Ellen DeGeneres says she and wife Portia de Rossi moved to the United Kingdom because of President Trump.
The comedian and former talk show host shared the news during a live conversation in Cheltenham, England, on Sunday, with British broadcaster Richard Bacon, who asked her if reports that she’d moved to the U.K. because of Trump were true. “Yes,” she said, noting that the decision to permanently relocate there was made the day after Trump was re-elected to a second term in November, according to the BBC.
After DeGeneres’ talk show ended in 2022, she embarked on her final tour, titled Ellen’s Last Stand… Up, which ended in August. Then, the couple purchased what DeGeneres said they thought was going to be “a part-time house” — a place to stay a few months out of the year. However, that changed when Trump was voted back into office, she said.
“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,’” she said. “And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here.’”
Their house is located in the more rural area of the Cotswolds. DeGeneres said she saw snow for the first time in her life this past winter. Meanwhile, De Rossi had her horses flown there, while DeGeneres has chickens.
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” DeGeneres said of the area. “We’re just not used to seeing this kind of beauty. The villages and the towns and the architecture — everything you see is charming and it’s just a simpler way of life. It’s clean. Everything here is just better — the way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here.”
DeGeneres also noted she and De Rossi might get married again in England.
“The Baptist Church in America is trying to reverse gay marriage,” she 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.”
Later, she added: “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.”
Meanwhile, DeGeneres also addressed allegations that her former talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, was a toxic workplace, acknowledging she can be “very blunt” but calling many reports about her on-set behavior “clickbait.” An internal investigation by parent company Warner Bros. resulted in three top producers being let go. DeGeneres also opened her final season — the show’s 19th — with an on-air apology.
“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?” she said, adding: “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?”
DeGeneres added that it is “kind of crazy” that saying someone is mean “can be the worst thing that you say about a woman” and that it was “certainly an unpleasant way to end” her show.
“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 said, adding: “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.”
