Ellen DeGeneres Shares Special Message from Wife Portia While She’s Home with the Flu

Ellen DeGeneres was solo on the red carpet last night as she celebrated the success of her Netflix special “Relatable.”

She told “Extra's” Renee Bargh that her wife Portia de Rossi was at home with the flu, explaining, “Everybody's going to want this, but I'm giving it to you because you're 'Extra'… Portia is sick… and she can't be here.” Portia did, however, send a message that Ellen shared exclusively with us: “If I were able to join you guys right now, I would tell you all how proud I am of her... she worked so hard and it's so good... and we had a lot of fun doing it… so that's what I'd say.”

Ellen added, “She doesn't want me to get sick because I have like three more weeks of the season.”

DeGeneres revealed Portia had never seen her do stand-up live before “Relatable.” “We've been together 16 years, but she'd never seen me live, so when she saw me the first time she was like, 'Okay, then you should do this… this is what you're supposed to do.'”

The star went on, “She'd seen my stand-up but she'd never seen me live so yeah, it was a big thing to take on and I was really proud of it.”

“Relatable” marked Ellen's first time back onstage in 15 years and could mean another Emmy for the 32-time winner.

“Everybody says it's the same thing because I do a monologue every day, but it's not… it's like five minutes of me hosting a show and it's a little bit of me but it's not the entire hour of me, and so doing stand-up is a whole different thing than hosting a show and yeah, it's very scary because I'm revealing more of myself and especially in this it's a lot more personal.”

The talk-show queen also weighed in on the name of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's son Archie.

“I love Archie. I think it's adorable… If I had a kid, I would name the kid Archie and I bet there are a lot of kids that are going to be named Archie now.”