Nearly two decades in the moderator’s chair at daytime television’s most argued-over table, and the woman who holds it says the reason she keeps showing up fits into three words.
Whoopi Goldberg, 70, told W Magazine in an interview published Oct. 27, 2026, that what brings her back to “The View” after almost 20 years is “a good check.”
Carolyn Twersky Winkler, who wrote the piece for the magazine’s print edition, pressed her on whether that was genuinely all of it. “That’s really what it is. I’m well-paid, and I do a good job. I earn my dough, and sometimes people like it, sometimes they don’t,” Goldberg said. Felipe Cordeiro photographed her for the story, and she wore her own clothes and accessories for the shoot.
“I Earn My Dough”
Goldberg drew a line between television money and movie money. “No one is going to pay me guy money to be in a movie,” she said, adding, “I get what I can, have as good a time as I can, and I don’t really worry about it too much.”
She had given an earlier version of the same answer in August, on a podcast. Host Keke Palmer asked her favorite part of the job on “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer,” and Goldberg replied, “The check. I love the check.” Palmer said she could only imagine the figure. Goldberg told her she couldn’t, because the number would stun her, then clarified that “The View” is not the best-paying job she has ever had. Each morning, she said, she looks at her family and the photos around her house and is grateful to have a job at all.
Why Grocers Wrote the Producer
Talking about money on air has cost her before. On the Nov. 7, 2024, broadcast, Goldberg blamed rising supermarket prices on store owners and called them “pigs.” The National Grocers Association, which represents more than 21,000 stores, objected in a letter to Brian Teta, the executive producer of “The View,” saying its members operate on margins of 1% to 2% and that such claims put retail workers at risk.
Five days later, on the Nov. 12, 2024, episode, she told the studio audience she understood the squeeze because she works for a living too. She would not be sitting there, she said, if she had all the money in the world.
“A Little Message of Hope”
Goldberg added a sign-off to each episode during the previous season, she told People. “I wanted to give people a little message of hope,” she said, because the daily topics “can be heavy.”
Twersky Winkler asked whether commentating on politics scares her. It does not, Goldberg said, and she credited Barbara Walters, the creator of “The View,” who recruited her to speak her mind. She still treats Walters’ offer as an obligation. Part of each “Hot Topics” segment lands on President Donald Trump, and Goldberg is among his sharpest critics at the table, though she has sworn off saying his name on air.
Finishing Deloris Without Maggie Smith
“Sister Act 3” is officially underway, returning Goldberg to Deloris, the nightclub singer hiding from the Mob in a convent. She had wanted to make it while co-star Maggie Smith was alive, and it did not get done in time.
“I don’t want to say it’s closure, because that sounds so esoteric. It’s like, You know what? Let’s put a button on this,” she said of going back to the role. Nuns approach her all over the world, she said, telling her: “We’ve done the same thing that you did, but we did it for real.”
Most of her film roles came to her only after bigger stars passed. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash was for Shelley Long. Sister Act was for Bette Midler. Burglar was for Bruce Willis. I know all the names,” she said. She also said: “I know and you know that I’m Black. Apparently, this comes as a surprise to people.”
In September she was away from “The View” for parts of two weeks to film Netflix’s “Women Like Us” with Jenifer Lewis, Vanessa Williams and Vivica A. Fox. Former co-hosts are returning for Season 30. The show airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
She Didn’t Know She’d Done It
Goldberg is an EGOT winner, the first Black person to collect an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Asked what that means to her, she answered: “Not a lot.” She first learned the term in 2009 while shooting “30 Rock” and asked co-star Tracy Morgan to explain it. “I didn’t know I had done that,” she said.
She took the moderator’s chair in September 2007, at the start of Season 11, in the seat Rosie O’Donnell had vacated. Season 30, which launched in September, is her 20th, and no host has lasted longer without a break. Joy Behar joined the show’s first season in 1997 and briefly stepped away, giving her more total time at the table. Behar, Sunny Hostin, Ana Navarro, Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin are her current tablemates.
Walters died in December 2022 at 93. In a September statement, Goldberg said she had considered walking away many times and that her own longevity surprises her; her advice to furious viewers is to skip the episode. ABC suspended her for two weeks in 2022 over remarks about the Holocaust, and she later apologized and clarified them.
She has been circling her back catalog lately. Her one-woman Broadway show, “Whoopi Goldberg,” opened in 1984, and the HBO recording that aired in 1985 earned her the Grammy. A 2026 revival, “The Whoopi Monologues,” starred several actors including Kerry Washington and Kara Young. This year she voiced Cupcake, an old, filthy, bald cat with a dirty mouth, on the animated series “Kevin.”
Asked what she wants to be remembered for, Goldberg said: “Just for being a decent person who maybe made mistakes but didn’t run from anything.”
