Whoopi Goldberg has a three-word answer for anyone wondering why she is still showing up at “The View” after almost 20 years.
Goldberg, 70, told W Magazine in an interview published Oct. 27, 2026, that what brings her back to the ABC daytime show season after season is “a good check.” The piece, written by Carolyn Twersky Winkler with photographs by Felipe Cordeiro, appears in the magazine’s print edition, and Goldberg wore her own clothes and jewelry for the shoot.
Pressed on whether that was genuinely all of it, Goldberg said: “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.”
“No one is going to pay me guy money to be in a movie,” she said. “I get what I can, have as good a time as I can, and I don’t really worry about it too much.”
A Paycheck That Would Shock You
She had said a version of it before. In August, podcast host Keke Palmer, 32, asked her on “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer” what her favorite part of the job was. “The check. I love the check,” Goldberg replied.
Palmer said she could only imagine the figure. Goldberg told her she couldn’t, and that the number would stun her. Then came the clarification: “The View” is not the best-paying job she has ever had. She added that she was grateful: looking at her family and the photos around her house each morning, she thinks it’s good to have a job.
When the Grocers Sent a Letter
Money talk from that chair has cost her before. On the Nov. 7, 2024, broadcast, Goldberg blamed rising supermarket prices on the people who own the stores, calling 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 percent to 2 percent and that such claims put retail workers at risk.
Five days later, on the Nov. 12, 2024, episode, Goldberg told the studio audience she understood the squeeze because she works for a living too, and that she would not be sitting there if she had all the money in the world.
No Fear at the Hot Topics Table
Asked by Twersky Winkler whether weighing in on politics ever scares her, Goldberg answered flatly: no. She credited Barbara Walters, the creator of “The View,” who recruited her to speak her mind and whose offer she still treats as an obligation. Walters died in December 2022 at 93.
Goldberg took over the moderator’s chair in September 2007, at the start of Season 11, filling the seat Rosie O’Donnell had vacated. Season 30, which launched in September, is her 20th. No host has lasted longer without a break; only Joy Behar, who joined the show’s first season in 1997 and briefly stepped away, has more total time at the table. Her current tablemates are Behar, Sunny Hostin, Ana Navarro, Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin, and the panel devotes part of each “Hot Topics” segment to President Donald Trump. She is among his sharpest critics there, and she has sworn off saying his name on air.
Staying has not always felt obvious. Goldberg said in September that she has considered walking away many times, and that her own longevity surprises her. Her advice to viewers who are furious with her: skip the episode. She was suspended for two weeks in 2022 over remarks about the Holocaust, which she later apologized for and clarified.
Deloris Is Coming Back
“Sister Act 3” is officially underway, returning Goldberg to Deloris, the nightclub singer who hides from the Mob in a convent. She had wanted to make it while her co-star Maggie Smith was alive, she said, and could not get it done in time.
The EGOT winner — the first Black person to collect an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — has been circling her own back catalog. Her one-woman Broadway show “Whoopi Goldberg” opened in 1984, the HBO recording aired in 1985 and won her the Grammy, and a 2026 revival, “The Whoopi Monologues,” starred several actors including Kerry Washington and Kara Young. This year she also voiced Cupcake, an old, filthy, bald cat with a dirty mouth, on the animated series “Kevin.”
In September she stepped 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. Season 30 is bringing back former co-hosts, with O’Donnell confirming she will appear as a guest; the show airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
Asked what she wants to be remembered for, Goldberg skipped the trophies entirely: “Just for being a decent person who maybe made mistakes but didn’t run from anything.”