Nearly four decades after a minor role in a commercially disappointing comedy left her in tears on set, Joy Behar used a live television reunion to say what she apparently held back for years. During a Friday episode of The View, the 83-year-old co-host welcomed Jon Cryer - her former costar from the 1987 film Hiding Out - and wasted little time disclosing that the production had been an unhappy experience, alleging that director Bob Giraldi treated her poorly enough to reduce her to tears. "I trashed him on TV, mercilessly," she added, with the kind of breezy candor that has defined her broadcast career.
What Hiding Out Was and Why It Disappeared
Hiding Out was a modestly premised 1987 comedy in which a young Boston stockbroker fleeing organized crime ends up enrolling, implausibly, at a suburban high school. Cryer played the lead. Behar played a supporting character named Gertrude - a small part, which makes the alleged friction with the director all the more telling. Minor roles rarely command the attention of a director who is focused elsewhere, and yet Behar's account suggests the set atmosphere was sufficiently hostile to leave an impression that lasted forty years.
The film did not succeed by any conventional measure. Critics were largely dismissive - the project holds a 38 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes - and its theatrical gross roughly matched its reported production budget, indicating that the studio recovered little to no profit after accounting for marketing and distribution. It belongs to a specific category of 1980s Hollywood output: high-concept premises built around a charismatic young lead, green-lit during an era when studios were producing at volume and accepting high failure rates as a structural reality rather than an exception.
The Dynamics of On-Set Power and Long-Held Grievances
Behar did not elaborate on the specifics of what Giraldi allegedly said or did. That restraint is itself notable. What she chose to convey - without entering into detail - was the emotional outcome: she cried, she felt mistreated, and she subsequently criticized him publicly. The sequence is a familiar one in the entertainment industry, where directors hold considerable authority over cast members, particularly those in smaller roles who have limited leverage to push back during production.
The willingness to revisit an incident from 1987 on live television in 2024 reflects something broader about how the culture around workplace conduct in entertainment has shifted. Performers who remained quiet about difficult experiences - partly out of professional pragmatism, partly because there was no infrastructure to support such disclosures - are increasingly willing to speak on the record, even informally, even casually. Behar's framing was lighthearted rather than accusatory, but the underlying point was clear: she felt wronged, she said so at the time, and she sees no reason to revise that position now.
Cryer's Response and the Value of Reunion as Television
Cryer, who went on to sustained mainstream success most prominently through his long run on Two and a Half Men, responded to Behar's disclosure with a comedian's instinct: "See, so it all worked out!" The line functions as both a deflection and a genuine observation. For Cryer, the film was an early credit in a career that eventually found solid footing. For Behar, it was a detour from stand-up into a medium that didn't reward her that time around - a fact that apparently stung enough to fuel years of public criticism of the director.
The exchange worked as television precisely because it was unscripted in feel, even within a formatted program. The View has built its audience around exactly this kind of moment - where the line between the prepared interview and the personal history of its hosts blurs, and something unexpectedly candid surfaces. Behar, who joined the show at its founding in 1997 and remains one of its most recognizable voices, has always been the co-host most likely to say the thing the format doesn't strictly require her to say.