Ellen DeGeneres Is Not Ready To Quit Her Show; Exploring Documentaries & New Film
Ellen DeGeneres is not yet ready to give up her daytime show, she told Deadline ahead of Netflix’s FYSEE screening of her special Relatable on Wednesday.
Saying she’s “torn” on how long to keep the show, she joked, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” While her wife Portia de Rossi wants her to have a chance to relax more and enjoy her life, her brother argues her voice is needed now in the Trump era more than ever. “He just feels like this is a really important time to be on television too, to put out kindness and a voice that you don’t get to hear and see a lot,” she said. “I love doing the show and I also love doing other things.”
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Meanwhile, DeGeneres also plans to explore documentary with her Warner Bros./ Ellen Digital Network (EDN) deal. “I love documentaries,” she said, “I haven’t done that yet.” And there’s a new film in the offing too. “There’s a movie I’m trying to make that was a very successful book that we’re working on right now,” she said, while remaining tight-lipped on its subject. “She wants to write it and we need to get her to write it.” Coming up, EDN has a new talkshow series coming up called Well, Well, Well with Lea Michele, a Jay Shetty project and Netflix’s Green Eggs & Ham. “I just want it to be a company that I’m proud of,” DeGeneres said. “We have animation, we have TV, we have movies, we have reality. I like just a whole broad range of things.”
Having revisited stand-up for Relatable after a 15-year break, DeGeneres spoke of her love of the form, but joked that now she’d need De Rossi on stage with her to remind her of her act, adding that a Vegas show for the two of them might be just the ticket. “I don’t know that I’d remember a lot because my wife repeats all the stuff to me all the time,” she said. “She constantly does my act back to me. So I know those bits. She would be great on stage with me. She would actually be able to do the whole thing and I could just sit in a chair next to her.”
However, during a post-screening Q&A with Jimmy Kimmel, DeGeneres admitted she was “getting the itch” to do stand-up again. “I do love it and will do it again, just not full-time. it’s a hard life.”
But embracing the fear has been a signature move for the comic over the years. She said the Netflix special had appealed for its fear-factor, in the same way that hosting the Oscars had previously. “I made the deal with Netflix before I knew what I was going to talk about. I kind of did that in the same way I agreed to host the Oscars,” she said. “I wanted to do something that scared me again.”
Confessing she almost quit the Netflix special, DeGeneres told Kimmel, “I almost gave the money back twice. I kept saying, ‘I don’t have anything to talk about.’ But the idea came to me a year and-a-half later.”
Being a woman coming up in comedy had been a challenge. “You still have to work really hard to win men over when you’re a female comedian,” she said, “because it’s just a male-dominated business. Even just being on stage is a very aggressive thing, so men have to like you and not be threatened by you, and enjoy you, and understand and relate to the same things the women are relating to. So that’s why I always tried to make it a people thing.”
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