Whoopi Goldberg has opened up about The View since co-star Meghan McCain left the show in August 2021, and the Sister Act star didn’t hold back.
Whoopi is ‘still tired’ after McCain’s exit in 2021
“It’s calmer, because nobody wants to be that tired every day,” Goldberg told Page Six. “I think [The View], it’s better. I feel it’s better, but I’m still tired!”
Whoopi Goldberg attends an event in 2020. (Photo Credit: Miguel Medina / AFP / Getty Images)
McCain, the daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain, has also commented on her tense working relationship with the Oscar-winning actress over her four years on the show. In her memoir Dirty Sexy Politics, she revealed, “I found her open disdain for me more and more difficult to manage as the years went on, and it became more frequent. Occasionally, if the show’s political discourse veered into a territory that she found disagreeable, Whoopi would cut me off, sometimes harshly.”
When asked for a comment on McCain’s book, Goldberg replied: “I’m trying to get my leg and my hip right. I don’t have time to think about anything but myself.”
McCain’s tense relationship with co-hosts led to her exit from The View
The View, created by groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters in 1997, features six female hosts who discuss topics ranging from pop culture and celebrity gossip to some of the most heated and divisive political and moral dilemmas. When McCain first joined the show in 2017 after leaving Fox News, she consistently clashed with Goldberg and another cohost Joy Behar – an experience she has since labeled a “toxic work environment.”
Meghan McCain at the Netflix ‘Medal of Honor’ screening and panel discussion in 2018. (Photo Credit: Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images for Netflix)
McClain also talked about her relationship with Behar on “The Commentary Magazine Podcast” explaining an interaction with Behar after she returned to The View following the birth of her daughter Liberty in early 2021: “I finally went back to the show, and the day I went back to the show, Joy Behar said on air, ‘Nobody missed you, we didn’t miss you, you shouldn’t have come back.'”
“I was working on the show as the only conservative during the Trump years,” McCain told Variety in 2021. “I felt like a lot of people took out their anger on the administration on me because I was the only person in the building who was a Republican.”
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In one particularly heated episode in 2019, Goldberg famously told McCain to stop talking during a discussion about then-president Donald Trump’s impeachment.
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According to McCain, Whoopi later apologized for her negative and dismissive tone. “I love Whoopi,” McCain shared in 2021. “I felt at a certain point she stopped respecting me, and it was hard.”