Rosie O'Donnell: ‘I already had $100m. If you want more, you're missing the point of your life'

Irish Times

3 days ago

I'm outside the Olympia Theatre on Dame Street in Dublin with comedian, actor, philanthropist and – since she moved here in January – latter-day Dubliner
Rosie O'Donnell
. She has just finished a photo shoot and we're waiting for a taxi. The star, who turns heads on a Dublin street, is talking entertainingly about some of the Irishisms she has discovered since moving to Ireland to escape
Donald Trump
's second presidential term last January. For example, our fondness for the long drawn out farewell, saying 'bye bye, bye, bye bye' at the end of a phone call. 'People here think I'm very abrupt because I end the call when I have nothing else to say, and meanwhile they are still saying 'buh, bye, buh bye, bye',' she muses in that distinctive New York drawl.
The taxi arrives. O'Donnell congratulates the driver for having a clean car, having recently been in a 'dirty, smelly taxi'. The taxi driver asks about the race of the person who owned the dirty taxi. O'Donnell is having none of it. 'Well, that's a bit racist,' she admonishes. 'But thank you for having a clean car.'
We're heading to
Sandymount
, the place O'Donnell now calls home. She lives there with Clay, who at 12 is the youngest of her five children. Clay is nonbinary and autistic and excited to start secondary school here in September. The other four – two daughters and two sons – are grown-ups based in the US, not that their grown-up status means she doesn't worry about them. ('News flash: you never stop worrying as a mother,' she says. She's been thinking of starting a new podcast called Mommy Guilt.)
The driver seems to be taking the long way round, which suits me fine. It means more time with O'Donnell. Full disclosure: I've been a fan for decades. It began when she starred as a sassy-mouthed baller with Tom Hanks and Madonna in the baseball movie A League of Their Own in 1992. It continued when she hosted The Rosie O'Donnell Show – think Oprah but with more gags – which ran for six seasons from 1996 to 2002.
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Back then O'Donnell was known as the Queen of Nice. 'That soon came to bite me in the ass,' she says. Celebrities loved her warm, enthusiastic interviewing style. Viewers adored her joyful demeanour, comedic flair and passion for musical theatre. For many of us it was refreshing to see a woman on television who had a larger body in an era of supermodels and slogans such as, 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.'
So when I heard, last March, that O'Donnell had announced on TikTok that she had
moved to Ireland
to escape the second incarnation of President Trump, I said to my husband, 'I'm going to try to be friends with Rosie O'Donnell.' He laughed. Who's laughing now, I think to myself in the taxi sitting beside actual Rosie O'Donnell who, to jog your memory, also had starring roles in Sleepless in Seattle and The Flintstones, not to mention more recent cameos in Curb Your Enthusiasm, And Just Like That, and Hacks. On Broadway, among other gigs, she played Rizzo in Grease and Golde in Fiddler on the Roof.
She is here on a work visa while waiting for an Irish passport – she's in the process of applying for citizenship as her grandparents were Irish. At the end of this month, O'Donnell will star in the world premiere of her one-woman show
Common Knowledge
at the Olympia. In August the show travels to the Edinburgh Festival for 10 nights.
Common Knowledge is something of a catchphrase of Clay's, a smart and clued-in child who often comes out with facts O'Donnell is surprised they know. It was through Clay that O'Donnell, who describes herself as 'an OG lesbian bitch', learned how Ireland recently celebrated 10 years of equal marriage. 'How did you know that?' O'Donnell asked Clay. 'Common knowledge, Mom,' Clay replied. The show explores O'Donnell's childhood, her decision to leave the US and her new life in Ireland.
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Rosie O'Donnell on her new life in Dublin: 'I see reflections of myself in this country everywhere I look'
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The taxi arrives in Sandymount. I tell her I grew up here and point out where my house used to be. 'You could be poor in Sandymount back then, but not any more,' I say. O'Donnell says she was shocked to hear the village is an affluent place. 'It looks like a normal little town, you know?' she says. Now I'm looking at Sandymount through Rosie O'Donnell's eyes, the Mace on the corner, the Tesco. I can see how it must look quite ordinary compared with the swanky homes with swimming pools she has owned in New York, Miami and LA. Lately she has been working on material for the new show in The Comedy Cellar at The International Bar in town. 'When I tell audiences I moved to Sandymount, everyone goes 'Oooh'.' She loves the area. She's got a great relationship with the school lollipop lady and the local pharmacist. But Sandymount as a posh place? O'Donnell isn't buying it.
Rosie O'Donnell at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where her new show Common Knowledge premieres in July 2025. Photograph: Naomi Gaffey
We're lunching at Crudo, where O'Donnell is a regular. She orders a panino with fries, explaining that she will eat half and get half in a doggy bag to take home for dinner. She doesn't cook. Also, she has been on the weight-loss drug Mounjaro for three years, which has curbed her appetite and resulted in the loss of several stones. 'I'm now the weight I was when I filmed A League of Their Own,' she says. The best thing the drug has done for her is 'remove the shame [of being overweight]. Because you can feel your whole life like it's your fault. And then you get on this medicine and you go, holy crap, there's a plate of chocolate chip cookies and they are no longer calling my name. The 'food noise' is the number one thing that changes. It just disappears.'
Her weight struggles are tied in with the depression she has lived with for most of her life. She was originally prescribed the drugs for diabetes, and the weight-loss side effect came as a shock. 'I lost nine pounds the first week. I rang my doctor saying, 'I think I have cancer.'' She's enjoying being able to choose clothes in shops more easily, but the weight loss is for health reasons. The 63-year-old wants to live as long as possible to be around for Clay. 'I have to make it to my 80s,' she says.
In the new show she talks about how depressed she became when Trump got into office the first time around. She knew she couldn't handle a second term. 'I was going to have to be mentally well in order to take care of Clay going through puberty and school, so I had to leave,' she says. She tells me about the selfies she took towards the end of Trump's first term, photos that will be projected in a slide show behind her in the new show. 'I was in shock when I looked through them.' She takes out her phone, pointing to the ones she thought she looked best in. She looks awful. Her face is puffy, her eyes empty and sad.
O'Donnell, as fierce and outspoken as she can be, is open about her vulnerabilities. She was abused as a child growing up in Commack, Long Island. She has explored this in other interviews, but today, we talk more about the other big trauma of her life: the death of her mother, aged 39, from breast cancer on St Patrick's Day, 1973. The funeral was held on O'Donnell's 11th birthday. Afterwards, her father – whose parents had emigrated from Co Tyrone to the US just before he was born – made the interesting choice to bring his five motherless children under 13 back to Northern Ireland to stay with cousins at the height of the Troubles. 'He didn't mean to f**k us up but he absolutely did,' is how O'Donnell puts it in the new show. She still has a strong relationship with these cousins and has visited them regularly since moving here.
As a child she was bolshie and smart but also sensitive and empathetic. When she came to Ireland after her mother's death she remembers being appalled by the poverty here, and back home in the US she would cry watching news reports from the Vietnam War. Her father would say: 'No more news for you. Go to your room.'
'That's how we dealt with having emotions,' says O'Donnell. 'It was very Irish.' (She is 100 per cent Irish according to a genealogy test.)
Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell during an episode of The Rosie O'Donnell Show in 1998. Photograph:While the family were away in Ireland, neighbours removed every trace of her mother from the house, apart from her Barbra Streisand records (O'Donnell grew up obsessed with Streisand). Her mother's name (Roseann, the name she gave her eldest daughter) was never mentioned in their home again. In that confusing, lonely vacuum, 11-year-old O'Donnell decided her mother was not really dead. 'It was around the time of Patty Hearst, and I thought my mother was being held captive somewhere,' she says. 'I thought she would come back if I excelled. I taught myself things like juggling. I can balance a chair on one finger. I taught myself tricks.'
She was an overachiever at high school. Voted senior class president, homecoming queen, prom queen and – no surprise here – class clown. At 16 she began performing stand-up routines in local clubs. In her early 20s she was scouted for the Star Search television programme and flown to Los Angeles. She was on the show for weeks, narrowly missing out on the $100,000 prize. But by then she had made a name for herself, and the film and television offers were rolling in.
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Flight of the Trumpugees: The wealthy Americans fleeing the US for Europe
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The Rosie O'Donnell Show, beginning in 1996, was her big break. She earned tens of millions of dollars and rewrote the rule book for daytime TV, winning multiple Emmy awards. She says she didn't know how to handle her wealth. She continued to shop from the sale racks. 'And people would ask why, and I'd say 'because I have four kids'. I never got used to it.' Why did she leave her show? 'They offered me $100 million to stay for two more seasons and I said no. Because by then I already had $100 million in the bank, and if you have $100 million and you're thinking you want more, then you are missing the point of your life.'
'What are the chances,' she said once in an interview 'that a little, chubby, gay girl from Long Island, tough talking, with no mom, would grow up and be me? Every single time when people say, 'Oh, that could never happen,' I'm, like, 'never happen' happens to me a lot.'
Something occurred to me when I read that quote. Does she think that 'little, chubby, gay girl' Roseann would have become Rosie O'Donnell comedian, TV and movie star, Broadway performer and presidential pin cushion if her mother had not died so young? 'No,' she says. 'I'd be married to a man in Long Island, probably an Irish firefighter, and struggling with my sexuality but not brave enough to face it. I think I would have tried to fit in and be the daughter she wanted me to be.'
Although it was an open secret in the industry, O'Donnell officially came out as gay in 2006, using her platform to protest a law in Florida that forbade same-sex couples from adopting. O'Donnell, who is a grandmother of four, has five children, just as her mother did. She adopted three children with her first wife Kelli Carpenter, who also gave birth to the couple's biological daughter, and adopted another child with her second wife, the late Michelle Rounds.
Rosie O'Donnell at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where her new show Common Knowledge premieres in July 2025. Photograph: Naomi Gaffey
'I don't think I'd have this career if my mother hadn't died. I don't think I would have been as driven. I wanted to succeed because she died at 39 and I thought I'd be dead at 40.' It's not a coincidence that she left her talkshow at that age. 'I'd made millions of dollars, I had these kids, I wanted to go to their school plays and basketball games.' She missed her children as they got older. 'They didn't need me as much any more so, at 50, I adopted another one.'
She doesn't need to work, so why is she doing Common Knowledge? 'Because I'm an artist,' she says, sipping on her Diet Coke. 'I need to spend my time creating something positive, and if I'm not doing that I get a little lost and obsessional about the world's maladies.'
If she's not creating, she's not being herself? 'Correct.' It's not about money. 'In Edinburgh I'm making no money, pretty much. It's going to cost me money in the end.' She hopes to take the show to the West End and eventually Broadway, 'when the wrongs get righted over there'.
'The wrongs' are mostly Trump-related so inevitably, we talk about him. They've had a long-running feud that began back when she co-hosted The View with Barbara Walters and later Whoopi Goldberg. The acrimony began in the mid-2000s when Trump was presenting The Apprentice. O'Donnell
had his number
from the beginning, calling him out for his dubious finances and saying: 'Left the first wife, had an affair. Left the second wife, had an affair – but he's the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America.'
'Since then, any way he can take a shot at me he has done it.' His favourite anti-O'Donnell insults are 'wacko' and 'fat'. The latest attack came last March in the White House when Trump
disparaged her
in front of Taoiseach Micheál Martin. O'Donnell was watching it live from her home in Howth, where she was living at the time. 'I wrote the Taoiseach a letter,
apologising
, explaining the context.'
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There are people who wish she'd stop banging on about Trump. 'They say to me, 'Don't you have anything better to do?' And I'm like, 'How can this not be the focal point of your life when we have a Hitler-esque leader in our country who is robbing the country blind in broad daylight? How can you not care?' I don't understand people who say, 'Well you moved to Ireland, just forget about it.' I can't. That is my country where I was born and raised and I'm not going to forget about it ... The crimes are endless.'
wednesday ramble from me
But engaging with it must take a toll? 'I feel it's my responsibility to talk about it. But I don't watch the news.' She watches gameshows for distraction. The Chase. Tipping Point. 'I love that any time you turn on the television here, there's a gameshow to be watched,' she says.
O'Donnell has always found it difficult to cope with troubling events. She first went on antidepressants in reaction to the Columbine school shootings in 1999. 'I will never come off them.' Her compassion for others can sometimes lead to unhealthy compulsions. She writes about this in her extraordinary 2002 memoir, Find Me. She was given $3 million advance for the book. Her second memoir Celebrity Detox, published in 2007, was also a New York Times bestseller – the proceeds for both books were donated to the children's charities she set up.
She often uses art as therapy. Affected by the horrors in Gaza, she made hundreds of art pieces. 'The compulsion wasn't healthy.' She was the same during the Iraq war. She would make collages. 'I couldn't stop ... I was bombarding people with them. And then I'll go to writing and poetry and reading and I'll just consume a lot on one topic.' Her latest platform is Substack. She wrote a piece recently on there about the puzzle of Oprah attending the Bezos wedding, which made headline news in Variety.
She can't stay quiet even though it often causes her problems. 'I got into a lot of trouble with my friends in Los Angeles for my pro-Palestine stance. They were angry with me, saying, 'You're hurting Jewish people.' I told them, 'My son had a Bris [a Jewish ritual] performed by a rabbi and we buried the foreskin in the backyard, don't tell me again that I'm anti-Semitic'. I'm anti-genocide. How people can't get that, I don't know.'
Growing up, she believed fame and money would put her in a position where she could help fix all the world's ills. 'I genuinely thought that when I got rich and famous I was going to get together with all these other powerful and wealthy women and form a Justice League and we were going to save the children of the world. That was my plan.'
After 9/11 she called all the rich celebrities she knew asking would they donate a million dollars each, 'and then I thought the next day I'd have $100 million to throw some light into the darkness. These people all had millions to spare. But I was the only one who did it.' Did it change how she felt about them? 'Yeah. It was crushing disillusionment.' (Later she mentions one other celebrity who donated: Julia Roberts.)
Rosie O'Donnell and Oprah Winfrey in 1998. Photograph: Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty
She says 'fame is a drug, make no mistake'. Did she ever get addicted? 'I don't know if I got addicted, but you can't be in that universe for too long without it affecting you in ways you can't really determine while you are in it. At the height of my fame I felt like I'd gone too high and it took me a long time to settle back on planet Earth.' The more blasé Irish attitude to celebrity is another thing she enjoys about Ireland.
She has endless celebrity anecdotes – Gloria Estefan was a neighbour; more disturbingly, so was P Diddy – but makes a firm distinction between casual celebrity interactions and genuine friendship. Madonna, for example, is a proper friend, because O'Donnell can 'identify her family members without them being around. That's how I determine who my real friends are.' Others she describes as 'friends in the celebrity vernacular'.
While she's enjoyed incredible successes, not everything in the garden has been rosy, career-wise. Along with the talkshow there was an initially successful magazine called Rosie, which became mired in legal battles. Her chatshow for Oprah's OWN network, The Rosie Show, only lasted from October 2011 to March 2012, failing to attract large enough audiences but netting her tens of millions of dollars. In 2003 she attempted to fulfil a lifelong dream of being a Broadway producer, bringing Boy George's musical Taboo to New York. The reviews were not kind and it closed after 100 shows. She lost $10 million of her own money. She's not shy about discussing this or other failures. 'I did it the wrong way but don't regret it,' she says.
O'Donnell is constantly surprising people, even those who know her well. In recent years, she has developed an unlikely friendship with Lyle Menendez. Lyle and his younger brother Erik have been in jail for 35 years for the murder of their parents in 1989. 'I believed them then and I believe them now,' O'Donnell says of the brothers who claim the murders in California were self-defence following years of sexual abuse. In May
a judge in Los Angeles reduced their sentences, making them eligible for parole
. O'Donnell's recent documentary Unleashing Hope, about the power of service dogs for autistic children, came from her connection with Menendez. When the O'Donnells moved to Dublin, Clay's cherished service dog, a black Labrador called Kuma, travelled with them.
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When I ask whether she thinks she involves herself in other people's pain as a way to avoid her own, she disagrees. 'That's not true, I've been in my pain for a very long time. It's gets dark in there.' What would she like her legacy to be? 'I'd like people to see I did a lot more for people than maybe they knew. But my legacy is going to be what it is. I am an incendiary soul in the United States, and I speak up about things in a way that women are not supposed to.'
A week after our lunch, I go to see one of O'Donnell's shows in the International Bar as she fine-tunes her material for Common Knowledge. She's half an hour late, having flown in from London where she saw the new production of Evita. 'I cried five times.' She sends a voice note from the taxi on her way to the show which is played down the microphone, to the delight of the tiny audience in the packed Cellar Bar.
The show, even as an evolving piece on a small stage, is brilliant. There are plenty of laughs and Clay, with their 'common knowledge' refrain, emerges as a knowing hero of the piece. It gets dark too, with themes of loss and unprocessed trauma. 'I know what you're thinking,' O'Donnell says at one point. 'You thought this was a f**king comedy show.' She does more than an hour on stage and brings the house down.
Life has been a wild ride for O'Donnell but you get the sense, listening to her talk so enthusiastically about her new life in Ireland, that she has found a soft landing place for her curious, sensitive, compassionate and sometimes troubled soul. She's safe. She's home.
The world premiere of Rosie O'Donnell's Common Knowledge is at The Olympia Theatre on July 27th.
Photographs: Naomi Gaffey. Styling: Corina Gaffey. Rosie O'Donnell wears a teal blazer by Max & Co at Arnotts; gold jacket by Zadig & Voltaire at Costume; and navy shirt also by Zadig & Voltaire. Black top and trousers are Rosie's own.