The hosts of The View gave a full-throated defense of Adam Driver on Wednesday, supporting his reported walking out of an NPR interview earlier this month after expressing displeasure at the idea of listening to a clip of him singing in the Netflix movie Marriage Story.
The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday that Driver left during a break in an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross while NPR played an audio clip of the film. As such, the incomplete chat will never air.
According to sources, the NPR crew offered Driver the opportunity to remove his headphones during such audio breaks, but during one such break, he walked out and never returned.
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View co-host Joy Behar kicked off the segment by jokingly referencing the time she and fellow co-host Whoopi Goldberg walked out on former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly during an interview on their set.
“So wrong to walk out, don’t you think, Whoopi?” Behar sarcastically quipped.
Co-host Abby Huntsman, meanwhile, empathized with Driver, saying that “we’re our own worst critics” regardless of how famous you become.
“I feel for him, I don’t know exactly what happened but my sense is he wasn’t trying to be rude,” she added. “Maybe he has a hard time watching himself.”
(As The Daily Beast noted in reporting the incident, Driver has described in previous interviews—including one in 2015 with Fresh Air—his displeasure with listening to or watching footage of his acting. And as noted above, the NPR show, per sources, encouraged Driver to remove his headphones when audio clips would play back.)
After Sunny Hostin discussed her own past issues with watching herself on television, noting how much she “hates it,” it was Meghan McCain’s turn to give her take—which, of course, meant invoking her family.
“He’s a former Marine, and that's where his background is,” she said of her brother, who apparently adores the Rise of Skywalker star actor. “Semper fi, I love him, and when you come from a Marine background, and you served and you’re arguably one of the biggest actors in the world at this point, probably seeing yourself for him is—my brother worships him because my brother was a Marine as well.”
The former Fox News personality then appeared to suggest that she is a superior interlocutor compared to NPR’s Terry Gross, who oversaw the scuttled Driver chat.
“I will say we interview celebrities almost every day here, and I’m always very specific with what they are and aren’t comfortable talking about,” McCain declared. “If they don’t want to talk about their personal life, I’m not going to push anything because I have too many times done too many interviews where I say, ‘I don’t want to talk about this, it makes me uncomfortable,’ and it’s the first question and people are absolutely nasty about it. I think it’s sad the breakdown between media and basically all public figures at this point.”
Goldberg, an Academy Award-winning actress, went on to describe what it’s like for an actor to view a scene of themselves, stating that while others may dissect how “deep” the acting is, the actor might be thinking how they had “the biggest headache that day.”
“I knew a TV person who would drag everybody in to watch him and say, ‘Look what I did here,’” Behar recalled, prompting Huntsman to quip: “What a weirdo... was it Trump, Joy?”
“No, no,” Behar laughed, adding: “I’m sure he does! He loves to watch himself.”
