On the day her MSNBC show expands to two hours, host Nicolle Wallace is thinking back to another, less convivial TV experience.
The Deadline: Whitehouse host Wallace reminisces about her time on ABC’s daytime chatfest in a new Los Angeles Times interview, saying that though she “loved” her time at the table, her 2015 firing stung.
“Being fired from a TV show where you think you’re kind of baring your soul feels personal because it is,” she says. “It’s like being broken up with. Because I never worked in entertainment, I think what I didn’t understand is: It really was a casting, and it was a casting they didn’t like.”
Wallace joined The View in 2014 but was a co-host for only a season before she was booted from the job at the end of Season 18. At the time, the show’s higher-ups reportedly did not like how Wallace, a political commentator, wasn’t very pop culture-savvy and didn’t want to engage with some of her co-hosts about political topics.
Acknowledging that part of the problem was that her season “wasn’t contentious,” Wallace says that she tried to make peace with then co-hosts Rosie O’Donnell and Rosie Perez. (Perez’s departure from the show took place shortly before Wallace’s firing.) She adds that she had “such a special friendship” with co-host Whoopi Goldberg, whom she credits as the first person she ever heard state that Donald Trump would be elected president.
Deadline: White House now airs daily from 4 to 6 pm ET.
Do you miss Wallace as a View co-host? Hit the comments and let us know!
