DeGeneres challenges her sunny TV image
Ellen DeGeneres got sick of dancing, and really, can you blame her?
She has to be the only 60year-old woman in America who is expected to dance with total strangers wherever she goes. “There’s been times someone wants a picture, and while I’m doing a selfie, they’re like: ‘You’re not dancing!,’ ” DeGeneres said in her office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. “Of course I’m not dancing. I’m walking down the street.”
As she prepares to release her first comedy special in 15 years, DeGeneres is considering a much bigger change, retiring from the long-running hit show that bears her name. She’s been receiving conflicting advice from her wife, actress Portia de Rossi, and from her older brother, Vance DeGeneres, a comedian, and has changed her mind more than once.
At a transitional moment in her remarkable career, DeGeneres agreed to sit for a rare series of interviews over two days. As much as anyone possibly could, she has taken on Oprah Winfrey’s mantle as the queen of inspirational daytime talk, providing an oasis of positivity and escapist
comedy in a culture short on both. But with DeGeneres’ status as a sunny stalwart come certain burdens and constrictions, like the expectation to dance, which she finally stopped doing on her show two years ago, after some agonizing over how her audience would react.
In person, she is more blunt, introspective and interesting than she is on the show, willing to express mild irritation that might seem off-key in front of a national audience. She’s also much more likely to explore dark corners of her psyche, regrets, second thoughts, anxieties that linger. And DeGeneres is appealingly open about the tensions in her career between providing a cultural safe space and delivering laughs, and says she has learned to care less about being liked.
Spoofing her own approachable, down-toearth image, her surprising new special, “Relatable” (available Dec. 18 on Netflix), doesn’t just reveal a refreshingly irreverent version of DeGeneres. It also provides a window into her state of mind.
In sharp contrast to her public image as everyone’s good friend, happy to listen, she presents herself — with tongue in cheek — as cartoonishly aloof and indifferent, stuck in a privileged bubble, cracking several jokes, for instance, about her fabulous wealth. (Forbes reports that she earned $87.5 million this year, making her the 15th-highest-paid celebrity in the world.) When she mentions a seat in the 10th row of an airplane, she admits, with practiced cluelessness, that the back of the plane is a mystery to her, asking if the seats even go that far.
For a famously nice talk show host, this is risky stuff. Yet the most jarring jokes in this special are those that subvert her reputation for kindness. After a lifetime of clean comedy, she startles her crowd with a curse. Comic Tig Notaro, who co-directed this special with Joel Gallen, calls it “a decades-long payoff,” adding, “Then you’re like: Ellen’s a real person with a foul mouth.”
Asked why his sister returned to stand-up, Vance DeGeneres, a former correspondent for “The Daily Show” who helped create the “Mr. Bill” shorts for “Saturday Night Live,” said: “After doing the show for 16 years, it’s second nature. She wanted to break out of, not a rut, but a mold.”
Because daytime talk shows get less attention than their late-night counterparts, DeGeneres is often overlooked in discussions of important hosts. But make no mistake: No other current daily host has been as successful or celebrated. Among her vast collection of awards are the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and 32 Emmys. And apart from Conan O’Brien, no one matches her television longevity (she’s been daytime host for as many years as Jon Stewart led “The Daily Show”) or her influence. Years before Jimmy Fallon turned games into standard elements of “The Tonight Show,” DeGeneres regularly invited guests to play them.
Fallon has become known for these segments, and they have been imitated on other shows, but they all clearly owe DeGeneres a debt. (Last year, she started a hit game show “Ellen’s Game of Games,” which returns for a second season in January.) “I’m flattered that he’s taken stuff,” DeGeneres told me, adding: “He said he was going to steal everything, so it’s fine.”
During an October taping of her show, what stood out was the stark contrast between the relaxed, low-key charisma of DeGeneres and the chaotic, charged-up energy of her audience. The crowd is encouraged to stand and dance, but they don’t need to be told; they are ready to party, while DeGeneres projects a seemingly paradoxical blend of warmth and reserve, actively engaging, waving at people, listening intently to guests, adding a quip here and there, but never pushing too hard.
With the supreme confidence of a professional who has seen it all before, she pingpongs from a monologue of topical jokes to an interview with a chef dying of cancer, from playfully joking with Sean Hayes of “Will & Grace” to talking to a Tennessee assistant principal whose dance video went viral. Some guests cry. More than one leaves with a big check. DeGeneres is clearly having a good time, but her energy remains steady. She doesn’t look like someone going through the motions, ready to retire, nor does she appear particularly challenged.
After the show — without her makeup on, she still looks a decade younger, her alert blue eyes her most distinguishing feature — she sat in an elegantly airy office surrounded by paintings as she analyzed her performance, beat by beat, with the authority of a doctor explaining lab results.
The next morning, DeGeneres, in jeans and a casual white shirt, sat staring at the ocean from her beach house outside Los Angeles in Carpinteria, where you can see dolphins leaping from the water. George Lucas lives two doors over, and Conan O’Brien is down the way, as are Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. She has a farm nearby and a place in the city, but she seems to prefer this tranquil spot, where she walks her dogs and chats with neighbors. “It’s the most community I have ever felt,” she said.
As her private chef dropped off a drink, she explained that she spent a year struggling to come up with a subject to make comedy about. “I used to talk about airplane food,” she said, summing up her gentle mainstream style of observational humor. “What do I do now?”
As she spoke, she glanced at her phone on the kitchen counter, made a call and immediately tensed up. “What do you mean?” she asked urgently. “Is anything broken? Baby!” She put the phone down and explained that de Rossi had been riding, fell off her horse during a jump and sustained a concussion. She was taken to the hospital and was now heading to the beach house.
“This is my biggest fear,” she said, sounding shaken. “I’m scared all the time for her.”
Minutes later, as if on cue, de Rossi entered in full riding gear, cutting a glamorous figure in jodhpurs and dark sunglasses. DeGeneres embraced her and shouted, “Baby, stop riding horses!”
De Rossi seemed unscathed, although her condition would worsen the next day, when she would have trouble concentrating. (She’s doing better, but is still healing.) And as she bantered lovingly with her wife, she seemed charming and at ease, talking effusively about the special. “She’s just a bit more complicated than she appears on the show,” de Rossi said. “There’s more range of emotion.”
DeGeneres recently took the option to extend her contract — until the summer of 2020 — although she had been close to declining. On the question of leaving, she changes her mind all the time. Her brother has been an advocate for staying on, making the case that in the age of Trump, the country needs her positive, unifying voice on television every day.
“She gets mad when my brother tells me I can’t stop,” DeGeneres said, glancing over at de Rossi to see if she’s gone too far.
“I just think she’s such a brilliant actress and stand-up that it doesn’t have to be this talk show for her creativity,” de Rossi said. “There are other things she could tackle.”
DeGeneres, who has largely done voice work in film, most famously as Dory in “Finding Nemo,” said she would love to do another movie and play “someone unappealing”; her wife mentions doing radio or a podcast.
“I don’t see the end of her show as her career ending,” de Rossi said.
DeGeneres smiled and considered the comment for a second. But she skipped the kindest response and went straight for the laugh: “You have a concussion. What do you know?”