“She could have just avoided me for the rest of our lives and never hung out with me again and just been like, ‘Okay, Chelsea’s badly behaved, I don’t want anything to do with her.'”
Chelsea Handler is looking back on a Hollywood moment that changed the way she behaved in public.
While speaking to Parade about the incident in an interview published Friday, the 49-year-old comedian said it all went down when she attended a party at Jane Fonda’s house in 2017.
Handler said the legendary actress took her aside and told her that she was behaving poorly and asked her to stop. The Dear Chelsea podcast host said that she was so embarrassed she had to excuse herself.
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“I went to the bathroom mirror at her house and looked at myself, and I was like, ‘Okay, you have two choices in how you’re going to handle this,” Handler told Parade. “You could be defensive, and that just means she’s right. Or you can take it in and realize that she did not have to sit down and take the time to tell you this.”
She continued, “She could have just avoided me for the rest of our lives and never hung out with me again and just been like, ‘Okay, Chelsea’s badly behaved, I don’t want anything to do with her.'”
“But she set an example for me that day. That was an act of love.”
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Handler admitted that with age has come the wisdom, and she’s learned to check herself and not get so worked up over things.
“I know to remove myself from a situation if I’m not going to be my best,” Handler said. “I don’t lose my s–t like I used to when I was younger. It’s not a big deal if something doesn’t work out. It’s not a big deal if the guy I’m dating breaks up with me; it really isn’t. I’m a tree now. I’m kind of unshakeable.”
Handler, who turns 50 next month, said her new lease on life came after years of therapy — with the funny woman taking the mag that she started therapy just a few months before the Fonda incident after suffering a panic attack on the set of her short-lived Netflix show Chelsea.
“My confidence and my bravado and my tough exterior that worked for me so well and for so long in the years of Chelsea Lately — it’s like gas that you run out of,” Handler explained. “That anger and that drive, that got me to be really successful.”
“But there comes a time in your life where whatever works for you stops working for you, and all of a sudden you have to take a look at what you haven’t examined, which is usually your inner life and what happened to you as a child,” she continued.
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She realized she had in fact repressed some things growing up, including the grief she felt around her brother Chet dying when she was nine, something she refused to acknowledge or talk about until she was 40.
The revelation also came at the same time Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, which didn’t sit well with the die-hard Democrat.
“That coincided with my new talk show on Netflix. It was a perfect storm of instability, and I had never felt unstable before in my life, in that way,” Handler recalled.
All that therapy gave Handler new material for her stand up sets and the handful of books she’s released over the last few years.
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As for how she plans to celebrate her milestone birthday and all the work she’s done to get to this point in her life, Handler said she will once again hit the slopes near her vacation home in Whistler, Canada, and likely strip down to her birthday suit, as fans have seen her over the last few years.
“It’s going to involve more than just me; it’s going to involve a lot of people and hopefully lots of pets,” she teased. “Everyone keeps asking me [how I feel about turning 50], and I feel like they want me to say something like [sounding slightly bummed] ‘I can’t believe I’m 50.”
She added, “[But] this is awesome. My life is exactly what I hoped it would be — it’s more than I hoped it would be. I had no idea what the possibilities were or that I could live a life like this and feel so free.”
