The View alumna Rosie O’Donnell announced this week that she will return to the show for the upcoming 30th anniversary special.
O’Donnell, 64, served as a host of the daytime program twice, first from 2006 to 2007 and then from 2014 to 2015, and left each time after a single season.
During her tenures, she developed a reputation for clashes with her fellow panelists Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg.
Now she has confirmed: ‘I will go on the 30th anniversary next year and be on in whatever way they want me, just as a guest,’ on the podcast The Tangle.
‘They’re bringing back all the hosts, I think, for the 30th season,’ she said. ‘And I’m pretty proud of that show, what it’s become and how it really speaks to the people and to politics, and that was not the case when I first joined.’
Having moved to Ireland to avoid living under a second Trump presidency, O’Donnell will be back on American TV this month as a guest host for Jimmy Kimmel.
A representative for O’Donnell declined the Daily Mail’s request for further comment.
The View alumna Rosie O’Donnell announced this week that she will return to the show for the upcoming 30th anniversary special; pictured this June at the Tony Awards
O’Donnell, 64, first hosted the show from 2006 to 2007, leaving after a particularly rancorous argument with her co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck about the Iraq War
O’Donnell first joined The View as a replacement for its moderator Meredith Vieira and instantly became a headline-grabbing presence.
In a departure from Vieira’s conciliatory geniality, she frequently plunged into fiery arguments on the air, particularly with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whose position as the show’s stock conservative resulted in conflict with the liberal O’Donnell.
It emerged in 2007 that O’Donnell’s contract negotiations with ABC had collapsed and that she was exiting the show after a single season.
She ultimately left three weeks earlier than planned as a result of a particularly rancorous on-air scrap with Hasselbeck over the Iraq War.
O’Donnell fumed that she was no longer willing to engage in squabbles with Hasselbeck on The View ‘because here’s how it gets spun in the media: “Rosie – big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie – attacks innocent, pure, Christian Elisabeth,” and I’m not doing it for the rest of the – I’m not doing it!’
The split-screen confrontation grew so bitter that their co-host Joy Behar eventually erupted: ‘Is there no commercial in this show? What are we, on PBS?’
When O’Donnell was brought back aboard The View in 2014, rumors began circulating of a feud between her and her colleague Whoopi Goldberg.
In her new podcast interview, O’Donnell confessed that she ‘had a sort of a tense time with Whoopi,’ while referring to Goldberg as ‘somebody I admire.’
O’Donnell returned to the show from 2014 to 2015, during which tenure she is pictured with (from left) Jenny McCarthy, Barbara Walters, Sherri Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg
According to O’Donnell, she had ‘expected that we would be like Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, passing the ball back and forth and then shooting and leading the team to victory. But that’s not exactly what happened.’
In an attempt to trace the source of her bad blood with Goldberg, O’Donnell mused that ‘maybe she felt encroached upon in some way, and I was never trying to encroach. I was just doing it the way that I knew how to do it and it didn’t go so well.’
Goldberg allegedly took against O’Donnell when the latter ‘made the mistake of throwing to a commercial when she was still talking,’ O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell will compere Jimmy Kimmel Live! this month as part of a rotating stable of guest hosts while the show’s star enjoys a summer holiday.
Her reentry to American television comes after she underwent a facelift in January that hit the headlines for being scarcely perceptible.
The talk-show host had initially agonized over the decision to have the ‘shameful’ procedure, which she regarded as a ‘betrayal of feminism.’
She bit the bullet and forked over more than ‘I have ever paid for a car,’ only to emerge from surgery and realize nobody noticed the difference anyway.
O’Donnell rationalized the result as ‘the best possible outcome’ when she went public with the operation in rambling free verse on her Substack.
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