Ellen DeGeneres used to be everywhere. She hosted a hit talk show, starred in ad campaigns, and even voiced an animated fish. But after toxic workplace allegations surfaced five years ago, the 67-year-old Finding Nemo star quietly stepped out of the spotlight in 2022.
Now, Margaret Cho is calling out her longtime peer and she’s not sugarcoating it.
“Ellen was really weird and not nice to me for most of my career,” the 56-year-old Notorious C.H.O. star said on the Wednesday, June 18 episode of The Kelly Mantle Show. “I opened for her in the 1980s, when she was a headliner in comedy clubs, way before her big fame. Later, when I would do her talk show in the 2000s, she acted like we just met. And I’m like, ‘B****, what?’ That’s weird. We go way back. It’s so creepy and weird.”
Cho also recalled an incident involving David Bowie that left her especially frustrated. After she wore a “giant Chinese emperor outfit” to one of his concerts, Bowie, now 69, reportedly raved about it during an appearance on the Emmy-winning comedian’s show. But none of it aired.
“The producer, who’s a really good friend of mine, had to call me and tell me, ‘I can’t believe she did this, but she cut it out of the show,’” Cho said. “‘But you need to know that he was going on and on about your outfit. He loves you.’” While the All-American Girl alum admitted the edit could’ve just been for time, she was still a little bitter about it. “I’m gonna take it personally because I decided to," she told host Kelly Mantle.
Cho isn’t the only one who’s had less-than-glowing things to say about the former talk show host.
In 2020, Everybody Loves Raymond actor Brad Garrett responded to headlines about The Ellen DeGeneres Show’s toxic workplace allegations with a blunt post on X (formerly Twitter). “Sorry but it comes from the top…” he wrote at the time, tagging DeGeneres. “Know more than one who were treated horribly by her. Common knowledge.”
Actress Lea Thompson backed the claim in a separate post, replying to a People headline about Garrett’s comments: “True story. It is.”
And it hasn’t just been Hollywood speaking out. Influencers and internet personalities have weighed in too.
That same year, YouTube beauty star NikkieTutorials (a.k.a. Nikkie de Jager) called her appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show “cold and distant.”
"Call me naive, but I kind of expected to be welcomed with confetti cannons: 'Welcome to The Ellen DeGeneres Show!' But instead I was greeted by an angry intern who was a bit overworked," the makeup artist shared with Dutch magazine &C. "I was expecting a Disney show, but got Teletubbies after dark."
Singer Greyson Chance also spoke out about his experience. After being discovered by DeGeneres in 2010 and signed to her label, he told Rolling Stone in 2022 that she “completely abandoned” him once his popularity dipped. The former teen-pop prodigy called her “manipulative,” “self-centered,” and said working with her left a lasting impact on his mental health.
After the show wrapped, DeGeneres retreated from the public eye, spending more time at home with wife Portia de Rossi, whom she married in 2008.