Ellen DeGeneres Publicly Confronted Patrick Warburton for Bailing on Her Sitcom

Turns out Ellen DeGeneres could be mean long before she got her own talk show. Patrick Warburton, the Seinfeld and Family Guy actor, says DeGeneres confronted him in public after he turned down a return guest appearance on her titular sitcom, Ellen.

Warburton appeared three times in the second season of DeGeneres’ mid-1990s sitcom, albeit as two different characters. 

Apparently, Warburton’s character gave excellent massages because Ellen wanted him to guest again, he said this week on SiriusXM’s The Spotlight with Jessica Shaw. Warburton’s fledgling acting career was picking up steam at this point — the same year he did his Ellen appearances coincided with his first spot as Puddy, Elaine’s on-again/off-again boyfriend on Seinfeld. “They say you’re the flavor of the month,” he remembered about different sitcoms trying to book him for one-off guest roles. 

But as his status grew, Warburton was interested in more regular work. “Ellen asked me to come back and do another one, and I was just kind of done doing guest spots at that time,” he said. “It was time to move on. I just said I had a conflict. So that was it.” 

DeGeneres, however, wasn’t ready to let it go. “Two weeks later, I’m having lunch at a restaurant called Oro in Beverly Hills with a buddy of mine,” he told Shaw. “And Ellen walks up to the table and she goes, ‘Too big to do my show now, huh?’” 

Warburton stuck to his alibi — “No, Ellen, I just had a conflict” — but DeGeneres wasn’t buying it. “She probably sensed it was just bullshit, and she walked away.”

The grudge, though, was just beginning. “Just knowing her, I realized from that point on, there was a reason why I was never, ever going to be invited on her talk show,” he said. “She was spurned.”

For his part, Warburton says there are no hard feelings. “I want you to know I’m a huge Ellen fan,” he said. “What I recall working on that show was that as far as crowd work and talking, she was just this remarkable comedian at the very, very top of the game. She was as good as anybody.”

But clearly, the confrontation left a mark. “It was just weird,” Warburton said. Turning down a job opportunity and blaming it on a conflict is pretty standard stuff in the entertainment industry, a polite way of saying thanks but no thanks. “You don’t expect the damn star of the show to walk up to you and call you out on your shit.”