The View‘s Joy Behar slams Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck: ‘Never thought that movie represented Italians that well’

Though she didn’t flip the Hot Topics table in frustration, The View cohost Joy Behar still shook the table after revealing her thoughts on the 1987 classic Moonstruck starring Cher and Nicolas Cage.

During a wider discussion about Cage’s recent admission that he previously dated actress Sarah Jessica Parker but didn’t hear from her after he met her mom, Behar posed the theory that perhaps Parker took issue with Cage’s work in the romantic comedy that follows Cher as an Italian-American woman who falls for the younger brother (Cage) of a man she already agreed to marry.

“What didn’t they like about him? Besides his performance in Moonstruck?” Behar quipped at the table, before moderator Whoopi Goldberg cut in to tell her, “I thought his performance in Moonstruck was great.”

Behar replied, “I’m not saying it wasn’t, but that could’ve been something that irritated them.”

The cohosts nervously laughed before Alyssa Farah Griffin asked, “Now we’re just dragging Nicolas Cage?”

The comedian then clarified her stance on the movie, which went on to gross $122 million at the box office and win three Oscars — including one for Cher in the Best Actress category.

“Well, I’m Italian,” Behar reminded her colleagues. “I never thought that movie represented Italians that well.”

Goldberg then turned to her fellow panelist and asked, “When was the last time you saw a movie that represented anybody the way they were supposed to be represented?”

Without missing a beat, Behar smiled as she joked, “The Godfather II. That was the one. I just watched it the other day!”

Behar has long spoken about her Italian heritage via her public platforms, even once admitting that she was given her real name, Josephine, after her parents were inspired by her “wacky” Italian grandmother who once threatened to murder her own children.

Following an iconic April 2023 visit to her homeland, Behar returned to the Hot Topics table to tell her cohosts that she had called an Italian woman a “bitch” on a passenger train after the lady wouldn’t let her use a first-class restroom.

“I said it in English because she wouldn’t let me pee in the first-class lounge. I said, ‘Please, let me just go!’” Behar recalled at the time. “I said, ‘Listen, don’t be a bitch.’ She wouldn’t let me go.”