Lately, Chelsea Handler is setting the record straight.
The comedian, 50, got candid on her relationship status after she and Ralph Fiennes sparked romance rumors while leaving the Vanity Fair Oscars Party arm-in-arm.
“I saw that,” Handler said to Entertainment Tonight about the pictures of the two circulating online. “I saw about 30,000 articles come through. When your publicist sends you an update of the press that you’ve been in daily and I was like, ‘How long is this email?’”
Regardless of the long email, Handler denies that the pair are anything but platonic.
“Ralph Fiennes and I went from one party to another party with a group of people and that is what happened,” the host stated. “I don’t think Ralph Fiennes is marriage material and I don’t think I’m marriage material.”
The “Conclave” star, 62, was married to actress Alex Kingston from 1993 to 1997, and was previously in a relationship with actress Francesca Annis for 11 years until they separated in 2006.
Handler, meanwhile, has kept her dating life largely out of the spotlight since splitting with fellow comedian Jo Koy in 2022.
The exes first got together in 2021 before calling it quits nearly a year later. Handler shared the pair had went their separate ways in a social media post, stating Koy “renewed my faith in men” and “in love.”
In January, she revealed that she doesn’t have any regrets when it comes to her time with the actor, 53.
While speaking with Parade, Handler called the split “the first mature ending to a relationship that I was in.”
“My behavior was mature and graceful,” she continued. “I honored the relationship by never actually divulging what happened, and I liked that version of myself. I’ve ended so many relationships where I lacked dignity and I lacked grace, and I was immature and vindictive. And I don’t want to be that way. I want to be better than that. I’m a woman now, I’m not a little girl.”
But the reason Handler and Koy split in the first place had a lot to do with the actress doing what was best for herself.
“I felt like it was a decision between having a relationship and being full-on or choosing myself and my sanity — sanity is an overstatement — but I would have compromised my own value system,” she explained while on the “Armchair Expert” podcast in February.
Despite being “happy” and “really in love” with Koy, she knew they wanted different things in the long run.
“What I thought was a mature healthy relationship and what he thought was a mature healthy relationship were two different things and I would have had to compromise everything I stand for and I wasn’t willing to do that,” the “Chelsea Lately” alum told host Dax Shepard.
“We had a couple of instances where it was obvious that we had different ideas about togetherness and the amount of time we would spend together and the expectations of me as his girlfriend, which to me were very outdated, old-fashioned and not going to work.”
Handler did share a few good takeaways from their time together, as well.
“The biggest takeaway from that relationship was A, that I was able to be in love in a vulnerable, mature, healthy way and that when I realized it wasn’t going to work out, I was able to end it in a healthy, mature way and not divulge all of the stuff and the ugliness that may have happened in between because I didn’t want to focus on that,” she explained.
“So that was a huge takeaway,” she continued. “I didn’t for one second doubt any of my decision-making.”
Additionally, Koy reminded her of her worth when her confidence was at a low point.
As the author put it, “He got me at a point in my life where I needed to be reminded of my strength and my power of who I am and he reinstalled that in me because I had kind of lost interest in my work and the job.”
