#Ellen DeGeneres Audience Member Shares Her On-Screen Experience, and It’s Not Pretty

If we’re to believe recent reports, Ellen DeGeneres is not a nice person. 

On camera, the host sports a friendly grin and warmly chats to the audience, as well as her guests. 

However, a former audience member of the show has now come out to speak against DeGeneres, claiming that she only smiles when the cameras are rolling. 

Dana Dimatteo appeared on a 2018 episode of the hit talk show in the audience, but was selected to take part in a game. 

Dimatteo claimed that the Ellen while the show is being taped is totally different to the Ellen during an ad-break, or more simply, when the cameras are not rolling. 

“During commercial breaks, Ellen would break out of her ‘kind’ character and sit moodily in silence on her couch,” she revealed to The Sun, adding that she was “not acknowledging anyone.”

“She didn’t say one word to the audience unless the cameras were on,” she explained.

“She snapped out of her character the second the cameras stopped rolling.”

“My friend and I loved the show and it took us so long to get tickets,” Dana detailed of the event

 “We flew all the way to Los Angeles from Chicago just for that.”

“We were told by the producers that if we were picked we were not allowed to be funnier or smarter than Ellen,” she elaborated:

“That she is the star and the comedian, not us.”

“We were told to act in a very specific way and to only speak if she asked us a question,” Dana said.

“They made us scream and jump around backstage as a test,” she added.

“It was pretty humiliating.”

Dana and another guest were invited to take to the stage to play Make It Rain.

“Once the game was over, we were soaking wet so they sent us backstage,” Dana recalled.

“Then they just left us there…we waited pretty much the whole show in our soaking wet clothes for someone to bring us dry things to change into,” she recalled.

“It was really cold and uncomfortable.”

“I didn’t enjoy myself on the show,” she shared.

“You have to follow all these rules, you can’t be yourself. You have to clap constantly and laugh at things that aren’t funny.”

Ellen’s name has been in the media for all the wrong reasons of late, and a Buzzfeed News article quoting almost a dozen employees bashing the toxic workplace did not help. 

What we do know is that Ellen has apologized, but it wasn’t enough to stop Warner Media from investigating the show. 

Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.