“I’m a creative person, and when you’re a creative person you constantly need to be challenged, which is why I decided to host the Oscars or why I decided to go back to stand up when I didn’t think I would,” DeGeneres confessed to The Hollywood Reporterin an interview released Wednesday. “I just needed something to challenge me. And as great as this show is, and as fun as it is, it’s just not a challenge anymore. I need something new to challenge me.” The Ellen DeGeneres Show’s upcoming 19th season will be its last; DeGeneres reportedly informed her staff of the decision Tuesday before the news broke publicly. She’d been considering ending the show since Season 16, but said she agreed to extend her contract for three more. “That was going to be my last season and they wanted to sign for four more years and I said I’d sign for maybe for one,” she recalled. “They were saying there was no way to sign for one. ‘We can’t do that with the affiliates and the stations need more of a commitment.’ So, we [settled] on three more years and I knew that would be my last. That’s been the plan all along. And everybody kept saying, even when I signed, ‘You know, that’s going to be 19, don’t you want to just go to 20? It’s a good number.’ So is 19.” DeGeneres said her wife, Portia de Rossi, had encouraged her for years to move on from the talk show and embark on projects that were more stimulating, while the comedienne’s brother pushed her to stick it out because the show brought so many people joy. Not everyone, though. Last year, DeGeneres was hit with accusations of being cold and cruel behind the scenes, and her show was flooded with allegations of being a toxic work environment. While the host acknowledged that the allegations were hurtful, she insisted that the reports didn’t impact her decision to leave the show behind. “If I was quitting the show because of that, I wouldn’t have come back this season,” she explained, adding that some of the allegations against her (including reports that she made people chew gum before speaking to her and that she ordered staff not to look her in the eye) were so ridiculous that she thought if she just didn’t address them publicly, they’d go away. When they didn’t, DeGeneres says, she was personally devastated. “I became a comedian because I wanted to make people feel good. It started when I was 13 years old when my parents got divorced, and I wanted to make my mother happy,” she said. “My whole being is about making people happy. And with the talk show, all I cared about was spreading kindness and compassion and everything I stand for was being attacked. So, it destroyed me, honestly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t.” DeGeneres added that the pile-on and cancel culture, as well as what she claimed were clickbait reports, made matters worse. She said that for a four-month period, she was coping with not just the toxic workplace allegations (which she says she learned of through the press), but also her and de Rossi’s home being robbed and losing four of their beloved pets. “There was an internal investigation, obviously, and we learned some things, but this culture we’re living is [is one where] no one can make mistakes,” she lamented. “And I don’t want to generalize because there are some bad people out there and those people shouldn’t work again but, in general, the culture today is one where you can’t learn and grow, which is, as human beings, what we’re here to do.” Still, DeGeneres says that major changes were made behind the scenes to improve relationships at work, though she accepts that not everyone will buy it. “I can see people looking at that going, ‘You don’t care about what people [went through.]’ I care tremendously. It broke my heart when I learned that people here had anything other than a fantastic experience—that people were hurt in any way,” she said. “I check in now as much as I can through Zoom to different departments and I make sure people know that if there’s ever a question or ever anything, they can come to me and I don’t know why that was never considered before. I’m not a scary person. I’m really easy to talk to. So, we’ve all learned from things that we didn’t realize—or I didn’t realize—were happening. I just want people to trust and know that I am who I appear to be.” DeGeneres will address more questions about ending her talk show with another star who famously did the same: Oprah Winfreywill guest on the show Thursday. As for what DeGeneres plans to do next with so much free time, she will continue hosting and producing shows like Ellen’s Game of Games, The Masked Dancer and Ellen’s Next Great Designer, and she’s open to a lot of ideas to exercise her creativity beyond show business. “I care about the environment. I care about animals. I care about design and furniture,” she said. “So, definitely people have been saying, ‘Why don’t we just try to go a little longer?’ But 19 years is a long time to do anything.” Next, look back at Ellen DeGeneres’ 50 most uplifting quotes about kindness.
