Not a rosy memory.
Rosie O’Donnell wasn’t a fan of having Keanu Reeves on her “Rosie O’Donnell Show” back in the late ’90s.
“One of the worst, who, I love the guy, but he’s not good on talk shows: Keanu Reeves,” O’Donnell revealed while on the Australian talk show “Sam Pang Tonight” on Monday.
“He’s so sweet, he looks gorgeous, I love all his movies, but he would not answer a question,” she continued. “I’d say, ‘So, Keanu, how’s it going? How are you feeling?’ [He’d respond] ‘Good.’ We were live. We couldn’t retape. I finally said after three minutes, ‘You know, Keanu, it is a talk show. You have to talk.’”
That wasn’t the last O’Donnell saw of Reeves, 61, on her set either.
“But he did come back, and he got the hang of it,” she added, before stressing that the actor is “a lovely man and a good-hearted guy, so I don’t wanna throw him under the bus.”
The Post has reached out to Reeves for comment.
Barbra Streisand, meanwhile, was “probably” O’Donnell’s “favorite” guest.
And another memorable one was none other than Martin Short.
“Because you come out and say, ‘How you doing, Marty?’ and it’s over for you,” O’Donnell recalled. “He stands up and he goes, ‘I’m here!’ He was the funniest and the nicest guy, so I would say Marty Short was definitely one of the best.”
O’Donnell also looked back on her heated 1999 interview with actor Tom Selleck, where the pair went head to head over gun laws following the Columbine massacre.
“It was very awkward. I had never been unkind or controversial, but Columbine had just happened,” O’Donnell shared. “It was 1999. He had an ad in the magazines that said, ‘I am the NRA. Shooting teaches children good values.’ And I was so torn up about Columbine that I just didn’t give up. And then, like an innocent idiot, I walked off-stage and said to my staff, ‘Do you think that’ll get any press?’”
O’Donnell then came to blows with her “View” co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, to which Selleck, 80, toldAccess Hollywood at the time, “I still like Rosie. I think she needs to take a deep breath and stop thinking everybody who disagrees with her is evil.”
The former talk show host reflected on their exchange while talking to People in 2021.
“I think it’s just the first time that I ever challenged a celebrity,” O’Donnell told the outlet. “Every other one I was nice to. If they said, ‘Please, let’s not talk about my divorce or my recent drug addiction, drug rehab,’ I would do what they asked.”
“I was not a ‘get you’ kind of interview, I had no desire to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” she elaborated. “Like Johnny Carson taught us, if there was egg on anyone’s face, it’s supposed to be on the host, not the guest. So I think no one was expecting that I would challenge someone in the way that I did.”
Earlier this month, O’Donnell got candid on another daytime fight, this one with Hasselbeck, 48, in 2007.
The pair got into a heated argument over American military activity in the Middle East while live on air. The stand-up comic leans left while Hasselbeck is right leaning.
The segment got so out of hand that the show turned off its live shot and created a split-screen of the co-stars. This type of shot was unprecedented in 2007 and became one of the show’s most talked about moments.
O’Donnell now alleges that the argument was set up by the show’s producer.
“I can not believe that this woman, after all I did for her, because when I took that job, I made one commitment to myself, that I was not going to be her enemy, that I was going to meet her as a person,” she said while on the “Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel” podcast.
When asked if she knew that the split-screen was taking place, O’Donnell replied: “Of course not.”
But she did claim that the program’s late producer, Bill Geddie, knew that the fight was going to take place.
Geddie, who died in 2023 at age 68, worked on the “View” from its first season 1997 until 2014.
“Our producer is not an on-the-fly kind of guy, he wasn’t mister like, ‘Let’s go to the split-screen.’ That was prepared. So, the whole thing, I think, was a setup,” O’Donnell alleged.
Hasselbeck, meanwhile, refuted her claims, tearfully saying in an Oct. 9 Instagram Story to “stop the madness” and to “stop the lying.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
