You know our first guest from hit TV shows
like Scandal and Felicity.
And now you can see him co-hosting my new HBO Max show.
It's called Ellen's Next Great Designer.
Please welcome Scott Foley.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi, Ellen.
Hey, Scott.
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm good.
You look great.
Where are you right now?
I'm in my new house in Connecticut.
We moved during the pandemic.
So I'm talking to you from across the country.
And I know you moved there after being here for 30 years.
What made you want to go to the East Coast?
Oh, there were-- a lot of different things
played into our move.
Raising kids somewhere outside of Los Angeles, a lot of fires,
I'm going to be honest with you, a little bit of the weather.
The weather made me want to move the East Coast.
How is the weather?
But it's freezing there.
You prefer the snow.
I don't prefer the snow.
Look, after 30 years in Los Angeles--
you know this.
You've lived there a long time as well.
Before you even wake up, you know
it's going to be a sunny day, right?
You know it's gorgeous outside.
I was never able to relax the way I wanted to.
There was no good time to sit in front of the TV
or watch a movie, because I always felt guilty.
I always felt like I needed to be productive.
And now I can be lazy in Connecticut.
Well, I know where someone's daughter is moving.
Hello, [INAUDIBLE].
So I heard you took an RV across country
to get to the new house.
That sounds like fun?
Oh, come on, don't do that.
Yes, it was so much fun.
Look, it was the COVID, right?
And we didn't want to fly.
There's the beautiful RV.
We named her big booty Judy because she's hard to back up.
It was three kids, two dogs, a cat, my wife, and myself.
12 days we drove across country.
We saw Mount Rushmore.
We had maybe the best time we've ever had as a family.
It was just great.
And you got-- this puppy is adorable.
What is it, half pug, half what?
It's a Spug.
So it's a Cocker Spaniel Pug mix.
Weird that I'm wearing the same thing there that I am now.
Yes, his name is Duke Pumpkin, and he's so cute
and a bit of a pain in the ass.
Nobody really likes him.
Well, I mean, the family likes him.
Our other dogs couldn't care less about him.
Look at him laying on the couch though.
I want to hear why he's a jerk, because I
heard you said he's a jerk.
Look at that.
That's hilarious.
And that is why he's a jerk, I mean, just too comfortable.
He hadn't been in the house for three weeks
and he's already taken up my spot.
What is that?
Ridiculous.
I think that's one of the cutest dogs I've ever
seen in my entire life.
You grew up all over the world, which I did not know.
You lived in Australia as a kid, which I did not--
does Portia know you lived in Australia?
Yeah, we spent a few seasons on Scandal together,
and there was enough downtime that I bothered her
about a lot of things.
One of them was like, hey, you know I lived in Australia.
And she was like, yeah, that's great.
She couldn't care less.
But yes, we talked about it.
I spent almost four years there and have really fond memories.
For the most part, it was great.
I did have an issue at one point.
It's famous for its beaches.
And I think I was six or seven years old
and we were at Bondi Beach, and we were swimming.
And they had these jellyfish called blue tails,
and they're these stinging jellyfish.
And I was in the water and I got one of their blue tails wrapped
around my leg.
So I got stung by a jellyfish.
But that's really the only bad thing that
happened to me in Australia.
Wow, yeah, everything-- they say anything that can kill you
lives in Australia.
They have a lot of dangerous things.
That sounds horrible.
Did someone urinate on you?
Because that's what's supposed to happen.
Yes, someone totally peed on my leg.
My dad pulled me out and the lifeguard came over,
and everyone was looking around, and I was crying in pain.
And that dude, random dude peed on my leg.
Yeah, I heard that's not actually something that
helps but people still do it.
I'm going too far down this path.
Before the pandemic you moved your family to Prague
for a year.
How was that?
That was great.
I was shooting this show called Whisky Cavalier, which
met an untimely demise as most television shows do.
But we decided to shoot the whole show in Prague.
So I moved my family over there, and my kids
were in school over there.
Ah, there is the Charles Bridge.
It was so beautiful.
Beautiful.
It was a great experience.
I was literally illiterate over there.
You can't read the words.
You can't speak the language.
Now, that's my wife Marika.
She was actually born in Poland, so she speaks fluent Polish.
So she could understand about 60% of what they were saying.
And they could understand about 80% of what she was saying.
But it really shifted the power dynamic in our family.
I like to think it was about 50-50 before we moved there.
And it was like 99 to 1 once we did because I was
like, what did they say, babe?
Well, I need to go here.
What do we need?
How do I say this?
It was insane.
I can imagine.
I can't imagine how hard that is to be in a country
and not speak the language or understand it.
Hey, Scott, we have to take a break.
But when we come back, we'll talk about my new show
that we both love.
We'll be back.
I can't wait.
All right, we're back with Scott Foley.
And that was one of the calmer clips from my new show.
It's called Ellen's Next Great Designer.
You are my co-host and judge.
But it gets pretty competitive, but tell everybody about it.
Yeah, look, Ellen's Next Great Designer
is a show about furniture design and something
that I was thrilled.
Thank you for asking me to be a part of.
We have seven designers taking place over seven
different challenges.
We crown one winner who wins $100,000
and the title of being Ellen's Next Great Designer.
There I am.
You can see me with, well, with the table.
But my brilliant co-judges, Brigette Romanek
and Fernando Mastrangelo, we had a great time shooting this.
And you know furniture design and building things is
something I'm passionate about.
So I was thrilled to be a part of this, Ellen.
Thank you.
Yeah, well, that's why I wanted you.
I know that you build things, and you're really good at it.
What have you been building lately?
Funny you should ask.
This is my second to most recent thing.
I don't know if you can see it.
It's a shelf that I built. My eight-year-old, now
nine-year-old as of yesterday son
had a bunch of-- he has the top bunk above his brother,
and he had a bunch of books in his bed.
And so I built this shelf that slides over the railing
of his bunk bed.
And so he can put a water up there all his books.
It was just a, I don't know, quick little thing.
It's fun for me to do.
And I get such satisfaction out of completing something
like that.
See, that's clever right there.
That's why I wanted to start the show,
because who's building the next coffee
table and/or the next whatever?
And there's amazing designers out there.
And you got to visit the designers
in their own workspaces, which was very cool.
Yeah, it was great.
One of the challenges we had, and you know this,
doing the show was because of COVID, we
couldn't do what they do on Top Chef, which is get everybody
together in one room and have them make
these projects together because of the pandemic
we all went through.
So we were able to--
your producers had a great idea of delivering the challenges
to these designers in their home workspaces.
For me, it was a dream come true.
Yeah, everybody even when they got voted off,
they said it was one of the best experiences they ever
had because it pushed them to do things in a certain time limit
and to have challenges.
Anyway, you're great on the show.
It's called Ellen's Next Great Designer.
It premieres tomorrow on HBO Max.
Scott, great talking to you.
I'll see you soon.