A former co-host of The View revealed she had dreams of moving on and spreading her wings, just as she learned she was about to be fired.
The star has since found wild success away from the now-politically charged daytime chat fest, shining on her own, and recently joked about how she found out she was getting canned.
Fired Before She Could Quit
Shepherd revealed she was planning to leave ‘The View’ when she was fired.
Sherri Shepherd made the admission on her syndicated daytime talk show while chatting with former Saturday Night Live star Ego Nwodim, who departed the sketch comedy show in September after seven seasons.
Ndwodim, 37, described how she “learned so much there,” but it was “the time to make space for something for me.”
Shepherd, 58, agreed, telling her guest, “Sometimes you have to just shift your energy. I know. I co-hosted The View for seven years.”
“I started feeling like I’ve got to leave, I want my own talk show, and I have to leave,” she continued, before cracking, “I didn’t know they had fired me before that!”
‘It Was Time’
Shepherd had always dreamed of hosting her own talk show.
Nwodim joked about the host’s comments, turning to the audience and laughing, “But, she was gonna leave! You didn’t fire me; I was going to quit! I quit before you fired me!”
Shepherd said it was a somewhat scary experience to decide to strike out on her own and leave behind such a steady paycheck.
“It was that thing that does come up, it was just time,” the Mr. Iglesias actress said. “If I don’t do it now, it will be stability, and I don’t want stability.”
Nwodim agreed when comparing it to her own experience leaving SNL, noting, “The risk is fun, huh? Right? You feel like gambling on yourself to see what you can achieve.”
Why Getting Fired Boosted Shepherd’s Career
Less than two weeks after leaving ‘The View,’ Shepherd started getting film and Broadway offers.
While Shepherd was able to joke about being fired from The View, she was a little more serious during a June episode of Sherri.
She explained, “Firing is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s like when I got fired from The View, I was sitting there and looking in the mirror in my dressing room, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Lord, what am I going to do?’ Because I’ve been doing The View for seven years. I live out here. I don’t know. I’m older. I don’t know if Hollywood is going to remember me. And you know, and I remember a soft, still voice said, ‘Do you trust me?'”
Shepherd then recalled that, immediately after leaving The View, she landed a role in Kevin Hart’s film Ride Along, followed by an offer to play the evil stepmother in a Broadway production of Cinderella starring Keke Palmer, and the jobs kept coming.
“After they let me go, I never was lacking in paying any of my bills, everything. So I tell people, don’t look at getting fired as a bad thing,” the star continued, telling viewers to see it as God closing the door on one thing and having the excitement to ask, “Okay, well then what’s next? We’re going to have a good time.”
Perfect Timing
Shepherd has hosted her own talk show since 2022.
The Trial & Error actress finally had her dream of getting her own talk show come true, thanks to falling on hard times with her physical and emotional health.
Williams, 61, was the host of her popular eponymous talk show for 13 seasons. Guest hosts were brought in to cover Williams’ absences when season 14 began amid her wellness struggles.
Shepherd proved to be a massive hit with both viewers and producers, and by February 2022, she landed her own talk show, Sherri, that took over Williams’ time slot when it debuted the following September.
