Shonda Rhimes Talks Growing Pains

Rhimes admits it has taken her a while to get things going. Asked if she has a response when people question how much she and some of the other mega-producers make, she says: “It’s not my place.[…] I don’t know what it is for other people, and to hop in and hop out of a megadeal might not make sense, but for me it’s about a much longer haul.”

She says of her new approach: “The first thing I said was, ‘You’re not going to get another Grey’s Anatomy – not Grey’s Anatomy in a cornfield, Grey’s Anatomy on a baseball field or Grey’s Anatomy at an airport, that’s just not happening,’ and he said, ‘I’d never expect it to.’ And then I said, ‘I just want to be in a place where I can make stuff and no one’s going to bother me or make me feel like I’m beholden,’ and he was like, ‘That sounds great to me.’ ”

The transition hasn’t been easy. “It was saying, ‘Let’s go visit Spain, I’m so excited about Spain,’ and then getting there and realizing you don’t speak any Spanish,” she says. “We had real culture shock.”

And owning her power has also been hard. “Society is built to make women question their worth from the moment they’re born, and we were just never raised that way,” says Rhimes, praising her parents, both academics. “We talk about it a lot. We’re always like, ‘What is it? Can you bottle it?’ ”

Now, she feels a responsibility to do more, as often as she can. “Every time I’d give a speech, I started to say, ‘Why don’t we donate that money to charity?’ Or, ‘What portion of this are you going to donate to charity?’ ” she says. “And at first we were living in that wonderful Obama world and it felt exciting and positive, and then all of a sudden it felt urgent.”

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by Cheryl & Rich

Shonda Rhimes Talks Growing Pains

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