Julie Chen Moonves Says Meredith Vieira Turned Down ‘Big Brother’ Hosting Gig
Julie Chen Moonves revealed in a new interview that she got her job hosting the CBS reality show Big Brother after Meredith Vieira turned it down. And Moonves actually declined the gig at first, too.
“After 25 seasons of Big Brother, what fans probably don’t know [is], I wasn’t the first choice to host,” Moonves told Entertainment Tonight in a video posted online on Friday, July 21. “It was offered [to] and turned down by Meredith Vieira. I was second choice. And they offered it to her because she was a very well-respected name in the business, and she turned it down.”
So executives turned to Moonves, who was the news anchor for The Early Show at the time. “I think I was low-hanging fruit for them, because I already worked for the company,” she said. “I already was anchoring the morning news at CBS, so I was in-house. And when they offered me the job, they were one month away from launching the show, and they didn’t have a host.”
Monty Brinton/CBS
Moonves also told ET her “dirty little secret”: that she turned down the hosting job, too. “And the reason I turned it down was because I had just started my big career at CBS News. I was 29 years old, I was a morning anchor, and I had visions of one day walking down the halls of 60 Minutes.”
But a CBS executive informed her that the network could assign her to the Big Brother job — and that she’d come off as insubordinate if she didn’t accept the position. “And I said, ‘When’s the next flight to L.A.?’” Moonves quipped.
The 53-year-old — who’s married to disgraced ex-CBS chairman Les Moonves — didn’t give up on her newsmagazine aspirations, though. “I was trying to envision, like, they can’t say no to me at 60 Minutes one day because I did this,” she recalled. “So I was trying to be very 60 Minutes on Big Brother. And it was the wrong lane to be in. It didn’t work. … My mistake was, I didn’t fully embrace it for what it was, which is why they ended up calling me the Chenbot. I was so stiff and robotic in front of the cameras. You know, because I was trying to be, like, hard news, like a 60 Minutes person, and it just didn’t work. But you live and you learn.”
Big Brother, Season 25 Premiere, Wednesday, August 2, 8/7c, CBS
