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Good Housekeeping: You always seem so optimistic and have such a positive outlook on life. Does that come naturally to you?

Ellen Degeneres
Well, I'm definitely happier than I've ever been. I assume tomorrow I'll be happier than today, because things are great. I have a great career and I have wonderful fans who really are supportive and loyal — because I'm not hiding anything from them. So, on the spectrum of happiness, I'm pretty high up there. But I have a healthy dose of reality. The world's a scary place, you know? It can be really sad and stressful and negative. I try to counterbalance that. I believe everything in life is energy. If we're destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there's got to be a very powerful energy to fight that. I think we need more love in the world. We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that. I really want my time here to be positive and productive.

GH: Life wasn't always so easy for you. You've talked about the tough time after your sitcom was cancelled years ago. You had trouble finding work, and the relationship you were in broke up. What got you through that period?

ED:
Drinking, really. [Laughs] No, I think it was probably a necessary time for me, though I would not have wanted to hear that at the time. I had been on a track where I kept telling myself, I'm going to be successful; I'm going to be famous. And then it stopped. I had done a sitcom and a movie and hosted the Emmys, and all of a sudden, I lost everything. As someone put it at the time, I was suddenly like a Ferrari in neutral. If you get to a place where something negative happens and you go, OK, what do you want me to do? Let me sit still and listen to this, then you're almost there in terms of understanding life. One rough patch is not the big picture. Now, when things don't work out, I try
to go, OK, I guess I'm not supposed to do this particular thing.

GH: Your mom is one of your biggest fans. You reserve the best seat in the audience for her. How has she been a model for you?

ED
Certainly, she has persevered. My mom had some really bad things happen in her life, and she's a trouper. She's tougher than I am, I'd say. When my parents divorced, it was my mother and me, by ourselves in an apartment. At that point, we kind of became roommates. I was 13 years old. She'd been married for almost 20 years, and I watched her go through a tough time, trying to date, trying to figure things out. She dated some horrible men whom I had to kick out of the house. So, at 13, I kind of became an adult and was taking care of...watching her struggle. It made me go, Oh, you're my mom, but you're just a human being. I saw her in a different role all of a sudden.

GH: Comedy must have been a source of comfort
for you.

ED: I was quiet as a kid and wasn't funny until I was a little older. Then I remember being funny, because I remember people laughing. But I was more of the sensitive type, taking care of injured animals I found. But I was aware of all the stuff nobody in my family was talking about. Everything was fine all the time. I was like, Really? It doesn't seem like it.

GH: So tell us, what makes you laugh these days?

ED: My animals. I have three kitties: George, Chairman, and Charlie. And then two dogs, Mabel and Wolf. They make me laugh. They make me calm. They fill me with awe. I'm in awe, for instance, when my dogs know exactly when it's time to go and get in the car. Even though they speak their own language, they still understand us. I'm in awe of these little tiny moments all the time. Like the other day, we showed a video on the show of a cat and a dolphin interacting. I mean, it was insane! The cat was on the edge of a pier, and a dolphin came up out of the water, and they started nuzzling each other!

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WIRED: Watching the opening of The Revenant, all I could think was, “That looks really cold.”

DICAPRIO:
It was physically grueling for everybody. We had to have this massive crew go to far-off locations and move around all over the high altitudes, from Calgary to Vancouver. They had coordinated all that stuff with a lot of precision. But of course when we got there, the elements sort of took over.

What drew you to the role of Hugh Glass?

Glass was a campfire legend—and it’s all true. He survived a savage bear attack, was left for dead, then traveled through this uncharted territory of interior America, crawling through hundreds of miles of wilderness on his own. Not a lot of directors wanted to take this on because of how difficult it would be to shoot.
The script had been floating around for a couple of years. It wasn’t until Alejandro was attached to this man’s struggle in nature that it got going.

What was the worst part?

The hardest thing for me was getting in and out of frozen rivers. [Laughs.] Because I had elk skin on and a bear fur that weighed about 100 pounds when it got wet. And every day it was a challenge not to get hypothermia.

Do you have a lot of outdoor experience? Are you a survival school kind of a guy?

I love being immersed in nature and wild places. I love scuba diving, and I’ve been up and down the Amazon. But as far as dropping me off with a small bit of rations? Before this movie I wouldn’t have known the first thing about it.

I heard that you’ve had a couple of brushes with death yourself, though. Do you think of yourself as an adventurous type?

My friends have named me the person they least want to do extreme adventures with, because I always seem to be very close to being part of a disaster. If a cat has nine lives, I think I’ve used a few. I mean, there was the shark incident …

Shark? What do you mean?

A great white jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa. Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me.

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How did your Money Monster role come about?

George [Clooney] reached out to me about it and I thought it sounded intriguing. And of course there was the element of Jodie Foster… I told him, of course, send it to me – I’d love to read the script. And I have to say, I do read a lot of them. But this was one of those things that I just sat down and read in one fell swoop; it was just so terrific. I was so excited about it.

What was it about your character, Patty Fenn,
which ultimately caught your attention?

It was the stuff that will probably go unnoticed, not so much the foreground of the character but her background. I just thought of her as very much a New Yorker, third-generation in television – you know, that her dad was probably in
television, her grandfather was probably in television. And that this is her world – that control room.

What was your first meeting with Jodie Foster like? I was surprised to learn that you two had never actually worked together before.

As many times as we’ve crossed paths over the years, I think I’ve actually only ever spoken to her, ever so briefly, a couple of times, ever.

If I was a fly on the wall for that first Money Monster meeting, what would I have seen?

Well, we were on the phone [laughs]… But she was so funny and entertaining. She was so fired up about the project and it was really infectious. She’s such a consummate actor that to get her incredible intellect as a director intertwined with the deliciousness of her acting, what more could anybody ask for?

What was it like when you were working with her on set with her?

Everything I could have hoped for, really. It’s funny, too, because she’s incredibly encouraging, almost to the point where I was like, “Come on, tear it apart! Tear my performance apart!” You know, “Fix it for me! Jodie-Foster it!” And she was like, “No, you’ve got it. You’re exactly right.” And I’m thinking, “I just want to be Jodie Foster.” [Laughs]

What was it like working with George Clooney again?

It’s my great fortune to have such talented friends. I just think we’re very much alike in our approach to work. We both really enjoy what we do and we put a lot of effort and joy into it. These days it’s just about fine-tuning.

Does working with someone like Jodie inspire you to direct something yourself?

(Laughs)… No! It in fact inspires me to stay away from directing even more. It just makes me realise how totally unqualified I am for that job…

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DG: Over the last few days, I read all the stories we've run about you. It was an amazing experience.

GC: I bet.

DG: I think over the time that you've been on
our cover and the time I've been editing this magazine, it's only gotten more complicated to be a man.

GC: I had some pretty good examples in my life. My father's very smart and has a great sense of humor. And some people just feel comfortable in their skin. I have good friends who are like that. And my father is like that and my uncle is like that.

DG: Probably didn't hurt that you were in your
thirties when you got famous.

GC: Noah Wyle was 23 when ER got picked up, and by our fifth or sixth show we had 40 million people watching. And I remember Noah asking me, "Is that good?" And I said, "It will never happen again in your lifetime." I was lucky enough to have the perspective to understand when things are good.

DG: You came to fame right at the beginning of the modern age of fame, when—

GC: When all the fun was gone. Used to be you could be as famous as you wanted. You show up at premieres and everybody cheers and you sign autographs, and then you go off and you drive out to a restaurant and go to dinner and you'd be left alone.
Every once in a while some paparazzi would sneak around, but now everybody's got a phone. If all this stuff existed when I was 25, it'd be me getting carried out of some bar by my feet. Cuz I did it all. I had all the fun that you should have. And it would have been multiplied by 10 times had I been famous and rich. I'm just lucky that the advent of camera phones happened when I was 43 years old or something.

DG: You know Hillary Clinton well. Is there a moment you've had with her that crystallizes who she is?

GC: I was a big supporter of Barack Obama in 2008. When I came back from Darfur when she was secretary of state, I would have thought she would have been a little ticked off to meet with me. And she wasn't.

DG: What is it like meeting with a secretary of state?

GC: When I walked out of that room, I was very, very, very glad that she was secretary of state and that she was an informed, responsible, smart person. I don't think she's nearly as good a campaigner as she would be a leader.

DG: Is Obama funny?

GC: Deeply funny. He gets the joke. He's called me a couple of times after I've gotten in an argument with somebody about him. And he's like, "What are you doing fighting with that guy?" That kind of stuff has been very funny.

DG: Have you ever played basketball with him?

GC: We played here in L.A. I did a fundraiser here with him, and he said, "What are you doing tomorrow morning?" I go, "What time?" He goes, "5:30. You wanna play some hoops?" And I go, "Yeah." And he goes, "All right, we'll set it up. You got any of your friends want to play?"

DG: I'm surprised he even has time to play at 5:30 in the morning.

GC: The truth of the matter is, in my lifetime certainly there's never been a president who's been up against so much obstructionism. There just hasn't been. Period. I don't give a shit what anybody says. Yet he's managed to do an awful lot of things, and he's had to do it with a sense of humor that I wouldn't have kept. At some point, I would've said, "You know what, boys? Why don't we step
outside?"