Billie Eilish is opening up about her Tourette’s syndrome like never before. The Happier Than Ever singer sat down with David Letterman on his Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, where she called the neurological disorder “really weird” and admits “I haven’t talked about it at all”—before admitting that plenty of people think she’s just after a laugh.
Billie Eilish Says She Gets Offended When People Laugh At Her
There’s little in life that the singer hasn’t shared with her fans, but she’s remained relatively quiet about her struggles with Tourette’s. It wasn’t until she experienced a tic on camera while Letterman interviewed her that she was willing to speak on the topic.
“If you film me for long enough, you’re going to see a lot of tics,” she explained, prompting Letterman to ask if it was okay to discuss her condition, to which she replied: “Absolutely.”
Surprisingly, the Grammy-winning singer says that people usually laugh when she suffers from a tic—something she says is incredibly offensive.
“It’s really weird. I haven’t talked about it at all,” she said. “The most common way that people react is they laugh because they think I’m trying to be funny. They think I’m ticcing as a funny move. And so they go, ‘Ha,’ and I’m always left incredibly offended by that. Or they go ‘What?’ and then I go, ‘I have Tourette’s.’”
“So many people have it, and you’d never know,” she continued. “A couple artists have come forward and said, ‘I’ve always had Tourette’s,’ and I’m not going to out them because they don’t want to talk about it. But, that was really interesting to me, because I was like, ‘You do? What?’”
Ther Singer Says The Tics Don't Occur When She's On Stage
Thankfully, the tics don’t occur when Eilish is performing, as she frequently does, or during other activities requiring thinking and focusing.
“I never don’t tic at all, because the main tics that I do are constantly, like, I wiggle my ear back and forth and raise my eyebrow and click my jaw and flex this arm here and this arm there,” she explained to lettermen, adding, “These are things you would never notice if you’re having a conversation with me, but for me, they’re very exhausting.”