Rosie O’Donnell is returning to The View more than a decade after her exit as a moderator.
O’Donnell, 64, confirmed on the Monday, August 3, episode of “The Tangle” podcast that she will appear as “just a guest” in season 30.
“They’re bringing back all the hosts, I think, for the 30th season,” she noted about the show’s upcoming anniversary. “I will go on the 30th anniversary next [season].”
O’Donnell continued: “And you know, I’m pretty proud of that show, what it’s become and how it really speaks to the people and to politics. [It] was not the case when I first joined.”
The comedian was previously on the show as a moderator for one season in 2007 and another in 2015. O’Donnell has since been outspoken about the challenges she faced behind the scenes despite her support for the morning talk show.
“Many, many people got the short end of the stick there. It was, you know, it was a factory where people were being churned in and out and their tenuous security, nobody got to be calm,” she added on Monday. “It also was a show at the time that was run by a man. A show created by a woman, for women, about women, and the man was deciding what we should talk about. And that didn’t sit right with me, you know.”
O’Donnell has spoken about longtime View producer Bill Geddie, who died in 2023, in the past.
“One day on the show [Elisabeth Hasselbeck] kind of threw me under the bus and I was like, ‘Are you f**king kidding me?’ I finished the show, got my coat, walked out and said, ‘I’m not going back,’ and I didn’t until a few years later when they asked me to come back and Whoopi [Goldberg] was on it and we clashed in ways that I was shocked by,” O’Donnell recalled on a 2023 episode of the “Now What? With Brooke Shields” podcast.
O’Donnell was asked whether she had any regrets about her time on The View, to which she replied, “I know this: It’s not the best use of my talent to get in a show where I have to argue and defend basic principles of humanity and kindness. It was not something I’d ever do again.”
She continued: “Barbara [Walters], who created the talk show in 1997, and I got along after. We went out to dinner. We knew each other way before I did that show, before she asked me to do it, and we remained friendly toward the end. I forgave her, because she was older and did the best that she could with what she had to work with, but it’s nothing I’d want to do again, I can say that.”
Elsewhere in the podcast episode, O’Donnell said she had a “tense time” with current moderator Goldberg before her 2015 exit. The pair have since worked out their differences off screen.
The View airs on ABC weekdays at 11 a.m. ET.
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