Dern said that DeGeneres' hands were shaking in hers while they filmed the episode's pivotal scene
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NEED TO KNOW
- Laura Dern reflected on her role in the 1997 episode of Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom where DeGeneres’ character came out
- Dern said it was one of the ‘most incredible experiences’ of her life to support DeGeneres in that moment
- She spoke about how that moment almost thirty years ago led people to consider her a queer icon today
Laura Dern isn’t quite sure how she became an LGBTQ+ icon, but she’s very grateful.
Dern, who turned 59 on Feb. 10, appeared on the Feb. 11 episode of Las Culturistas, hosted by Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Rogers, 35, asked Dern about when, around 2020, there was “a moment in culture” where “every single person that's in the queer community was like, ‘Wait. You know what we all have in common? We f—ing love Laura Dern.’ ” He asked how that felt.
“That was insane. Surreal,” she said. She pointed to a song at the 2020 Independent Spirit Awards, sung by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles that was about, as host Aubrey Plaza put it, “the gayest moments in other films that you might not have realized were gay.” The song included many different moments of Laura Dern in 2019’s Marriage Story, which won her an Oscar, and then ended with the choir singing over and over “Laura Dern.”
“I didn't understand what was happening,” she said. “So I knew in the moment I had to surrender and just start enjoying it and dancing. even though I had no clue why it was happening.”
She connected it to bigger culture shifts and said, “We're only gonna affect change if it's your voices before other people have caught up to feeling brave enough to say it.” She meant the 1997 episode of the sitcom Ellen, where Ellen DeGeneres’ character, Ellen Morgan, came out as a lesbian. She was the first gay or lesbian lead character on a U.S. network television show. Dern appeared in the episode, titled "The Puppy Episode,” as Susan, a gay woman who Ellen is attracted to. Oprah Winfrey also appeared in the episode as Ellen’s therapist.
Dern said that she wasn’t allowed to tell people what the episode was, but she told her friends, “I'm doing an episode of TV.” Her friends said, “Woah. You know, you [were] just in Jurassic Park. Why are you doing an episode? And I said, ‘No. My friend is doing something. I wanna be part of it, and I can't really say what it is.’ ”
She said that now looking back, the episode might seem “obvious” and some might think, “A million people must have done it before that, and people must have been going crazy and celebrating, and it must have been such an emotional moment.” But in actuality, she said, they received “bomb threats,” and the show lost advertisers.
“The assumption is you're gonna do this thing and, thank god, people will wake up, love their relatives and their neighbors, see them. Everything will expand. Culture will catch up, and it will be a beautiful celebration,” she said. Instead, DeGeneres lost her show. “The world went, ‘No. No. No.’ ”
“And yet, now a moment like that happens,” she said of her gay icon celebration. “ I had a couple of people, part of the Gay Men's Choir of Los Angeles, come up and go, like, ‘I was a kid who didn't even know what was going on. I saw that episode.’ And you go, oh, right. That's why you want culture to catch up later. That is culture. Culture's doing it when nobody's caught up.”
She added, “Being part of that moment with Ellen, it wasn't that I was somebody supporting an actor or a friend by being part of the show. It makes me emotional, but I was holding her hands as they were shaking. And she was looking in my eyes, saying for the first time, ‘I'm gay,’ out loud with people watching. And the privilege, the luxury of feeling it for someone in a moment was so beautiful.”
She said, “It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Watching someone do that for themselves and for their community and for their lives, it's amazing.”
Dern said that now, she’s “been so lucky” that people will often share their “personal stories” of their own queer journeys with her because she was “adjacent” to “this brave moment in someone's life. “
Rogers said, “They intuit correctly that you were a safe space for someone that needed it. And so now that's part of your essence. And that is a beautiful thing to have be part of your essence.”
The Oscar winner said, “It's incredible to even think that anyone would believe that of me. So I I will hopefully always rise to the occasion to hold space for anybody.”
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