In what many viewers are speculating was a UK television screen test, Ellen DeGeneres made a guest appearance on the late-night talk show “The Graham Norton Show” on October 16. After leaving the United States just prior to Donald Trump’s 2025 return to the White House and relocating to the English countryside with wife Portia de Rossi, DeGeneres had all but completely disappeared from television.
Readers will likely recall a 2022 network investigation into allegations of workplace racism, intimidation, bullying and the allowance of sexual harassment by producers following the end of her long-running daytime talk show.
Save for her Netflix special “Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval” and farewell comedy tour “Ellen’s Last Stand… Up” in 2024 and social media posts, Degeneres has remained tucked away in her country farmhouse in the English Cotswolds, that is, until now.
After the show’s introduction by Quentin Tarantino, DeGeneres sat alongside actors Gemma Chan, Colin Farrill and the multi-hyphenate Tarantino himself, opposite host Graham Norton. Norton wasted no time in dispelling the mystery of DeGeneres’ appearance and jokingly asks the bluntest of questions, “Why are you here?” to which she responded, “I had nothing going on, and I missed TV, so I thought I would just come on.”
The audience was then treated to flashback clips of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” with Degeneres seen twice welcoming and locking lips with Farrill on her own show in years past. When Norton asked Tarantino if he was ever on “The Ellen Show,” he professed, “I was never asked.”
DeGeneres was quick to point out the fault in her former producers’s decision-making and jokingly offerred to “look into it.”
“As we know, there are producers that bring you people, and I don’t know why you weren’t.”
Toward the end of the show Norton asked DeGeneres: “You spent so much of your life on television. Do you miss it?”
“Yeah, I miss a lot about it,” she replied. “I miss laughing every single day with the writers, I miss the guests, I miss kissing Colin. And I think about doing something here. It does seem easy to get on television here because I just called you up, and I said, ‘I have nothing to promote, can I just sit on the couch?’ and you were like, ‘Yeah.’”
She then went onto a tongue-and-cheek bit about the perceived blandness of UK television and how easy it is to get on, “You have a pottery show, you have a sewing show, and you even have a show about people watching TV shows.” She also mused about a dissociative lawn mowing show she called “Lawn & Order.”
Norton wished her luck in “whatever you do next,” alluding to the possibility of a future for Ellen DeGeneres on UK television.
This story is brought to you by Rosedale Health and Wellness and Dudley’s Place.
