Whoopi Goldberg moves like Cersei Lannister behind the scenes of The View
Whoopi Goldberg hinted at her Machiavellian schemes behind the scenes of The View when discussing gossip
It makes so much sense that Whoopi Goldberg rules over The View like she’s Cersei Lannister. The EGOT winner may not participate in her co-hosts’ group chats, but she’s still got everybody’s number, if you catch our drift. On Thursday’s episode of the talk show, Goldberg teased the Machiavellian tactics she’s used to keep the whole View crew in line.
The prompt came from co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant to the President under Donald Trump. “You know what I like to do? I like to try to catch a gossip,” she said. “Because what you can do is you can plant false information and see if it makes its way around.” (You have to wonder how well this went for Griffin; the White House might as well have been a sieve for how much was being leaked in that administration.) “We have done that, we have done that,” Goldberg revealed, confirmed after some hesitation by her longtime co-host Joy Behar. “We did that to see who was talking. Yeah.”
We must agree with co-host Sunny Hostin, who proclaimed “that’s a little bit of gossip I would like to know about.” But besides acknowledging that she’d been the victim of gossip in the past—“I’ve been burned many times. Really burned”—Goldberg did not reveal any details about the covert mission to uncover the rat. The View has a long history of behind-the-scenes drama, most recently during the Meghan McCain era. But there have been plenty of other co-host tensions that made their way into the press.
Much of those tensions are detailed in Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View by Ramin Setoodeh. And while leaking targeted gossip is a time-honored tactic, it’s not the only way Goldberg resembles a Lannister, at least according to former co-host Jenny McCarthy. “To me, Whoopi had an addiction to controlling people’s thoughts, their words, the room, the table, your feeling, your mood,” she says in Ladies Who Punch (via People). “She had an addiction to controlling all of it and everybody.”