The Cotswolds, England
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Time doesn’t transfer rapidly right here. Union Jacks flap gently within the breeze; a golden slither of night solar drapes a row of cottages; a crimson postbox, nonetheless bearing the initials of the late Queen, stands exterior a village church, bathed within the fading mild.
When you suppose of the English countryside, that is the place you suppose of. This idyllic pocket of rolling hills and picturesque villages, two hours west of London, has been an prosperous outpost for retired prime ministers and old-money elites for hundreds of years.
But there’s a brand new crowd now. They’re known as, with delicate derision, the “Chippie set” – a posse of well-known figures who stay across the prosperous village of Chipping Norton, and are not often seen by neighbors besides when in transit between a rising quantity of top-end resorts and eating places.
“They only go there – they really don’t come out,” Simon Finch, who runs a pub in Bloxham, instructed NCS on a latest heat afternoon.
“They leave their chauffeurs hanging around while they eat, (in) cars that are twelve feet long,” Liz, one other native who declined to give her final identify, complained. “You begin to feel (the area) doesn’t belong to you anymore.”
And the Chippie set has a notable new member. On an unlimited nation property behind an imposing timber gate, Ellen DeGeneres is settling into a brand new part of her life – and mulling her subsequent transfer.
After welcoming A-Listers to her TV studio set in Burbank, California, for twenty years, DeGeneres now raises chickens, battles her using mower and ushers wandering sheep from her open-plan lounge. She’s been noticed taking walks and having a drink in her native pub, The Duck on the Pond.
But whereas Finch and DeGeneres are neighbors close to the village of South Newington, they stay in several worlds. DeGeneres’ spectacular fall from grace in 2020, amid experiences of a poisonous office at her show, made her the signature scalp of a pandemic-era eruption in cancel tradition. For many years, the American public had been on first-name phrases with Ellen; now she lives in splendid isolation on this charming nook of the English countryside, having instructed an viewers final 12 months she was “kicked out of show business.”
The “Be kind to one another” girl, whose coming out within the Nineties was a milestone for the visibility of LGBTQ+ folks, is a Rorschach take a look at for a lot of Americans.
To DeGeneres’ supporters, she’s a pioneer who fell sufferer to a bloodthirsty on-line horde, taking the autumn for a ruthless tradition that’s commonplace within the tv business and had little to do with her personally. To her critics, she epitomizes the damaging imbalance of energy in Hollywood and the inauthenticity of movie star personas: a tv star who constructed her model on all the things she was not and duped the viewing public within the course of.
Now, 5 years after the collapse of her public picture, it is perhaps time to revisit DeGeneres’ case. Was her cancellation a product of a fleeting period when folks spoke earnestly about “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” – a time when the left, not the appropriate, was doing the canceling?
The zeitgeist stays an unforgiving place for hypocritical celebrities, however it’s troublesome to think about somebody getting canceled for being a troublesome boss in 2025. Lizzo, Jimmy Fallon and Kelly Clarkson, who confronted related accusations that their excursions and exhibits have been poisonous environments, have weathered the fallout. Lizzo denied these claims, whereas Fallon and Clarkson apologized to workers, and their exhibits stay on the air.
Were all of us too exhausting on Ellen? Those who’ve labored with the star over the previous a number of many years fall on radically completely different sides of that query. DeGeneres declined to be interviewed for this story, however a number of of her ex-colleagues spoke to NCS. Few don’t have any opinion of her anymore; stances have hardened in hindsight.
“After 19 seasons, more than 3200 shows, and over 1000 employees, it is not unreasonable to expect that a small handful of people may have had a negative experience while working there,” a supply shut to DeGeneres and her discuss show instructed NCS. “That is just common sense.”
“People are terrified to speak up to or disagree with the star of the show,” mentioned Gil Junger, who directed dozens of episodes of DeGeneres’ Nineties sitcom “Ellen,” together with the seminal version by which her character got here out as homosexual.
“She’s the most skilled comedic actress I’ve ever worked with,” Junger instructed NCS about DeGeneres. “But she is tough. She demands excellence from everyone around her.”
Junger mentioned the controversy that hastened the demise of DeGeneres’ long-running discuss show was unsurprising in a tradition the place “people all of a sudden realize you can’t do whatever the f**k you want to do just because you’re the boss.”
But, he added: “Maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far.”
It’s sunny, however this isn’t Los Angeles: Sunshine means little round right here. Rain is coming, penciled in for an hour or two from now, and a harsh British wind is flinging leaves off branches and cloaking the countryside with one thing that smells dungy and damp.
These are the afternoons that Finch has to cope with. He’s having a cigarette exterior his pub: the correct, quaint variety of British institution threatened with extinction.
“There’s most likely twice as many individuals right here as there have been within the ‘80s,” he says, gesturing down a beautiful high street. But none of them are inside his pub; they’ve opted as a substitute for an costly gastropub down the road, the place DeGeneres and her spouse, actor Portia de Rossi, have been just lately seen with singer Robbie Williams. An rising quantity of American figures – from Kourtney Kardashian to Vice President JD Vance – selected the Cotswolds for holidays this summer season.
At 67, DeGeneres has loved adapting to a slower tempo of life, however she isn’t retired, the supply shut to her instructed NCS. A 12 months after a Netflix comedy particular that was billed because the final phrase on her topsy-turvy profession, she’s taking conferences with writers and producers, the supply mentioned, and holding her choices open. Earlier this month, DeGeneres introduced a collection of “In Conversation” occasions in 5 British cities – a mini-tour that might function a dry run for a TV comeback.
“Everything here is just better,” DeGeneres told a crowd at a public occasion in close by Cheltenham this summer season. “The way animals are treated. People are polite. I just love it here.”
Her previous and new environment make for a jarring split-screen. On the identical day that DeGeneres interviewed Anne Hathaway in 2019, for instance, her future parish councilors in South Newington gathered to discuss whether or not placing the village Christmas tree in a bath would make it look taller. As she chatted up Ted Danson on one of her remaining episodes in 2022, councilors discussed “a significant amount of mud” that had constructed up close to the woods.
The couple’s choice to relocate was cemented after Donald Trump gained re-election in 2024, DeGeneres said. She interviewed Trump, then the host of “The Apprentice,” on her show in 2004 however has supported Democratic candidates in a number of elections since.
“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis,” DeGeneres mentioned. “And we’re like: ‘We’re staying here.’”
Instagram images and movies give her followers a glimpse into her new life. She ran into members of a Formula 1 crew whereas within the well-liked Falkland Arms pub. De Rossi, she wrote final month, is “living her dream riding her horse through the English countryside and into the village.”
Already, the pair have moved to a second English residence, relocating from a standard Cotswolds home to a placing minimalist mansion. The 100-acre property boasts a pool, two lakes, a wildflower meadow and a contemporary, glassy farmhouse with floor-to-ceiling views of the encompassing fields.
Their new house – a hulking slab of timber, concrete and glass seemingly dropped from one other world – hasn’t gone unnoticed. “It’s not very Cotswolds,” Liz instructed NCS in Charlbury. “It actually looks like it landed from Mars. Or from LA.” Other locals described the home as “horrific,” a “monstrosity,” and one thing akin to a “Bond villain’s lair.”
And nearly a 12 months after resettling right here, DeGeneres herself continues to be the supply of gossip. Though she’s by no means carried the identical cultural significance within the UK, she’s a recognizable determine right here. Talk of her arrival “has been everywhere,” 23-year-old native Eden Crystal, who used to watch DeGeneres’ discuss show on her telephone, instructed NCS. “When you think of really famous Americans, you think of Ellen DeGeneres.”
DeGeneres at all times wished it to be that manner. “I wanted to have money, I wanted to be special, I wanted people to like me, I wanted to be famous,” she told W Magazine in 2007.
As a toddler, the trail to fame felt distant. The future tv character was born in Metairie, Louisiana, in a Christian Science family, to a father who “was scared of everything,” she instructed Michelle Obama in a podcast interview in 2023. “I didn’t want to become that person.”
DeGeneres told David Letterman in 2018 that she had been sexually assaulted by her mom’s then-husband, who’s now lifeless, when she was 15 or 16. At the age of 20, her girlfriend was killed in a automotive accident, she instructed Dax Shepard on his podcast the identical 12 months.
But DeGeneres discovered an escape: comedy. On the Los Angeles circuit, after which on tv, together with a career-making look on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” she confirmed the primary glimpses of a simple allure that will finally earn her a sitcom. That show, “These Friends of Mine,” was rapidly renamed “Ellen” after she emerged as its central draw.
“She could literally turn just about anything into comedic brilliance,” mentioned Junger, one of the show’s administrators.
“I used to hang out during those days with Robin Williams, and there was a familiarity between their minds,” he mentioned. “Her ability to just improvise on the spot and make up really funny stuff was extraordinary to watch.”
But DeGeneres was single-minded about her profession trajectory – and there was a pointy edge to her rise, in accordance to some who labored on the collection.
“She can be pretty brutal,” Junger instructed NCS. “She would fire people fairly often, actors on the show – if they weren’t cutting it, if they weren’t great, ‘Boom, get rid of them,’” he recalled. “She was also tough on the scripts – if the script wasn’t right, she’d say no, and they’d have to rewrite the whole script.”
“She was demanding, but she delivered,” he added.
For others who labored on the show, the expertise grew to become insufferable.
“It was not fun to work with her,” Holly Fulger, a member of the show’s authentic forged, instructed NCS. “I’ve worked with some really famous stars, and, but nobody was ever like that,” she mentioned. “It was an incredibly difficult time for me, being on that show – it kind of made me want to quit acting.”
Fulger felt the main target of the show shifting from an ensemble in the direction of its breakout star. She instructed NCS she was instructed by producers to dye her hair after DeGeneres remarked to her that she’d been mistaken for Fulger at an airport. She mentioned jokes that acquired large laughs on the desk learn have been reduce in the event that they didn’t spotlight DeGeneres. At one level, Fulger says, DeGeneres requested the forged to inform Disney, which owned the show, that they have been sad with the scripts.
“It was like watching an ego,” Fulger mentioned. “Ellen wanted her own show, she wanted to be featured in every episode.” A consultant for DeGeneres declined to remark when contacted by NCS.
DeGeneres’ profession climb rankled Fulger, who was let go from the collection, together with co-star Maggie Wheeler, when it was retooled after its first 12 months on the air. Fulger now runs a non-profit in Cleveland.
“It just rocks your world. You grow up and you think: People are good … how can someone that awful be that famous for how nice she is?”
But when describing DeGeneres’ “pure, straight-up ambition,” Fulger added: “When you think about it, is that bad? That’s how she got to be so famous, and in a world like Hollywood, I think you need to be that way.”
DeGeneres’ fame soared, however a collision was coming. The cultural panorama of the Nineties had few distinguished LGBTQ+ figures, and the sitcom star was holding an element of herself hidden from public view.
That modified with a historic Time journal profile in 1997, the quilt of which featured a smiling DeGeneres and the headline: “Yep, I’m Gay.”
The ensuing episode of her ABC show – on which her character additionally comes out – was a monumental one. “I knew that it was an incredibly big deal while we were doing it,” mentioned Junger.
It gained loads of reward. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) mentioned on the time that DeGeneres had “made a profound and remarkable impact on our society.”
“What an incredible burden it was to bear,” President Barack Obama mentioned practically twenty years later as he awarded DeGeneres the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “To risk your career like that. People don’t do that often.”
But a lot of America’s socially conservative wing was not prepared.
Junger mentioned folks left threatening messages on the door of DeGeneres’ residence at night time, studying: “‘You better never get near my daughters. You’re disgusting.”
“I have no idea how they got my number, but a few people called me and screamed at me that I was going to hell,” he added.
And as soon as the preliminary reward for the episode had worn off, so too did the business’s urge for food for an overtly homosexual feminine star. “The complaint from ABC was ‘it was too gay,’” Junger recalled. “Too many gay storylines.”
The community by no means cited the character’s coming out as the rationale for the show’s cancellation, however its chairman Stuart Bloomberg mentioned on the time, according to The Guardian, that “as the show became more politicized and issue-oriented, it became less funny.” NCS reached out to ABC for remark.
“It hurt my feelings – I was getting jokes made at my expense on every late-night show,” DeGeneres instructed Shepard in her 2018 podcast look. “I was really depressed.”
The community positioned a “parental discretion” advisory earlier than subsequent episodes aired, and Ellen’s first landmark show, a troubled however historic challenge, was cancelled the following 12 months.
For just a few years, it appeared DeGeneres would turn out to be a culturally important footnote in leisure historical past. Her second try at a sitcom, “The Ellen Show,” was short-lived, airing simply 13 episodes earlier than being cancelled in 2002.
But DeGeneres by no means stopped trying to find her subsequent challenge.
“As we were closing up the offices, I submitted some material I had written to Ellen,” mentioned Jeff Bye, a former comedy author.
He mentioned he had crossed paths with the actress 9 years earlier exterior a retailer in Laurel Canyon, pitched her some materials, and was stored in DeGeneres’ orbit ever since. Days later, DeGeneres left a message on his answering machine: His materials was good. She wished to use some of it in her subsequent e-book and pay for him for it. And she was getting ready to host a daytime discuss show. Would he need to be a part of the writing workers?
The ensuing discuss show – “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” – premiered in 2003. It was the third flagship tv challenge to bear Ellen’s identify, and the one which caught. For twenty years it grew to become daytime consolation viewing for tens of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Famous faces would dance their manner towards the seat subsequent to DeGeneres or play pranks on the Warner Bros. lot to raucous studio applause.
But Bye finally felt let down – he was by no means provided a job on the show. “When I finally got Ellen on the phone, she explained those decisions were up to the producers and not her,” he mentioned. “I was thinking: “Well the name of the show is ‘Ellen’. So one would think she could override that.”
The rise of social media would ultimately assist facilitate DeGeneres’ downfall. But initially it gave the show one other, direct avenue into households, and made-for-YouTube moments grew to become its calling card.
“The first five years, she was extremely hands-on,” a longtime senior member of the show’s crew instructed NCS. But as soon as the show discovered its rhythm, DeGeneres stepped again, the particular person mentioned, throwing her time to different initiatives. She twice hosted the Oscars, most memorably in 2014 when a selfie she took alongside Brad Pitt, Bradley Cooper, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence and different stars was retweeted greater than 2 million occasions and have become a cultural time capsule.
Stepping again from a demanding job, nevertheless, was a luxurious her show’s workers mentioned they didn’t have.
“I was drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit more back then: I couldn’t admit it was toxic,” an worker who continued to work with DeGeneres on subsequent initiatives instructed NCS. “Now I can look back and say, yes, (it was) probably a little toxic.”
Staffers have been instructed their physician appointments should be pushed to days when the show wasn’t airing, and laptops have been delivered to their houses if folks have been too sick to are available in, the worker mentioned. Such mandates have been set by producers and managers, and it was unlikely DeGeneres knew about them, the worker added.
A consultant for DeGeneres declined to remark. An announcement from WarnerMedia, launched on the time, said that Warner Bros took the “allegations around the show’s workplace culture very seriously.” They mentioned they made modifications to guarantee “a workplace based on respect and inclusion.”
“By the end of the show she was incredibly wealthy,” the previous senior member of her crew instructed NCS. “And I think it’s hard to find people you trust and people who would give you good advice.”
Perhaps this is the reason Ellen mentioned she by no means knew what was occurring behind the scenes of a show that bore her face and identify, and why many imagine she by no means totally took possession for the scandal.
“You get in this bubble, where people don’t necessarily tell you what you need to hear,” the crew member mentioned. “I wish someone had been able to tell her what she needed to hear,” they added. “But I don’t think that person exists.”
Three of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”’s top producers “parted ways” with the show in August 2020 after the unflattering media experiences and an inside investigation by Warner Bros. Television. (NCS and Warner Bros. Television are owned by the identical mother or father firm, Warner Bros. Discovery.)
The saga made DeGeneres one of the primary victims of public scorn through the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Celebrities aren’t recognized for consuming their very own, and a few rushed to her protection, whereas others stored silent.
But those that watched DeGeneres’ rise have been shocked by the pace of her fall. “It was so strong and swift,” Junger mentioned of the backlash that derailed her profession on the similar second a pandemic had stopped the world. It was “horrible timing,” he mentioned, and a “perfect storm” that delivered a public goal for folks’s frustrations when the hole between the rich and everybody else appeared particularly stark.
Or maybe, it was justice: a uncommon case by which an influence imbalance was flipped on its architect.
“It did expose toxic workplaces,” her former co-star Fulger instructed NCS. “When you get somebody that famous, with that kind of ego, there’s this tendency to protect that person.” People have been “scared” to problem her, Fulger prompt — till immediately they weren’t.
Five years in the past, as outrage painted each controversy in stark black-and-white, a headline dubbed DeGeneres “one of the biggest villains of 2020.” But possibly the reality was extra nuanced. Maybe she was a villain and a hero – a perpetrator and a sufferer – all of sudden.
Years later, many of the show’s workers stay fiercely defensive of DeGeneres, describing her as pushed and difficult however honest. The office surroundings on her show grew to become breakneck and pressurized in her identify, however not at her course, they mentioned.
“I feel bad because at the end of the day, she’s a human and I genuinely think she wanted to do good in this world,” mentioned the previous worker who described the show’s working surroundings as poisonous. “The world is so cruel.”
“But she’s crying in a mansion,” they added.
DeGeneres apologized on air, and to staff during a Zoom call. A supply mentioned on the time that DeGeneres instructed staff: “I’m hearing that some people felt that I wasn’t kind or too short with them, or too impatient. I apologize to anybody if I’ve hurt your feelings in any way.”
The show ultimately wound down by 2022.
Or, as DeGeneres put it, with out irony, in her 2024 Netflix comedy particular: “I got kicked out of showbusiness.”
Former colleagues who spoke to NCS mentioned they believed DeGeneres when she mentioned she was shocked, together with the remaining of the nation, to be taught of the environment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” DeGeneres apologized on-air in September 2020 for the scandal, telling viewers: “I know that I’m in a position of privilege and power, and I realize that with that comes responsibility. And I take responsibility for what happens at my show.”
But her subsequent remarks struck a distinct tone. “It looked like I was the boss. The show was called ‘Ellen,’ and everybody was wearing T-shirts that said ‘Ellen,’ and there were buildings all over the Warner Brothers lot that said ‘Ellen.’ But I don’t think that meant that I should be in charge,” DeGeneres mentioned in her 2024 stand-up particular. “I don’t think that Ronald McDonald’s the CEO of McDonald’s.”
“I think that it was probably a missed opportunity (for her) to not take ownership and apologize,” the previous senior member of her crew instructed NCS. “I always hoped that there would be a bigger apology. As we got to Netflix comedy special number two, and it was just more of the same lack of awareness and ownership … I found that part disappointing.”
DeGeneres had started telling audiences to “be kind to one another” after the 2010 loss of life by suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers scholar who had been outed as homosexual. But a decade later, when scandal struck, it had turn out to be an unattainable normal in opposition to which she was judged.
“Here’s the downside,” she joked in a 2018 stand-up particular, throughout which she appeared to be grappling with the paradox by which she’d trapped herself: “I can never do anything unkind, ever, now. Ever.”
And when the courtroom of on-line opinion grew to become its strongest, DeGeneres was given the harshest sentence attainable: she was cancelled, at the least within the eyes of many of her longtime viewers, unable to shake the cost that her cheerful persona was a facade. “You can’t be mean and be in show business,” she joked in her Netflix particular final 12 months.
The verdict stung for somebody who has lengthy admitted that she wished to be favored. “I’ve spent an entire lifetime trying to make people happy, and I’ve cared far too much what other people think of me,” DeGeneres mentioned.
Her life may be very completely different now. Instead of applause, her afternoons are soundtracked by tractors and sheep and Britain’s famously fickle climate. The clock within the close by village has damaged a number of occasions lately, every time taking weeks to restore. After the breakneck tempo of internet hosting a day by day discuss show, time might already be ticking too slowly for DeGeneres as nicely.
“I want to do something,” DeGeneres instructed an viewers at her July occasion, as she ponders a re-entry to public life. “I do like my chickens, but I’m a little bit bored.”
In any case, the winds exterior DeGeneres’ imposing mansion is perhaps shifting. The zeitgeist is cyclical, and an growing old whiff of toxicity will not be sufficient to sentence a celeb to cancellation in 2025. A profitable return for DeGeneres may show a degree concerning the whimpering demise of cancel tradition and redefine an advanced legacy for one of American tv’s most distinguished and divisive figures.
But finally, the decision on her profession gained’t be hers to write.
“Being in this business, I’ve had to care what people think,” she mentioned throughout her particular. “It’s our only real currency for success. If they like you, you’re in. And if they don’t, you’re out … When you’re a public figure, you’re open to everyone’s interpretation.”