Meghan McCain opened up about the “miserable” time she had hosting The View ahead of her shocking exit in 2021.
Speaking on a recent episode of her podcast Meghan McCain Has Entered the Chat, the former daytime host admitted that it took some time for her to get used to not being on television anymore.
“For me, being on The View and being around so many people who’ve been on TV daily, for decades, I was like, I cannot live my life on camera like this anymore, because it’s bad for me. It’s bad for me emotionally,”she said.
She went on to say that she felt like she couldn’t endure the show’s “chaotic environment” any longer.
“I just felt like I could not be the kind of mother, wife, and commentator I wanted to be in that kind of a chaotic environment,” McCain explained. “I didn’t want to be the type of person that couldn’t live without being on TV every day — and I, too, questioned, when I left, if I could live without it, and then I was just so happy that I didn’t have to wear makeup every day.”
McCain left the show in 2021 after four years of butting heads with Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, and Sara Haines. Ana Navarro and Alyssa Farah-Griffin were later added to the panel to replace her.
The conservative television personality later recalled the “very dramatic” day she decided to finally quit the show.
“It was like a bomb going off, when I was going into the studio to announce that I was leaving,” she said. “My entire body was trembling. I couldn’t get my body to stop because I was having a physical reaction. I didn’t know how people would respond. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing.”
She compared working on the show to being Anne Hathaway’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, in which she plays the executive assistant to a demanding magazine editor.
“Working on The View is a big job, people watch it, but for me, it was like in The Devil Wears Prada where it’s like, ‘a million girls want this job,'” she admitted. “What I thought I wanted was the most miserable I was in my entire life.”
McCain has openly spoken about the difficult time she had on the show. In a column published earlier this year, she declared, “There is nothing on God’s green earth that could convince me to ever walk on to that set again.”
Since leaving the ABC talk show, the former television personality launched her own podcast and founded a production company that produces podcasts and documentary content.