Ellen DeGeneres mourns 'tWitch' in emotional video
Ellen DeGeneres embraces colleague Stephen "tWitch" Boss on the set of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." Credit: Warner Bros./Michael Rozman
Following her string of almost daily social-media posts since the suicide earlier this month of her friend and daytime talk-show colleague Stephen "tWitch" Boss, Ellen DeGeneres mourned him in an emotional video.
"Hey, everybody," the comedian, 64, begins somberly in a more than minute-and-a-half video released Friday on social media. Standing outdoors, wearing little or no makeup and visibly holding back tears, she says, "[T]he past 11 days have been really tough for everyone" who knew the 40-year-old dancer-actor and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" DJ, who is survived by his wife and three children.
"Everyone is in pain and trying to make sense of it, and we'll never make sense of it," continued DeGeneres, whose Daytime Emmy Award-winning talk show ended in May after 19 seasons. "And the holidays are hard, I think, anyway, but to honor tWitch, I think the best thing that we can do is to laugh and hug each other, play games and dance and sing. That's the way we honor him, is we do the things that he loved to do, which is dancing. He loved music, he loved games, so we do that."
She conceded, "I know it seems hard, it seems impossible, but that's how we honor him. And hug each other and tell each other we love each other, and let people know we're there for them and check in on people. So, happy holidays, everybody. And I know it's not a happy holiday, but he was pure light, as everybody in the comments [of her various posts have] said. If you knew him, you knew that. If you didn't know him, you saw it."
After a long pause, DeGeneres concluded by saying, "Let's honor him and think about him and send love to one another."
Boss first gained fame as a contestant on the Fox competition “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2005, returning three years later to become the season's runner-up. He joined DeGeneres' daytime talk show as a guest DJ in 2013 before later becoming permanent and also occasionally guest-hosting. He married "Dancing with the Stars" ballroom pro Allison Holker in 2013, and the two had son Maddox, 6, and daughter Zaia, 3, with Boss adopting Holker's daughter from a previous relationship, Weslie, 14.
Boss died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in an Encino, California, motel room on Dec. 13.