The View’s Joy Behar is going viral for a lingering kiss with married guest Anson Mount — and their respective spouses are weighing in.
Behar, 83, planted a kiss on the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds actor, 53, when he came out for his interview on the Wednesday, July 22, episode, much to the surprise of her cohosts, including Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin.
“I’m old but I’m not dead!” Behar declared after the intimate greeting, while Mount discreetly tried to remove the comedian’s lipstick from his mouth.
Behar noted that the last time Mount was on the ABC daytime talk show, “he brought me flowers for my birthday, and it’s never been the same between us.”
“Well, I got married,” responded Mount, who wed Darah Trang, with whom he shares two children, in 2018.
Behar then quipped, “I know. That’s what I mean.”
Following Wednesday’s episode, Behar took viewers behind the scenes of her impromptu moment on the latest episode of the “Behind the Table” podcast hosted by The View executive producer Brian Teta.
“All morning I’d been hearing about Anson Mount, and I’d been making jokes about his name backstage,” Behar explained. “And then when he came out, I just felt like kissing him. I said, ‘Lips,’ and then those lips hit mine.”
Behar shared her husband Steve Janowitz’s reaction to the kiss, revealing, “Steve wrote, ‘Cut that out!’ In the middle of the show I got a text.”
Mount also addressed his steamy moment with Behar in an interview with TV Insider on Wednesday.
“I asked my wife to promise me that she wouldn’t divorce me,” he joked.
“She thought it was hilarious,” Mount added.
Mount continued, “I hadn’t been on The View in like 13 years; that was the last time I saw Joy Behar. I brought her flowers for her birthday, and I guess I made an impression. We’ll see what she does the next time!”
Mount is far from Behar’s first kiss with guests and cohosts on The View. On Wednesday’s “Behind the Table” podcast, Behar shared memories of previous kisses with the likes of Meredith Vieira and X-Files star Gillian Anderson.
“I was very attached to her,” she said of Vieira. “And then Whoopi. Gillian Anderson was my lesbian fantasy at that time, but before that was Catherine Deneuve. The last [kiss] was Jane Fonda — another lesbian fantasy.”
“I’m done with that phase of my life,” Behar went on to quip, adding that she has “no problem kissing women on the lips,” citing growing up in an Italian neighborhood where greeting someone with a kiss was commonplace.
