News : Taylor Swift wrote Ellen Pompeo’s charity a check “in blink of an eye” even though they’d only met for “all of 20 minutes”

Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo has hailed the generosity of Taylor Swift, saying the megastar donated to a charity she works for within minutes of meeting her.

The pair worked together when Pompeo appeared in the star-studded music video for Swift’s hit ‘Bad Blood’ in 2014. Appearing on The Jennifer Hudson Show, the actor looked back on the exchange that led to the donation.

“At the time, (my husband) Chris (Ivery) and I, we do a lot of volunteering for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles here,” she said. “They have an amazing program at Children’s where they make music for the babies in the NICU. For the parents who have to go to work all day and they can’t be with the kids, they record their voices singing nursery rhymes or telling them stories and they play it for the babies in the day when the parents can’t be there. The babies respond to it and it makes their outcomes more positive”.

She continued: “It’s a really nice program, but they need money to run it. I asked Taylor, ‘Could you write me a big old check for Children’s?’ and she knew me all but 20 minutes and that girl wrote me the biggest check without blinking an eye”.

Elsewhere in the interview, she said she recalled shooting the ‘Bad Blood’ music video, where she shared a scene with Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay. “I didn’t know her… she invited me to be in the video and I thought it would be fun,” she said, before adding: “it was honestly the easiest thing, it was like an hour or two”.

Taylor Swift has been associated with Grey’s Anatomy before, with her song ‘White Horse’ being featured in the fifth season. Last year, the show’s producer Shonda Rhimes recalled how the singer performed barefoot in her office.