Question: When did you first notice that something was off about Ellen DeGeneres?
Years ago.
Besides hearing rumors about the way she would change when she got a few drinks in her from comedians I knew who were working the circuit then, she was in a film called Mr. Wrong that opened shortly before she came out of the closet. If you haven’t seen it (Frankly, almost no one has) it’s a rom-com where the audience is supposed to believe that Bill Pullman and her were a couple. Frankly, Nigerian princes are more credible than the film was.
She was doing an interview for the film and they showed a clip. The clip wasn’t particularly funny (keeping with the theme of the film) and when they cut back to Ellen and the host ( I want to say Leno) he made an offhanded crack about the clip and it got a laugh from the audience. Ellen smiled, but the closeup of her showed that the smile didn’t extend to hers eyes. She looked like she was ready to either cuss him out or crack him one and I thought at the time that seemed to be an overreaction to a throwaway comment.
Anyway fast forward to about 2005 and DeGeneres show was two years in. She was never very good at hiding her body language and you could see where she was humoring guests and when she was genuinely bored. On a few occasions (at the time I was dating someone who LOVED the show and so I watched it a few times. Maybe more than a few) when they were cutting away for a commercial, they didn’t take the camera off of her fast enough and her expression changed into something unpleasant. If they had AI back then like we do now, it looked as if someone had placed a filter over her face to make her look enraged. When I noticed this more than once, I got the sense that Ellen was not a “nice person”.
What REALLY outed her for me is that I have been listening to comedians’ podcasts for many years and from them you can tell who they like and respect and who they don’t. While a number of male comedians are misogynists, if they like someone or appreciate their skills, they will give them a “shout out” of some sort. Of the thousands of hours that I have listened to while driving or working NO ONE said anything good about her. When even joke thieves (Robin Williams) and hacks (Carlos Mencia) received some praise, to not hear ANYTHING about Ellen was telling for me. It basically confirmed some of the other scuttlebutt that I had been reading online.
Frankly, I think that she’s a really terrible person who became worse when she began to make money and became really famous. If her former employees are to be believed, she really saved her worst abuse for the people who were underneath her and she seems to have allowed her workplace to become a toxic cesspool simply to bolster her insecurities. That she ended her show was a surprise; however I believe that if she hadn’t, even worse things were going to come out and it would have been forced to end anyway.
DeGeneres in 2024