The Grey’s Anatomy Star You Forgot Showed Up on Friends

Before she was saving lives at Grey Sloan, Ellen Pompeo dropped in on Friends for a quick cameo that snowballed into one of those classic Ross-and-Chandler disasters. It is short, it is funny, and it aired right before Grey's Anatomy turned her into a TV fixture. And yes, she still has very practical reasons for staying tied to Meredith Grey two decades later.

Ellen Pompeo on Friends: the blink-and-you-miss-it chaos agent

Pompeo shows up in Friends Season 10, Episode 11, The One Where the Stripper Cries, which premiered in February 2004 — about a year before Grey's Anatomy debuted. She plays Missy Goldberg, the college crush both Ross (David Schwimmer) and Chandler (Matthew Perry) swore off back in the day. The cameo is small, but it kicks off a domino run of awkward revelations.

• At a college reunion, Ross decides the pact is ancient history and asks Missy out. She casually mentions she used to make out with Chandler. A lot. Cue Ross melting down.
• Chandler then reminds Ross he already blew the pact years ago with someone else from their circle: Rachel.
• That triggers the infamous 'who did Ross actually kiss that night?' mix-up. Chandler says he put Rachel on his bed. Ross says Rachel was on his bed. After some forensic dorm room geography, Monica realizes it was actually her — Ross kissed Monica back in college, not Rachel. Yep. That one.
• Elsewhere in the episode: Joey survives, barely, on the game show Pyramid (hosted by Donny Osmond), Phoebe's bachelorette party goes off the rails when she insults the aging stripper (Danny DeVito), and Gregory Jbara also pops up among the episode's guest lineup.

It is a quick cameo from Pompeo, easy to miss if you blink, but it sets off a genuinely wild first-kiss correction that makes Chandler briefly question the entire Geller family tree.

Why Pompeo is not walking away from Grey's

Fast-forward: after 20 years and 22 seasons, Pompeo is still the backbone of Grey's Anatomy. In 2022 she scaled back her on-screen time after becoming one of TV's highest-paid actors, but she stayed on as the show’s narrator and an executive producer — by choice.

That would make no sense, emotionally or financially. The show was streamed more than a billion times in 2024. More than a billion times.

The companies that own the show and stream the show make a lot of money from our images and our voices and our faces. 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 sense that everybody [else] gets to profit off of my hard work. And emotionally, the show means a lot to people. I want to have an attitude of gratitude towards the show.

She has dipped into other projects — including a Hulu limited series — but she prefers to keep a hand on the Meredith Grey wheel. That consistency is a big reason Grey's Anatomy has cruised past 400 episodes. Season 22 premiered October 9, 2025, and Episode 7 returns January 8, 2026. The show, created by Shonda Rhimes, airs on ABC, sits at 7.6/10 on IMDb, and holds an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Where to watch, and a quick sanity check

If you want to revisit the Friends episode with Pompeo (and Danny DeVito absolutely committing to pathos in a breakaway tearaway), it is streaming on HBO Max in the US. Grey's Anatomy is streaming on Hulu. Did you catch Pompeo's Friends cameo the first time around? And are you up to speed on Season 22?