Patrick Warburton says ‘spurned’ Ellen DeGeneres confronted him for not appearing on her sitcom

nypost.com:

“The Spotlight with Jessica Shaw” released Monday. “They asked me to come back and do another one and I was just kind of done doing guest spots at that time, and it was sort of time to move on, and I just, you know, I said I had a conflict, all right?” he explained. “So, that was it.”The “Seinfeld” actor continued: “Two weeks later I’m having lunch at a restaurant called Orso in Beverly Hills with a buddy of mine and Ellen walks up to the table and she goes, ‘Too big to do my show now, huh?’ ““And I go, ‘No, Ellen.’ I go, ‘I just had a conflict,’ which she probably sensed was just bulls–t and she walked away,” he added.

Warburton said that after DeGeneres confronted him, he knew he was “never, ever” going to be invited onto her talk show, which aired from 2003 to 2022.“She was spurned,” he said.“It was just weird because, you know, when you say you have a conflict and you don’t do something, you seem like you’re gonna be fine with that,” Warburton went on. “You don’t expect the star of the show to walk up to you and call you out on your s–t and that’s all it was.” “And then I always knew, it was like, ‘Oh, Ellen’s got a great show.

It’s a lot of fun. I’ll never be on it.’ “However, Warburton made it clear that he’s “a huge Ellen fan.”“What I recall working on that show was that, as far as crowd work and talking, she was just this remarkable comedian, you know, at the very, very top of the game,” he said. “She was as good as anybody.”The Post has reached out to DeGeneres’ rep for comment.Warburton appeared on three episodes of “Ellen” in 1995.

The ABC sitcom infamously featured an episode where DeGeneres’ character came out as a lesbian, which sparked major backlash from advertisers and religious groups.