Rosie O'Donnell gets real as she returns to NYC with 'Common Knowledge'

After moving to Ireland in 2025, the actress, TV personality, and comedian was finally able to write her solo show about motherhood 10 years in the making.

Rosie O'Donnell has always gone big. That's proven true in everything from her full-throated support for Broadway and charitable causes on her five-time Emmy-winning The Rosie O'Donnell Show to her more acid-tongued feud with Donald Trump during her time as host on The View and beyond. And while O'Donnell's larger-than-life public perception hasn't changed, the 64-year-old comedian, TV personality, and actress is now finding joy in the small.

In 2025, following Trump's second election to the presidency, O'Donnell made a buzzy move from the U.S. to Dublin, Ireland with her youngest child, Clay. In our interview, she painted her ancestral homeland as a tight-knit place where a talk show host tracked down her friend through calls to someone with the same common last name, and where a cut-off taxi driver put aside road rage and kindly said he'd see the offender at the pub. "You never know, Rosie, it could be your cousin," O'Donnell recalled the driver telling her in her disbelief.

O'Donnell, meanwhile, repeatedly saw her late parents in the faces of Irish strangers. All those experiences informed O'Donnell's latest solo show, Common Knowledge, coming stateside from July 22 to August 8 after runs in Dublin and Edinburgh. "I wanted to tell the truth and the facts to the best of my knowledge, and do it with humor and with pathos," she said. "It's more of a play than a stand-up set."

She deliberately noted this since attendees have assumed, given O'Donnell's comic background, that Common Knowledge is a comedy show. And it is, but it's also a raw reflection on the premature death of O'Donnell's mom and the highs and lows of navigating motherhood herself — now in a new country, no less.

"[My children's] parents got divorced; that's traumatic for any child. They're adopted; that's a primal wound that is hard to heal," O'Donnell reflected. "Their mother's famous, their mother's gay, their mother's a loudmouth. There are things that are challenging in their lives, but as far as anything I could help smooth, I try to, and I'm not so sure that was the best way."

That's no minor thing to unpack. In NYC, O'Donnell is doing so at the Daryl Roth Theatre, a 300-seat Off-Broadway space. She would like to grow the show's audience; her dreams for Common Knowledge's future, she said, involve a longer summer run at a theatre like the Booth, one of Broadway's smallest but still with a 750-plus capacity.

So perhaps it's not that O'Donnell is trading the big for the small, but figuring out how to hold both at once. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

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You originated Common Knowledge in Ireland after moving there. How did that environment influence the show?

I only knew two people there, so I had a lot of time. I had two cousins up in Northern Ireland, and I was there with my 13-year-old, and it was a little bit quiet and a little bit lonely.

I started seeing people right away that looked just like me, that looked like my family. [...] I'd see a 90-year-old woman, and I'd go, "That's what [my mom] would have looked like had she lived." I would see an Irish guy in the pub with his little cap and his cardigan, and I would be like, "That is my dad's spitting image." I was faced with my family in a way I had never been before, and I just started writing it.

Ten years ago, I tried to write this show about my mom and mothering without having a mother. [...] I couldn't perform it without crying, so it never really got off the ground because I was not ready. Somehow, being there and being alone with my thoughts and time to really think it through, I was able to put this show together.

Was bringing it to New York always the plan?

I assumed I was going to only do it in Ireland and Scotland and in Europe. As we got more and more performances in, and the reviews were so good, some people said, "Well, why don't you try to take it to Broadway?" And I was like, "I don't know if it would work on Broadway."

So I called [producer] Daryl Roth. I said, "Could we use your theatre for, like, 12, 15 shows, just to try to test it out and see?" [...] And she said sure, and then if she thinks it's ready, we would do it in New York next summer, but we'll see what happens.

Are there any audience responses from the show's previous runs that have stuck with you?

I will tell you that when I see people in the audience crying, because people have cried in every show, it makes me get upset. I'm not good at myself crying or other people crying.

People are surprised because it's sad in a lot of parts, right? I tried to tell my origin story to a country of people that were not very familiar with me, so I started at the beginning — which is, I lost my mom when I was 10 — and how that affected the rest of my life.

How did it?

The focal point of my adult life has been parenting five kids and a couple of foster kids. [...] I've had a lot of time to think back on why I acted the way I did in terms of raising them. I'm not a very strict mom. I should have been a little bit stricter, but I wanted to smooth the roads for them so they didn't have the bumpy childhood that I did. But what you don't realize when you're doing that to your children is it never teaches them how to recover.

Your 13-year-old, Clay, is central to Common Knowledge. Have they seen it?

No, they have no interest. But when they hear me rehearsing the lines [...] they'd go, "That's not true. I never said that. That is an exaggeration, Mom. You are exaggerating to your friends."

Also, they did say, "I don't like that you talk about me in the show," and I said, "Well, your siblings didn't like it either, honey, but that's how Mommy makes her money. Mommy talks about her life, and you are the focal point of my life right now. I have one child at home, and it's you." And they were like, "Well, I can't say I enjoy it."

Precocious kid.

Without a doubt, and very, very articulate in a way that calls me on my crap. I called myself a bitch at some point — I said, "Oh yeah, I'm an O.G. lesbian bitch" — and [they] said right away, "'Bitch' is pejorative, especially for a feminist." [They were], like, 11. What 11-year-old says that?

It's a comedy show, but you talk about themes with real personal and political relevance. Did you feel like you had to be careful about finding the humor in it all without being too flippant?

I don't know [if] flippant was my concern. My concern was over-sentimental, overly emotional. Like, it starts out where I talk about the day my mother died, and after about five minutes of telling that story, I say, "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'Did I buy a ticket to the wrong fucking show? Isn't this the Rosie O'Donnell comedy show? It's not Angela's Ashes: The Musical.'"

I have to remind the audience, "Don't worry, humor is coming. I just had to set the groundwork for my Irish tragic beginning."

If this is somebody's first time seeing you live, what do you want them to know? How do you hope they engage with your show?

I leave it up to them. When you're a famous person, people assign you a role in the story of their life that you play, right? To some people I'm a hero, and to some people I'm a horror story. To some people I'm a patriot, and to others I'm a loudmouth crook.

You have to just keep putting out truthful work and hope people respond in a human way, and that's what I did. I don't really think about who's going to like it while I'm doing it, or how it's going to be perceived. You can't, because that's the death of art.

Do you feel the move and the show have changed you in any way?

I'm amazed at the sense of community and the smallness and the comfort you find in the quaintness of life there. It makes America feel like the land of gross excess. My assistant from Ireland is here with me, [and] we went into one of these big Targets, and he's like, "I can't believe how big the store is. They've got everything." I didn't even take him to a Costco yet! His head's going to explode!

Everything is so much bigger in the United States, and bigger is not always better. [...] There's a commercial in Ireland about rugby or soccer, and there's a guy in his uniform with the ball, and then they say, "When you play Ireland, you play all of Ireland," and everyone walks down from the stadium and holds hands with each other. I start to cry when I watch this.

I'm not saying it's a country without issues, but politically, I really stand behind the fact that they were persecuted for so long, for hundreds and hundreds of years, and that they root for the underdog, and they fight for fairness. Those are things that really matter to me.

You've always been a champion of Broadway. Are you seeing other shows while you're in the city?

When I first got here, of course, I ran to see the Jellicle Ball, which I really loved, and then I saw Schmigadoon!, which was fantastic.

I'm going to see Meg Stalter in Oh, Mary!, which I have seen three times with Cole Escola. I've never seen it with anyone else [...] but I'm a huge fan of hers. She's wonderful and very unique. That's a role I saw and thought, "My god, I could never do that." Not that they asked me, but I'm just saying. Knowing my limitations has helped me in my career tremendously.

I'm going to see The Lost Boys when I get home. I saw Death Becomes Her because I was gone for that. That was amazing. I'm seeing [...] Operation Mincemeat. I saw Death of a Salesman. That was brilliant. All four of the leads were astonishing.

I'll see everything I can as often as I can because it's my favorite thing to do.

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This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Photo credit: Rosie O'Donnell in Common Knowledge. (Photos by Steve Ullathorne and Lee Byrne)