Comedian Rosie O’Donnell has revealed which Hollywood A-list star was her worst TV talk-show guest.
The Rosie O’Donnell Show ran for almost 1,200 episodes between 1996 and 2002. During an interview on the Australian talk show Sam Pang Tonight this week, O’Donnell revealed that one guest in 1997 was her least favorite—Keanu Reeves.
“I love the guy, but he’s not good on talk shows,“ O’Donnell said of the star of The Matrix and the John Wick series.
“He’s so sweet. He looks gorgeous. I love all his movies, but he would not answer a question. I’d say, ‘So, Keanu, how’s it going? How you feeling?’ [He’d say] ‘Good,’” she recalled.
“We were live, we couldn’t re-tape. I finally said after like three minutes, ‘You know Keanu, it is a talk show, you have to talk.’ But he did come back and he got the hang of it but he’s a lovely man and a good-hearted guy so I don’t want to throw him under the bus.”
The Hollywood star was on O’Donnell’s show to plug his 1997 movie The Devil’s Advocate. At one point the host prodded him, saying, “Sorry you know, but it’s a talk show, we gotta ask questions.”
He admitted on air at the time he was “not comfortable” with TV appearances.
O’Donnell picked Martin Short and Barbra Streisand as her favorite guests from her long-running talk show.
O’Donnell, who is in Australia with her one-woman show Common Knowledge, also spoke about her relationship with Donald Trump, which has descended into mutual loathing.
In 1993, O’Donnell attended Trump’s wedding to his second wife, Marla Maples, at New York’s Plaza Hotel. O’Donnell went as the plus one of Jason Opshal, who had performed on stage with O’Donnell in Grease! and also with Maples in The Will Rogers Follies on Broadway in 1992.
Speaking on the Australian talk show, O’Donnell said, “As [Trump] was walking down the aisle he shook hands with every famous person that he saw. Not me, because I didn’t know the guy at all, but he shook hands with everyone who was there, including Jeffrey Epstein. Good guy. Good guy.”
Trump and O’Donnell have traded barbs since 2006, when O’Donnell was a co-host on The View.
Trump, who owned Miss USA, said a pageant winner involved in a substance use scandal should be able to retain her title. O’Donnell made a joke about Trump being “the moral authority,” before listing off his history of cheating and divorce, and declaring, “Sit and spin, my friend!”
She moved to Ireland in January 2025, citing concerns over Trump enacting the far-right Project 2025 agenda and how it would impact her non-binary 12-year-old.
Trump posted on Truth Social in July, “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
“She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
On her Instagram account, O’Donnell has often referenced Epstein to bait Trump. She posted in September, in response to another Trump threat to revoke her American citizenship, “banishing me again? logan roy would be proud. im the distraction – EPSTEIN SURVIVORS are the reckoning and your gold lamé throne is melting.”
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