Rosie O'Donnell to Guest-Host 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' the Week of Aug. 17
Rosie O'Donnell will guest-host 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' the week of Aug. 17, 2026, stepping in while Jimmy Kimmel takes his summer break — a standard late-night rotation where regular hosts hand the desk to a guest for a week or more (Variety).
The choice is unusual. O'Donnell and Kimmel had never spoken in person and had what she described as an adversarial relationship. She told Variety the offer "came out of the blue."
Kimmel framed the booking as a joke aimed at President Donald Trump, calling O'Donnell's stint "a special treat" for a president who has maintained a 20-year vendetta against her — originating when she mocked his bankruptcies on 'The View' (Variety). Kimmel has previously compared Trump's grudge against O'Donnell to his own long-running fake feud with Matt Damon (Rolling Stone).
The two hosts' thaw reportedly began when O'Donnell reached out to Kimmel after the death of his uncle Frank Potenza, a former NYPD officer who appeared in comedy sketches on the show. When the hosting offer arrived, O'Donnell accepted — but only after confirming it genuinely came from Kimmel himself (Variety).
O'Donnell said she took the gig partly to support the late-night community amid what she called Trump's "war on TV comedy," which she said cost Stephen Colbert his 'Late Show' and nearly claimed Kimmel's programme. She also dismissed the FCC — the US broadcast regulator — as a threat ahead of her stint (Fox News; Variety).
She did not stop at comedy. O'Donnell described David Ellison's pending takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — the parent company of CNN — as "tragic," comparing it to Fox taking over all news channels. She also pointed to Ellison and Bari Weiss' right-wing makeover of CBS News and its flagship programme '60 Minutes' as evidence of the Ellisons' growing influence on Hollywood (Variety).
Trump himself has joked publicly about the Ellison reach. At the White House Correspondents Dinner in July 2026, the president quipped that David Ellison will rename the event the "Trump White House Correspondents Dinner" next year (Variety).
Not everyone saw Kimmel's booking as purely a creative decision. Megyn Kelly claimed in June that Kimmel chose O'Donnell to avoid being outshined — implying he picked a guest host he expected would generate headlines without overshadowing him (Yahoo Entertainment). That claim rests on Kelly's commentary and has not been corroborated by ABC or Kimmel's team.
For viewers, the week of Aug. 17 brings a host who has been off late-night television for years, sitting behind a desk she has never occupied, on a show whose lead presenter picked her at least partly to needle a sitting president. The booking draws together a comedy feud, a media takeover, and a summer fill-in slot — three threads that rarely intersect in the same week of television.
