Whoopi Goldberg Addresses Her Future on ‘The View’

Whoopi Goldberg is right where she is “supposed” to be in her career. The actress and comedian, who has been on The View since 2007, opened up about her future on the ABC talk show and possible return to movies on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show Tuesday.

“You have to have people ask you to master things. Listen, I have [Stephen King miniseries] The Stand coming up. I did The Stand last year … it’s kind of fabulous. Things come up and I think my time has been spread.” Goldberg said of her stint on The View. “It’s not that my time will come back — it’s not gone anywhere — and I guess I’m supposed to be doing this right now.”

She continued, “I guess I’m supposed to be in this chair every day saying, ‘Listen, we do not have to buy into fear or panic. We can master this if we do it together.’ I feel like I am better off saying, ‘Listen. Somebody needs to stand up when the person in the White House says, hey, maybe we should ingest some bleach.’”

The View is currently being broadcast virtually amid the coronavirus pandemic, with Goldberg and co-host Joy Behar opting to work from home as early as mid-March, when the show was simply filming without an audience.

“This is what we call responsible social distancing,” Goldberg told viewers on March 18. “So you know, I went to the doctor yesterday to check myself out just to make sure, and he gives me the all-clear to go to work, and I’m getting ready to do it, and then I start hearing these inconsistent messages from everyone. From the mayor, who’s saying we’re gonna be in place for now. New York’s gonna lock down. And then you have Gov. Cuomo saying, well, that’s not going to happen. And I just felt like if I was going to really try to figure out whether it was okay to come in — and my brain said, ‘you know what, ’til they can get themselves together, the governor and the mayor, until they can figure out what they’re doing, I should not go in.’ So that’s why I’m still here.”

“I am healthy, though my doctor was very annoyed with me. He’s like, ‘I just gave you the okay, why are you back?’ I said, ‘Because I need an okay, okay,’” she explained. “And so he gave me the okay, okay, but I just felt like with all this inconsistency between the governor and the mayor, it wasn’t good for me.”