LONDON — Ellen DeGeneres has made no secret of her new British life, posting social media clips of sheep charmingly trotting into her luxury rural home while she mows the lawn of the sprawling estate, her trademark hair now natural and undyed.
But on Sunday she confirmed for the first time that she moved to the United Kingdom permanently for one reason: the election of President Donald Trump last November.
“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.’ And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here,” she told an audience at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham, central England.
After her long-running talk show ended amid allegations of workplace bullying, DeGeneres, 67, bought a home in England’s picturesque Cotswolds region with her wife, “Arrested Development” star Portia de Rossi, 52.
With its honey-colored stone, lush greenery and chocolate-box villages, this 800 square-mile haven is home to a slew of celebrities including David and Victoria Beckham, music mogul Simon Cowell and supermodel Kate Moss.
This was initially meant to be a transatlantic bolthole, she said. But asked Sunday if Trump’s election cemented that move as permanent, she answered an unequivocal, “Yes,” in comments the theater confirmed as accurate Monday.
“Everything here is just better,” DeGeneres said, while lamenting the current state of her homeland.
“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,” she said. “So until we’re there, I think there’s a hard place to say we have huge progress.”
NBC News has contacted the White House for a response to the criticisms.
DeGeneres also referenced moves by the Southern Baptist Church to endorse banning same-sex marriage and overturn a Supreme Court ruling legalizing it nationwide.
“They’re trying to literally stop it from happening in the future and possibly reverse it,” she said. “Portia and I are already looking into it, and if they do that, we’re going to get married here.”
She also addressed the demise of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” after 19 seasons, almost two decades and more than 60 Emmys, after staff complained of a toxic workplace environment.
“I’m a direct person, and I’m very blunt, and I guess sometimes that means that,” she said with a pause, “I’m mean?”
The theater’s CEO, Mark Goucher, told NBC News in an email that it “was a huge privilege to meet her and have her at The Everyman. Our door will always be open to our new neighbor.”
DeGeneres is not the first person to toy with leaving America’s increasingly polarized social and political landscape.
Starting in June last year, around the time of then President Joe Biden’s disastrous TV debate against Trump, Google data showed a spike in Americans searching “how to move to X country,” according to an analysis by CNBC.
In early February, days after Trump’s inauguration, a poll of 2,000 people by Talker Research found that 17% wanted to leave in the next five years, with the top destination of choice being Canada. Some 69% of these respondents said they didn’t like the direction in which the country was headed, and 65% said it had become too toxic.
Trump has previously given short shrift to these potential wantaways. “If you’re not happy, you can leave,” he said in 2019.
While DeGeneres appears to be enjoying an idyllic rural life, there is some evidence the grass may not be greener on the other side of the Pond.
Though the U.K. is often vaunted for its universal free healthcare, public transportation network, and lack of mass shootings, it actually performs worse than the U.S. on a raft of quality-of-life indices measured by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which tracks such data.
Out of 40 countries in the OECD, the U.S. ranks 10th in the “Better Life Index,” which rates nations on everything from housing and income to life satisfaction, community and work-life balance. The U.K. is 14th.
