Last week, Rosie O’Donnell left her New Jersey weekend home for the first time in two months and she was terrified.
O’Donnell, 58, had to travel into Manhattan to have an annual heart test after suffering a heart attack in 2012.
“I was saying to my doctor are you sure we need this?” she recently told Page Six. “She said this pandemic is going to go for a long time so if we wait till this is over we’re going to be talking about a year, ‘I don’t want (you) to wait a year.This is the side of the hospital that doesn’t have any Covid and they’re only taking one client at a time and I got you in.’”
And like many in quarantine, “The View” alum has been bingeing on junk food, specifically Pop Tarts.
“We had a lot of junk in the beginning when it was first happening and I was panicking,” she explained. “I told the person who works here get us some Pop Tarts so he got us about 40 boxes … and it started to get really sad when I realized there were only about half the boxes left and I’m the only one in the house who eats them.”
The “Sleepless in Seattle” actress normally lives in New York City but doesn’t think she’ll be returning anytime soon.
“Without theater, without restaurants, that’s what your life in NYC is about,” she said. “Museums and culture and art shows and for me, theater, theater, theater. I do theater twice a week.”
O’Donnell currently appears in the HBO’s “I Know This Much is True” with Mark Ruffalo. In the limited series, Ruffalo struggles to take care of his paranoid schizophrenic twin brother. The project is deeply personal for O’Donnell, who suffers from mental illness.
“I struggle with my own mental illness, major depressive disorder and PTSD, also I have anxiety issues,” she said, “and I was very happy to see a role for a paranoid schizophrenic who wasn’t a murderer.
“Every time you see someone like that on TV, oh they’re going to make him the murderer. Paranoid schizophrenics are much more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else. Compassion is needed and I think this film gives you compassion.”