Ellen Pompeo Dissects How Kristine Barnett Sinks To The “Lowest Point Of Victimhood” In ‘Good American Family’ Finale & Ponders Her Next Role Beyond Meredith Grey

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the finale of Hulu’s Good American Family.

In the finale of Hulu’s Good American Family, the last threads of Kristine Barnett’s (Ellen Pompeo) accusations against Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid) firmly fall apart.

Mountains of evidence, including damning Facebook messages between Kristine and her husband Michael (Mark Duplass), and several expert witnesses testifying that Natalia was a child when she was abandoned by the couple turn just about everyone against Kristine — including her own biological children — after she managed for years to convince her friends and family (and the courts) that Natalia was an adult masquerading as a child, abusing Kristine and her children, and exploiting the family for money.

Frustratingly, and thanks to a frighteningly flawed judicial system, Natalia doesn’t win her case. Nobody is able to present most of this evidence in court, or even refer to her as a child. Instead, she must simply be referred to as a “person who was born in 1989.”

Still, while the evidence might not be admissible in the court of law, it certainly is in the court of public opinion — and this is where Kristine takes quite a lashing as even her closest allies begin to question her stories about Natalia.

“To me, she is in the denial. It’s just, how did this go so wrong? So I don’t ever see [the show’s version of] Kristine cracking in that way that ‘everybody’s on to me.’ It’s not that. It’s more like, ‘Why did everybody turn on me? Why did this girl get the sympathy that I didn’t get? I’ve helped all these people. I have this record of helping all these people, of helping children. I’ve only ever tried to help,’” Pompeo explains of her take on her character’s final moments in the finale. “So in a way, it’s a more nuanced victim, but it’s also the lowest point of victimhood, because it’s like feeling sorry for herself.”

In the interview below, Pompeo digs deep into the psyche of her character to explain how her version of Kristine sank to that “lowest point of victimhood” after convincing so many people that Natalia was malicious. She also discusses the delicacy of navigating her own take on a real-life person and what’s next for her now that she’s taken a big swing outside of her long-running role as Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy.

DEADLINE: You previously have said that one aspect of Kristine that you really honed in on was the idea that she’s someone who will find a way to make herself the victim, no matter the circumstances. I really see that come out in the finale. Are there any moments with Kristine that really stood out to you in that respect?

ELLEN POMPEO: Yes, and she does it throughout [the series], right? It’s strongest, almost, at the beginning, because she needs to get everybody on her side. The emotional shift that I had to navigate was really, in the beginning, she had the power of nobody knowing anything or having any information. So to play the victim when your audience hasn’t seen the movie is much easier. By the end of the show, we see that everything she’s said and accused Natalia of has all been lies and made up and exaggerated and seen through her lens. So although she’s still playing a victim, it’s much harder to do because she’s got no ammo left. She’s got nothing left. Everybody saw Natalia in the courtroom. Everyone saw what she looked like, saw that she looked older. We now have the birth mother from Ukraine providing the documents. We now have seen that all of these professionals, these doctors, have said that isn’t at all what happened. So it’s a matter of, how do you hold up that victim stance when you’ve been exposed

That is more nuanced. I felt like I had to pull it back a little bit, especially…when Val turns. She can blame Michael turning on the new wife. She can say, ‘Well, Michael doesn’t believe me and isn’t with me anymore, because you know that wh*re is influencing how he feels.’ But Val, she’s always sort of seen Val as an aspirational person and someone that she would have loved to have been with. Val’s acceptance of her sort of makes her feel like she’s arrived, or she’s at some sort of level or status. Val turning on her is really a super big moment, the pivotal moment for the character when I was preparing and when I was thinking about the emotional turns. There really is nothing left. She’s standing alone at the party, still convinced, but she doesn’t really believe it herself. So it’s harder to hold up that veil.

DEADLINE: So when you’re playing those moments, are you approaching any of them as though Kristine is starting to see the implausibility of her own story? Or is she still fully convincing herself that this happened and the truth is on her side?

POMPEO: What I was trying to go for — and only the audience could know if I achieved it or not — is this idea or emotion that, ‘Of course, I was right. How did this all turn so poorly? How does everyone believe this?’ To me, she is in the denial. It’s just, how did this go so wrong? So I don’t ever see [the show’s version of] Kristine cracking in that way that ‘everybody’s on to me.’ It’s not that. It’s more like, ‘Why did everybody turn on me? Why did this girl get the sympathy that I didn’t get? I’ve helped all these people. I have this record of helping all these people, of helping children. I’ve only ever tried to help.’ So in a way, it’s a more nuanced victim, but it’s also the lowest point of victimhood, because it’s like feeling sorry for herself. After everything I’ve done for everybody, nobody is there for me, and I’m still somehow the bad guy. So, it was sort of this balance between trying to be nuanced in the courtroom when they’re presenting all this evidence, but then at the end, when she’s left alone, she’s left with her lowest point of victimhood, I think, or her most intense feeling like ‘Everyone’s just abandoned me.’

DEADLINE: I know you’ve said you didn’t speak with the real Kristine Barnett, but did you watch any interviews? Was there anything you found particularly helpful in tapping into this character?

POMPEO: I mean, to be honest, I didn’t feel pressure to try to understand the real person. Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland wrote these great scripts. As an actor, I really just feel like I have to be in service to what our writers wrote. To try to dig into the real Kristine seems like a pressure I didn’t need to put on myself. The architecture is there. The framework is there. How would a woman who’s done all these things get to this place? How would she come up to all these conclusions? So it’s almost like I don’t really need the real Kristine Barnett for that. We’re all busy women. We’re all juggling a lot of things. We all think we can do everything. It could be anybody. And again, the circumstances around narcissism and around children, these are all kind of themes that we see throughout life.

I definitely watched some interviews. We were preparing this show in the middle of the strike, so we had a lot more time than we would have liked to, really, which was great for me to prepare, because I was so focused on really preparing every aspect of trying to create a new character for my audience. So I had a really long time to prepare, and I did end up watching some videos of Kristine. To be honest, I thought the most interesting thing to me about Kristine’s interviews was that she really did seem selfless…she would let Jacob speak, and she didn’t take over the interviews. In a way, she came off as humble and like ‘He’s the genius. I’m just here facilitating, driving him to his classes,’ which is interesting, because that’s not at all how she was portrayed or spoke about later. So, she’s either like a really good actress or really has this duality in her personality.

DEADLINE: There’s obviously this big perspective shift in the series, and that’s when Kristine’s version of events begins to fall apart. How did you approach her relationship with Natalia as the episodes progressed? In the beginning, she seems very loving and patient toward Natalia despite what seems to be some concerning behavior from this child, whereas in the second half she really is quite cold and mean to her.

POMPEO: Well, tonally, this was the biggest trap that we all had to watch out for. To be quite honest, that was what we were almost afraid of. Mark Duplass, myself, Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland and Imogen Faith Reid as well were all really, really concerned with not portraying Natalia as evil, as trope-y and evil, because these types of stories about adopted Ukrainian children have been done before, and we couldn’t do that. We had to make sure that we didn’t do that. I kept fighting in the in the beginning episodes, I really kept fighting for tone, because it in order for us to believe that they would go through with this adoption and not have left her at that shady adoption place, we can’t believe that there’s anything funny going on in the beginning. We had to reshoot some of the scenes to make sure. The balance had to be struck.

It had to be sketchy enough that you wanted to get the little girl out of there, but not so sketchy that they would say, ‘We don’t want any part of this’ and run. It’s a very delicate balance, and the truth is…the real Natalia in her life had probably been in really terrible situations. We don’t really know what that child was exposed to, what she was subjected to. But no child is born bad or evil or dark. It’s only adults and human beings putting upon children their evil and their darkness that can corrupt a child. A child would only know how to act a certain way or learn certain language or learn certain behaviors from an adult perpetrating that on them. We wanted to be careful, but we also wanted to intimate that there is a lot of shady things that go on with adoptions. There is a lot of shady stuff that goes on with children being taken advantage of and manipulated and abused. [Kristine] says to Michael, ‘You know what will happen to her in a group home.’

So there was a delicate balance there that I hope we achieved, that…she had been in some sketchy situations, and here she was in another one, and they had the opportunity to lift her out of that. Children become really psychologically damaged from whatever happens to them before they get adopted by good American families. You’re trying to convey that idea that children do become this because of what happens to them, but then we can’t portray them as evil. It’s a really tricky balance and all I can tell you is that we all had so many conversations and literally were dissecting every scene, every piece of blocking, everything to make sure that we were being mindful. Also…super important, we did not want to portray someone with dwarfism as evil. Our idea really was to present the idea of what happens to neglected, mistreated children.

DEADLINE: With Good American Family coming to an end, have you thought about what’s next for you? Any projects that you’re eyeing now that you’ve successfully stepped into a role outside of Meredith Grey?

POMPEO: I just hope that I get an opportunity to play another interesting character. I don’t have anything lined up yet, and I am reading things. I think what was fun about this is the opportunity to really play a character — voice, physical movements, wardrobe, all of it. I think that that helps my audience believe me as something else. I have to help them out of this hole that I dug us all in, this glorious hole of Meredith Grey. It’s my responsibility. I can’t just expect people to see me as anything else that I want. So I’m hoping for another rich character that I can kind of disappear into and make it easy for the audience to believe me as that character, not make them work too hard to not see Meredith Grey.