• Joy Behar, 83, announced on The View’s Behind the Table companion podcast that she’s taking a brief hiatus starting next week
• She’s flying to Paris for a week, then taking the Eurostar tunnel to London — a proper European vacation
• The show made her pre-record (“bank”) weekend episodes before leaving so she’ll still appear on air while traveling
• Producer Brian Teta broke the news on the podcast; Behar jokingly said the show had made her “bank” the shows even though she won’t be there
• The hiatus is temporary — Behar has been a View co-host since 1997 and is currently in her 29th season

Joy Behar is going to Europe, and she made sure everyone knew about it.

On Tuesday’s episode of Behind the Table — The View’s companion podcast — executive producer Brian Teta let it slip that Behar would be taking some time off. “This is your last podcast for a little bit, because next week you’re not going to be here,” Teta said. “Are we talking about this?”

Behar was ready. “Well, they made me bank the weekend shows even though I’m not here,” she said. “You better tell people why I’m not here.”

The reason: she’s flying to Paris this week, staying for a week, then hopping the Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel to London. It’s the kind of itinerary that sounds like it was planned the moment the season calendar cleared.

The “banking” detail is the practical reality of live television — Behar recorded her weekend show appearances in advance so viewers at home would see her on screen while she was actually somewhere in the 8th arrondissement. It’s not the first time a View host has pre-taped around travel, but Behar’s particular insistence on telling the audience exactly what the show was doing with her recorded segments had a very Joy-being-Joy energy about it.

The hiatus is short. Behar, who turns 83 this year, has been a co-host on The View since its premiere in 1997 — which makes this her 29th season. A Paris trip barely registers as an absence by those standards.

She’ll be back. The croissants, meanwhile, are not going to eat themselves.

The post Joy Behar Is Taking a Paris-to-London Trip — and ‘The View’ Made Her Pre-Record First appeared first on Cream.

• Joy Behar, 83, announced on The View’s Behind the Table companion podcast that she’s taking a brief hiatus starting next week
• She’s flying to Paris for a week, then taking the Eurostar tunnel to London — a proper European vacation
• The show made her pre-record (“bank”) weekend episodes before leaving so she’ll still appear on air while traveling
• Producer Brian Teta broke the news on the podcast; Behar jokingly said the show had made her “bank” the shows even though she won’t be there
• The hiatus is temporary — Behar has been a View co-host since 1997 and is currently in her 29th season

Joy Behar is going to Europe, and she made sure everyone knew about it.

On Tuesday’s episode of Behind the Table — The View’s companion podcast — executive producer Brian Teta let it slip that Behar would be taking some time off. “This is your last podcast for a little bit, because next week you’re not going to be here,” Teta said. “Are we talking about this?”

Behar was ready. “Well, they made me bank the weekend shows even though I’m not here,” she said. “You better tell people why I’m not here.”

The reason: she’s flying to Paris this week, staying for a week, then hopping the Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel to London. It’s the kind of itinerary that sounds like it was planned the moment the season calendar cleared.

The “banking” detail is the practical reality of live television — Behar recorded her weekend show appearances in advance so viewers at home would see her on screen while she was actually somewhere in the 8th arrondissement. It’s not the first time a View host has pre-taped around travel, but Behar’s particular insistence on telling the audience exactly what the show was doing with her recorded segments had a very Joy-being-Joy energy about it.

The hiatus is short. Behar, who turns 83 this year, has been a co-host on The View since its premiere in 1997 — which makes this her 29th season. A Paris trip barely registers as an absence by those standards.

She’ll be back. The croissants, meanwhile, are not going to eat themselves.

The post Joy Behar Is Taking a Paris-to-London Trip — and ‘The View’ Made Her Pre-Record First appeared first on Cream.

• Billy Bob Thornton said on Howie Mandel’s podcast that he doesn’t discuss politics because “I’m not an expert on that”
• The View hosts clashed over his comments, with Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin pushing back hard
• Alyssa Farah Griffin defended Thornton and turned the table by reminding co-hosts they once criticized George Clooney for his Biden op-ed
• Thornton, who describes himself as a “radical moderate,” has made similar comments on Joe Rogan and elsewhere
• The Landman star invoked Ricky Gervais’s famous awards show takedown: “Get your little award and f*** off”

Billy Bob Thornton has never been one to lecture from a Hollywood stage, and he said so plainly on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast — and now The View is in full meltdown over it.

The Landman star, 70, told Mandel that he keeps his political opinions off the table because he simply doesn’t think he’s qualified to push them on anyone else. “I don’t know anything about politics,” Thornton said. “I have no idea. And the stuff that I believe about it, I don’t want to force it down somebody else’s throat ’cause I’m not an expert on that. What I am an expert on is having this shit” — meaning his own lived experience, his humanity. He and Mandel agreed that celebrities speaking to their personal truths is valuable; celebrities telling people who to vote for is something else entirely.

Thornton also reached for one of his favorite reference points on the subject: Ricky Gervais’s scorched-earth takedown of Hollywood self-importance. “I’m not really big on like at awards shows all of a sudden you start talking about saving the badgers and stuff,” he said. “Like Ricky Gervais said, you know, it’s like get your little award and f*** off.”

It’s not the first time he’s said it. Thornton made nearly identical remarks on The Joe Rogan Experience last November, where he admitted he doesn’t really care about awards anymore — he’s “got plenty of them” — and described modern ceremonies as occasions to “have some dry chicken breast and green beans” while people “pontificate about how awesome they are.” He’s also been consistent about his politics: he calls himself a “radical moderate” who doesn’t fit neatly into any party. His position isn’t that celebrities should be silent — it’s that they should put their money where their mouth is rather than just making speeches. “If you have a billion dollars and you want to save the badgers, f***ing save them,” he said on Rogan. “That is barely gonna cut into your budget.”

The View Table Splits Right Down the Middle

When the The View hosts took up the topic, the conversation went sideways fast. Joy Behar wasn’t having any of it. “Imagine bragging about how uninformed you are,” she said, her contempt barely disguised. Sunny Hostin backed her up with considerably more urgency: “We are at a crisis point in this country. I think democracy is participatory. I think when you have a platform, that means I have an outsized voice and when you have a platform, I think that you have a responsibility to speak up about what’s going on in this country and my view silence is complicity. We need every single ally to speak out.”

Whoopi Goldberg, notably, didn’t seem particularly bothered by what Thornton said.

Then Alyssa Farah Griffin stepped in — and things got interesting. “A, Billy Bob Thornton is one of my favorite actors. I’m never going to say a bad word about him, starting with that,” she said. “But B, a lot of this table criticized George Clooney when he wrote his Biden op-ed.” The reference landed like a grenade. Clooney’s 2024 New York Times piece urging President Biden to step aside from the race was not warmly received by everyone at that table — and Griffin wasn’t letting that go unmentioned. “That is a celebrity using his voice, saying what he believes,” she said. “It can’t just be when they agree with your position.”

Behar fired back: “He can say it and I can criticize it, that’s called free speech.”

Fair point — but Griffin kept going. She called out what she termed “slacktivism”: the habit of celebrities posting political statements, feeling righteous about it, and never doing the actual unglamorous work of civic engagement. “I don’t think we should bully people,” she said, “saying, ‘You have to speak out.'”

Sara Haines landed the quietest but maybe sharpest observation of the whole segment — that celebrities making big political declarations are mostly just firing up people who already agree with them while alienating everyone who doesn’t. Preaching to the choir, enraging the congregation.

More Than Just Politics

For what it’s worth, Thornton’s conversation with Mandel covered a lot more ground than Hollywood activism. The Oscar-winning Sling Blade writer-director-actor also opened up about his famously restrictive diet, which he said stems from having AB negative blood — the rarest blood type in the world, shared by less than one percent of the population. “It means you have less digestive enzymes,” he explained, which limits how his body processes dairy, wheat, shellfish, and certain meats. He grew up in Arkansas eating everything, he said, and just assumed feeling terrible after meals was universal. “I just assumed everybody felt like shit after they ate. I didn’t know.”

It’s a reminder that behind the Gervais quotes and the awards show takes, Thornton is genuinely one of the more self-aware people in the room — a guy who knows what he knows and, more pointedly, knows what he doesn’t. Whether that’s wisdom or a cop-out depends entirely on which side of The View table you’re sitting at.

The post Billy Bob Thornton’s Politics Rant Sparks ‘The View’ Feud appeared first on Cream.