Rosie O'Donnell Reveals If She'd Ever Return to 'The View'

Rosie O'Donnell made it very clear that she has no plans to return to The View. The comedian joined the show for just one season in 2006, then came back in 2014. Her first tenure on the show was defined by her clashes with conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whom she tried to become friends with despite their political differences.

While on Brooke Shields' Now What? podcast, O'Donnell said she "went in there with a teamwork attitude" when she first joined The View, notes Deadline. However, she soon soured on the way the show was run. She recalled how producer Bill Geddie would visit Hasselbeck's dressing room before each episode to give her talking points from the conservative press.

"She had the talking points and I was trying to get her to feel more than to fact," O'Donnell told Shields. "When I took the job I said to myself, 'I'm gonna love her no matter what.' I took her to her first Broadway show, I took her kids to see the Nickelodeon shows with me and my kids. I had her at my house with her husband – they swam in my pool."

O'Donnell thought she and Hasselbeck were becoming friends after all that. "I thought we were friends in a civil kind of way and then one day on the show, she kind of threw me under the bus and I was like, 'Are you f—ing kidding me?'" she said. "I finished the show, got my coat, walked out, and said, 'I am not going back.'"

During her second one-season stint on The View, O'Donnell sat at the table with Whoopi Goldberg. She was surprised the two clashed, claiming that Goldberg did not want to discuss the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby. "I wanted to discuss Bill Cosby and Whoopi did not," O'Donnell said. (Goldberg eventually did discuss Cosby on the show in 2015 and said in an ABC News interview at the time that "If this is to be tried in the court of public opinion, I got to say all of the information that's out there kind of points to guilt.")

O'Donnell later told Shields that she did not regret going on The View, but noted it was "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." The show "was not something I would ever do again," but she stayed friendly with creator Barbara Walters until Walters' death.

Elsewhere in her interview with Shields, O'Donnell talked about the making of the 1995 coming-of-age movie Now and Then. She played an older version of Roberta Martin, who was a tomboy as a kid and lived with a boyfriend in the present. O'Donnell said the "producer" decided to remove all references to her character being gay. Her representative later told PEOPLE that O'Donnell meant to say that the studio, New Line Cinema, was behind the change. The studio, Now and Then director Lesli Linka Glatter, producer Suzanne Todd, and star Demi Moore did not comment.

O'Donnell told Shields she couldn't believe the change was made. "But you know, this was before Will & Grace. This was before Ellen [DeGeneres] was out," she explained. "And it was very controversial to be gay, and – my agent didn't know if I should take the job because 'What if people find out that you're gay?' And I was like, 'Come on, I'm an actress.'"