Ellen DeGeneres confirmed she and her wife, former actress Portia de Rossi, decided to permanently relocate to the U.K. following the re-election of president Donald Trump.
While in conversation with broadcaster Richard Bacon at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre before kicking off her British tour, the former talk show host said she and de Rossi were initially looking to settle in the country part-time, per BBC.
“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, ‘He got in.’ And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here,’” she explained.
DeGeneres continued of the decision, “It’s clean. Everything here is just better — the way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here.”
Of particular concern was the status of LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage in the U.S., DeGeneres stated, citing Southern Baptists delegates’ national meeting in June where an overwhelming majority of the 10,000 church representatives present called to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s 10-year-old ruling legalizing gay marriage. Additionally, lawmakers in nine states have proposed measures that would undermine 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. (Notably, the U.K. also has its issues with queer rights, as a recent International Journal for Equity in Health article addressed the rising transphobia among government, public and media officials.)
“The Baptist Church in America is trying to reverse gay marriage,” DeGeneres said. “They’re trying to literally stop it from happening in the future and possibly reverse it. Portia and I are already looking into it, and if they do that, we’re going to get married here.”
She added later, “I wish we were at a place where it was not scary for people to be who they are. I wish that we lived in a society where everybody could accept other people and their differences. So until we’re there, I think there’s a hard place to say we have huge progress.”
Elsewhere, DeGeneres commented on the controversy that in part led to the ending of her daytime series after 19 seasons in 2022. A string of reports about a toxic work environment and sexual misconduct by top producers in 2020 led to an internal investigation by parent company Warner Bros., with The Ellen DeGeneres Show making a number of behind-the-scene changes, including letting go of three longtime EPs and host DeGeneres apologizing to her staff, as well as to the audience. DeGeneres had most recently addressed the matter in her 2024 Netflix special.
“No matter what, any article that came up, it was like, ‘She’s mean’, and it’s like, how do I deal with this without sounding like a victim or ‘poor me’ or complaining? But I wanted to address it,” she explained. “It’s as simple as, I’m a direct person, and I’m very blunt, and I guess sometimes that means that … I’m mean?”
She added that it was “kind of crazy” that saying someone is mean “can be the worst thing that you say about a woman”: “How dare us have any kind of mood, or you can’t be anything other than nice and sweet and kind and submissive and complacent,” she stated.
DeGeneres concluded that it was “certainly an unpleasant way to end” her show, though “I don’t think I can say anything that’s ever going to get rid of that [reputation] or dispel it, which is hurtful to me. I hate it. I hate that people think that I’m that because I know who I am and I know that I’m an empathetic, compassionate person.”
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