Jennifer Lawrence was on the toilet when her phone rang on May 23, 2022. It was Ellen DeGeneres, calling to interview her three days before The Ellen DeGeneres Show ended its nineteen-year run. Lawrence had once told DeGeneres that she used to imagine being interviewed by her from that same seat, growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, years before anyone knew her name. DeGeneres remembered the story and wanted it recorded before the show ended.
That call was the last time the two of them were heard together in public. Neither has mentioned the other publicly since. DeGeneres’s own TikTok account has kept the connection visible instead, reposting old clips of Lawrence well into 2026. Some of those reposts still pull hundreds of thousands of likes, years after the two last spoke.
Table of Contents
The bathroom interviews Jennifer Lawrence imagined as a kid
Lawrence has said the habit started around age thirteen and lasted until she was about seventeen. The timing lines up closely with when DeGeneres’s show first went on the air, on September 8, 2003, a few weeks after Lawrence’s thirteenth birthday. She has said she imagined the same thing with Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman, but DeGeneres was the host she kept coming back to, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
During the 2022 call, Lawrence brought up something else from around that time: an audition for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where she tried an English accent hoping casting wouldn’t notice she wasn’t British. She didn’t get the part, and told DeGeneres it felt like a total failure at the time.
Lawrence became one of the show’s most repeated guests
Lawrence started appearing on the show around 2012, during the press tour for the first Hunger Games film, alongside her costar Josh Hutcherson. She kept coming back over the next several years, and the show built recurring segments around her. In November 2016, while promoting Passengers, she and Chris Pratt played DeGeneres’s “5 Second Rule” game. In early 2018, DeGeneres had her describe her drunk alter ego on camera, a persona she said her friends had nicknamed Gail, known for drinking rum and swimming with sharks. That 2018 appearance is generally cited as her last time in the studio, four years before the phone call that closed things out.
Ellen DeGeneres also joked about Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars
DeGeneres hosted the Academy Awards on two occasions, and during the 2014 ceremony she brought Lawrence up twice in the same monologue. A year earlier, Lawrence had tripped on the stairs walking up to accept her Best Actress win for Silver Linings Playbook. Then, arriving at the 2014 ceremony, she fell again, this time on the red carpet after tripping over a traffic cone getting out of her car. DeGeneres worked both falls into her opening jokes, telling the audience, “If you win tonight, I think we should bring you the Oscar,” according to ABC News.
In both settings, DeGeneres was the one doing the telling, on her talk show or the Oscars broadcast. Nothing in Lawrence’s own public statements suggests she has ever brought up DeGeneres independently, apart from these appearances.
What Ellen DeGeneres said during that final call
Two more moments came out of that same call. DeGeneres told her viewers that she and Lawrence were neighbors, saying Lawrence was living in a house DeGeneres had once owned near the start of her show, and that DeGeneres now lived next door to Lawrence. Then, describing how she sometimes overheard Lawrence talking to her newborn, DeGeneres referred to the baby as “him,” appearing to reveal the sex of Lawrence’s first child before it had been announced publicly. Lawrence’s only response was a soft “Aww.” Before the call ended, Lawrence told DeGeneres she would see her later.
Where Lawrence and DeGeneres stand now
Lawrence spent the early part of 2026 promoting Die My Love, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in January. DeGeneres spent the same stretch reversing a decision she had made two years earlier.
| Jennifer Lawrence | Ellen DeGeneres | |
|---|---|---|
| Recent work | Die My Love, 2026 Golden Globe nominee | Returning to voice Dory in a new Finding Nemo short |
| Personal life | Married to art dealer Cooke Maroney since 2019, two young children | Married to Portia de Rossi since 2008 |
She and de Rossi moved to England’s Cotswolds in late 2024, after Donald Trump won reelection, then bought back into Montecito, California, in 2025. During her farewell stand-up tour in 2024, DeGeneres told audiences she was done with show business, and when a fan asked if she would ever voice Dory again, she said, “No, I’m going bye-bye, remember,” according to NBC News. That changed in April 2026, when she signed on for a new Finding Nemo short, her first acting role in five years, according to E! News.
Neither woman has mentioned the other publicly since that call, three days before the show’s actual finale. The clips that still circulate come from one source, DeGeneres’s TikTok account, replaying a relationship that was largely built and narrated on her platform in the first place.
