After nearly two decades and more than 400 episodes starring on Grey’s Anatomy, Ellen Pompeo exited the ABC medical drama as a series regular in 2023. She didn’t quite say goodbye, as her beloved onscreen doctor, Meredith Grey, has stayed on as the show’s narrator and in a recurring onscreen role. But the change was a needed one for Pompeo, who has said she was looking to try something new.

That’s when Good American Family came along.

“It had to be a role that I could completely disappear into — and those don’t come along often,” Pompeo tells The Hollywood Reporter of what she was looking for when presented with the Hulu limited series, which is inspired by the true story of Natalia Grace. But was playing Kristine Barnett, the adoptive mother of Grace who was later accused of abusing her, taking that a bit too far?

“This was presented to me and I thought, ‘Well, that sounds insane. Why would I want to do that?’” she recalls of taking on this character in Grace’s story. “I read the show bible. I read the pilot. It was an insane script in the best possible way, but why would I want to play this character? I mean, this looks like [career] suicide. There are so many ways this could get misinterpreted and go wrong. How do we not do the bad version of this show? Then they said, ‘Well, you have to speak to [creator] Katie [Robbins], and you have to meet Imogen [Faith Reid, who plays Natalia].”

Good American Family is a dramatization of Grace’s real-life story and her multiple adoptions. Grace has a rare and severe form of dwarfism, known as spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, and for anyone looking for spoilers, her story has been told across three seasons of the ID docuseries The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, which concluded in January. Each episode of Good American Family opens with a legal disclaimer, stating that the limited series portrays allegations taken from court proceedings and public reports and that it dramatizes multiple conflicting points of view.

The series begins with a series of events alleged by Kristine and Michael Barnett, the latter played by Mark Duplass, who are the Indiana husband-and-wife who adopted Grace as a child in 2010. She had arrived from the Ukraine in 2008 and was adopted by a previous U.S. family, who relinquished their rights, ultimately leading her to the Barnett home. The limited series, which premiered on Wednesday, launches with two episodes and rolls out the remainder of its eight episodes weekly. As the series goes, more conflicting perspectives are introduced to challenge what viewers think they know about both Grace and the Barnetts.

Robbins had been researching Grace’s story ever since Hulu first approached her with the idea back in 2020, three years before the The Curious Case of Natalia Grace would debut and return Grace to the spotlight. Good American Family tells a complete story about Grace’s time with the Barnetts, while also introducing her next adoptive family, the Mans family (Christina Hendricks plays Cynthia and Jerod Haynes plays Antwon). Grace’s story, however, continues on after the Mans family — as was captured in the most recent season of the ID docuseries — and while Robbins and Pompeo feel that the Barnetts’ story is told by the time viewers reach the Good American Family finale, they leave the door open to perhaps continue on, given recent developments.

Below, in conversation together with THR, Robbins, creator and co-showrunner, and Pompeo, star and executive producer, explain why they wanted to take on Grace’s story and the justice they strive to bring to it.

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Katie, I understand you’ve been researching Natalia Grace’s for a long time. When did you start working on Good American Family?

KATIE ROBBINS Hulu approached me with the idea of doing a narrative version of the story back in 2020. So, a lifetime ago! The story was certainly something that had been covered, but it wasn’t as in the ether as it is today. I had to do a lot of deep diving to find articles about it, and one of the things I was so struck by was how your understanding of the story shifted so much depending on who was being interviewed in a particular article or in television appearance.

You would read something and be like, “This is the whole version.” Then you’d read somebody else’s account and it would feel entirely different. That’s always true depending on what you’re reading; you have to pay attention to who’s doing the telling. But it felt that much more acute with this story. In trying to figure out how to shape a narrative version, I wanted to try to give an audience that experience. So we start the story in Kristine and Michael Barnett’s version of events, and that slowly starts to shift over time. We’re led to question if our understanding of what we’ve been seeing the whole time is actually what happened. And in doing so, that allows audiences to grapple with their own biases in unexpected ways.

Then, how and when did Ellen come into the picture?

ROBBINS I can’t remember when exactly. But I remember when she was mentioned to me, I lost my brains because I was such an enormous fan. [To Pompeo] My best friend is a doctor because of you. I knew that having somebody as beloved as Ellen would give us the ability to allow the audience to go on this journey of anticipating one thing about this character and then having that change. We did a Zoom while I was in Japan and it was one of my favorite conversations. Hearing about the things she was attracted to, I really felt, “This is a creative partner with whom we can tell this story in a dynamic and emotionally honest way.”

Ellen, for Grey’s Anatomy fans (including myself), this is the show that pulled Meredith Grey away! What made you want to commit to telling this story? Kristine Barnett is of course very different than Meredith Grey.

POMPEO Very different. If I was going to do something different, it really had to be truly something different, right? I’m so well known as Meredith Grey. It had to be a role that I could completely disappear into — and those don’t come along often. So this was presented to me and I thought, “Well, that sounds insane. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to play that character?” I read the show bible. I read the pilot. I said, “This is an insane script in the best possible way, but why would I want to play this character? I mean, this looks like [career] suicide.” There are so many ways this could get misinterpreted and go wrong, how do we not do the bad version of this show? They said, “You have to speak to Katie. You have to meet Katie, and you have to meet Imogen.” I did those two things, and I knew instantly that Katie was someone who’s so thoughtful, so smart and so empathetic, and her take on the perspective and how sensitive she is was going to allow for us to tell this story in the way it needs to be told, which is with sensitivity and awareness.

You also had to find your Natalia before you could tell this story. How was that search to find U.K. star Imogen Faith Reid, 27, and what about her gave you each the confidence that this show could work?

POMPEO Imogen was involved before I was, because when I was deciding to do it they said, “You have to meet her.” So we had this great two or three hour Zoom. We were on the phone forever. We just hit it off. What struck me is that, a lot of young people have grown up watching me and watching Grey’s, and they get sort of nervous. It’s normal. I get nervous when I meet certain people. And she really was so charismatic and wasn’t nervous and was able to just jump into a conversation with me. We were able to have this very honest, interesting dialogue about these characters and how we do this; how she felt about it and what it meant to her to tell her version of this story — because we’re in everybody’s versions. She really was what pulled me in, because you do need that character to be perfect or it doesn’t work. And she was, and she is.

ROBBINS I’d written the pilot and bible, and the series was contingent on finding somebody to play this role. As Ellen says, it’s absolutely essential. You can’t do it unless you have somebody who can embody this character who we see go from being a child to being an adult; we see this from multiple perspectives. You needed somebody who could embody all of that. We did an international casting search and Imogen came in on a self-tape. She’d done some theater work and a lot of stand in and body doubling work on film and television, but this was her first big role. As Ellen says, you meet her and you feel like, “We’re in good hands. This is this is going to work.” And it did. She brought it every day and was so willing to go to all kinds of deeply emotional places, and also cared so deeply about doing justice to this story, which gave it an emotional truth the show needed.

Ellen Pompeo (right) as Kristine Barnett with Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia and Mark Duplass as Michael Barnett. Disney/Ser Baffo

Each episode opens with this legal disclaimer of whose allegations the episode is based on. These accusations are now public record from court cases. Who of the characters involved did you speak to, or try to speak to?

ROBBINS We didn’t speak to anybody. We relied very deeply on copious amounts of research. We had a robust research team led by Reeva Mandelbaum, who was there on site in Indiana for the trials. We had access to court documents, depositions, Facebook messages, doctors’ records, adoption records. When I say we had a robust amount of research, I can’t fully articulate. There’s a scene in a later episode where Kristine and Michael go in to see their lawyers and stacks and stacks of pages are printed out. That representation is literal. That’s how much we had access to that our incredible support staff went through and pulled into the storytelling. I was a journalist before I started doing this kind of work, so research is my bread and butter. We took it really seriously because we wanted to make sure that the version of the story, while inspired by allegations, still felt like as emotionally truthful as possible.

POMPEO I think they call those receipts. (Laughs.)

Ellen, how deep did you dive into the research? You are an executive producer, but when it came to playing Kristine, did you want to keep some distance to bring your own take?

POMPEO That was a better way to go for me, quite honestly. I didn’t watch the documentary for a really long time, because I didn’t want to have any judgments. At a certain point, Katie’s so right, there was so much research. And working with my acting coach, I felt myself judging too much. I had to step back from that and I had to just play what was on the page and be so in her truth of what was on the page.

The docuseries rolled out three seasons while you were making this show, including the last season which goes beyond where your Good American Family story ends. Since there’s more of Grace’s story, is there more Good American Family?

POMPEO I think Kristine Barnett’s story is finished. Clearly, there’s been a third installment of the documentary and Natalia continues to speak her truth and her story. So I guess if there were another season of this, it would be … Emmy all the way. (Laughs.) Is Hulu listening?

Christina Hendricks as Cynthia Mans certainly has more to do…

POMPEO Isn’t she fantastic? Isn’t she amazing? All the supporting cast, Sarayu [Blue] and Dulé [Hill]. It takes all of the pieces for us to believe or not believe all of these things, to be left in wonder and not know what’s happening. It takes all of these nuanced, brilliant performances and nuanced writing to really pull this off, because it is walking a tight rope. So I just want to give everybody their flowers, because it was a huge group effort.

Have you given thought if Natalia were to watch, what she might think of the show?

ROBBINS We can’t speak to how she will feel or not feel or speak to the future. My hope is that we have tried very, very hard to tell a version of this story that is empathetic and that gives justice to her story. I think the hope is that it will shed light on the story in ways that haven’t been in the past, by really highlighting these themes of bias and the elusive nature of truth and whose stories get to be heard and believed. And that in telling her story, we’re not only hopefully doing justice to it but also showing the ways in which society as a whole might be improved by paying attention to this story.

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Good American Family is now streaming its first two episodes on Hulu, followed by a weekly release on Wednesdays leading to an April 30 finale.