The life of a talk show host is forever fraught with the danger that the conversation might take a turn for the awkward while a huge number of people are watching.
One of the all time hall of fame awkward moments has got to be the time Ellen DeGeneres called out Dakota Johnson for not giving her a birthday party invite, only to be told she had been invited and didn’t show up.
Johnson had been on Ellen several times before and making another appearance in 2019 to promote her film The Peanut Butter Falcon, but nobody remembers that bit because of what happened next.
DeGeneres wished Johnson a ‘happy belated birthday’ and asked her ‘how was the party, I wasn’t invited’, only to get called out by the movie star with the cameras trained on them.
“Actually no, that’s not the truth Ellen, you were invited,” Johnson said as she set the record straight.
“Last year, last time I was on the show last year you gave me a bunch of s**t about not inviting you but I didn’t even know you wanted to be invited.”
Ellen asked back ‘who doesn’t want to be invited to a party’, with Johnson replying that she ‘didn’t even know you liked me’ and the talk show host insisting she did like her.
“But I did invite you and you didn’t come, so…” Johnson said, with Ellen asking her ‘are you sure’ and the actor being very certain she’d invited DeGeneres to her birthday party.
“Ask everybody, ask Jonathan your producer.”
It turned out that Ellen had been invited to the party after all and a member of her team explained she couldn’t make it because ‘you were out of town’, with the host quipping ‘oh yeah, I had that thing’.
The moment between Ellen DeGeneres and Dakota Johnson happened back in 2019 (YouTube/The Ellen Show)
Body language expert Blanca Cobb claimed that DeGeneres had been feeling uneasy in the exchange and said she could have been ‘self soothing’ to reassure herself during the encounter.
The expert said that Ellen seemed ‘surprised’ that the conversation had taken such a turn, while Johnson had been ‘sincere, candid, and forward in the encounter.
The awkward moment is one of the first things people remember about Ellen, with the show ending in 2022 a couple of years after it was hit with claims of being a toxic workplace as former employees claimed to Buzzfeed that it was ‘dominated by fear’.
In an email to staff Ellen said that action would be taken to ‘correct the issues’, while in a statement WarnerMedia said ‘the primary findings of the investigation indicated some deficiencies related to the show’s day-to-day management’.
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