Whoopi Goldberg has a three-word answer for anyone still wondering why she keeps showing up at “The View” after almost 20 years.
Goldberg, 70, the moderator of the ABC daytime show, told W Magazine in an interview published Oct. 27, 2026, that she returns season after season for “a good check.”
Carolyn Twersky Winkler, who wrote the piece, pressed her on whether the money 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.
She measured the paycheck against the rest of her business. “No one is going to pay me guy money to be in a movie,” she said, and, “I get what I can, have as good a time as I can, and I don’t really worry about it too much.”
The profile appears in the magazine’s print edition, with photographs by Felipe Cordeiro. Goldberg wore her own clothes and jewelry for the shoot.
Keke Palmer Could Only Imagine
Goldberg gave a similar answer in August, when podcast host Keke Palmer, 32, asked her favorite part of the job on “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer.” “The check. I love the check,” Goldberg said.
Palmer said she could only imagine the figure. Goldberg told her she couldn’t, and that the number would stun her, then clarified that “The View” is not the best-paying job she has ever had.
She pointed Palmer toward the family and the photos around her house that she sees every morning, and the thought they leave her with — that it is good to have a job.
The Grocers Who Wrote to Her Producer
Talking about money has cost her before. On the Nov. 7, 2024, broadcast, Goldberg blamed rising supermarket prices on the people who own the stores and called them “pigs.”
The National Grocers Association objected in a letter to Brian Teta, the executive producer of “The View.” The association, which represents more than 21,000 stores, said 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, Goldberg told the studio audience she understands 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.
Barbara Walters Asked Her to Speak
Goldberg credits Barbara Walters, the creator of “The View,” with recruiting her to speak her mind, an offer she still treats as an obligation. Walters died in December 2022, at 93.
Twersky Winkler asked whether weighing in on politics ever scares her. Goldberg answered flatly that it does not.
She took over the moderator’s chair in September 2007, at the start of Season 11, in a seat Rosie O’Donnell had vacated. Season 30 launched in September, her 20th, and no host has gone longer at that table without a break.
Joy Behar joined the show’s first season in 1997 and briefly stepped away, which still leaves her with more total time at the table than anyone. Goldberg’s current tablemates are Behar, Sunny Hostin, Ana Navarro, Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin.
Part of every “Hot Topics” segment goes to President Donald Trump, and Goldberg ranks among his sharpest critics there, though she has sworn off saying his name on air. The show airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
Season 30 is bringing former co-hosts back, and O’Donnell confirmed a guest appearance.
Goldberg said in September that she had considered walking away many times, and that her own longevity surprises her. Her advice to viewers furious with her is to skip the episode.
She was suspended for two weeks in 2022 over remarks about the Holocaust, which she later apologized for and clarified.
Deloris Returns Without Maggie Smith
“Sister Act 3” is officially underway, with Goldberg back as Deloris, the nightclub singer who hides from the Mob in a convent. She said she had wanted to make it while her co-star Maggie Smith was alive, and they did not get it done in time.
She filmed the Netflix movie “Women Like Us” in September with Jenifer Lewis, Vanessa Williams and Vivica A. Fox, work that kept her away from “The View” for parts of two weeks. This year she also voiced Cupcake, an old, filthy, bald cat with a dirty mouth, on the animated series “Kevin.”
Goldberg has been circling her own back catalog lately. Her one-woman Broadway show, “Whoopi Goldberg,” opened in 1984; HBO aired a recording of it in 1985, and she won a Grammy for it. A 2026 revival, “The Whoopi Monologues,” starred several actors including Kerry Washington and Kara Young.
The EGOT winner — the first Black person to collect an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — skipped the trophies entirely when Twersky Winkler asked what she wants to be remembered for. “Just for being a decent person who maybe made mistakes but didn’t run from anything,” she said.