fame. When did you first notice guys wanting to play doctor with you?

Ellen Pompeo: I didn't have any confidence as a young girl, because all the other girls had boobs and hips. I was always thin, always called the stick or the pencil. I didn't have a boyfriend until I was 16, and he was eight years older. My father was furious about this 24-year-old, and I had to hide the relationship.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: Was Dad any better with your younger boyfriends?

Ellen Pompeo: When my boyfriend slept with my best friend and I was playing the field a little, I dated some boys my age, but my father intimidated everybody. He'd wait at the window, and when they would drop me off in front of my house, he'd fly out the door and rip them out of the car by their neck. He didn't want me in cars with boys, and they would never come back. My father is a big, scary sort of guy. He ruined my social life. For me, guys and sex and everything came after money, though. It was about survival, how to make money to better my life and get myself out of that town.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: That town was good, solid, working-class Everett, Massachusetts, where you were the youngest of six kids. How did you first start making your exit money?

Ellen Pompeo: At 14 and 15 I sold slush outside Fenway Park in Boston for wiseguys. Back then I didn't know they were wiseguys, but I do now. They just seemed like nice guys who were willing to give me a job when I wasn't old enough to work. There were probably 10 other slush carts on the street, but mine was the only one with a line of people waiting down the block for my "special" slush. I was given this giant cleaned-out ketchup bottle, and for a couple of dollars extra I would squirt one or two shots into the slush. The cops never bothered me, so I eventually figured out that these guys were connected and I could sell as much special slush as I wanted. Those streets of Boston will definitely teach you the art of the hustle, and I learned it very young.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: You must also have learned the art of survival very young, since your mother died when you were four.

Ellen Pompeo: I don't want to talk about that. But because of what happened to me as a child, we had different babysitters every day; all these characters in my life would babysit me. I have so many different influences. My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater. It was the 1970s, and all my brothers and sisters were hippies. They were smoking pot and watching The Three Stooges. When I was small it seemed chaotic, but now, as an older woman looking back, I think, My God, it's so much to draw on.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: In the early 1990s you were a cocktail waitress in Miami and then worked as a bartender in New York. The way you look, your tips must have been huge.

Ellen Pompeo: My father was a salesman, so I guess the art of the hustle was always in me. Miami happened so fast. There were all these beautiful girls, models the rich guys wanted to meet. These playboys had absolutely no game, so I made big money by getting them to send champagne and drinks to these girls' tables, because the guys were so desperate to meet them. I worked the door at a couple of clubs, and that was very lucrative too. People will do anything to get in, and "anything" is throwing more money at you.