Sherri Shepherd Reveals Barbara Walters Advised Her To Change Her Voice During ‘The View’

Sherri Shepherd is looking back on her time at “The View”.

The actress was a cohost on the daytime talk show from 2007-2014, during the years Barbara Walters led the panel, making guest appearances in the years after.

Though she recently launched her own talk show , “Sherri”, Shepherd admitted she owes a lot of her training to her time on “The View”.

“I cried for three years,” she said of her time under “taskmaster” Walters to Bevy Smith for a SiriusXM Town Hall for “Radio Andy”. “Don’t get me wrong. It was the best experience that I’ve ever had. It was literally my training. This is why my voice is so deep, right now from being on ‘The View.'”

When Shepherd would do her introduction for the episode, her voice was quite high at the beginning of the show.

“And Barbara was like, ‘Put some bass in your voice because that, that is what makes you appear confident. Slow down.'” she recalled.

The comedian was under the impression she was on the panel to make jokes, but Walters wanted all of her cohosts to be informed.

“‘You’re here to be curious about people.’ So she was a very hard taskmaster,” she explained. “And she got on me because I know that she loved me. Literally she made me stretch and stretching, if you don’t come outta your comfort zone and stretch, you don’t grow.”

Shepherd took the advice to heart, as years later, she gave the same advice to her own team.

“Back to business, but my voice got deeper. And this is what I tell our interns that work with us. I tell people who just got outta college that work with me and they have that high voice,” said the 55-year-old. “‘In order to, for people to take you seriously, and you have to be assertive, lower that voice.'”

The “20/20” host wasn’t the only Hollywood icon to give Shepherd advice throughout her career.

She had spoken previously of how she took “15 pages of notes” after a call with Oprah for advice on her show, but it took a while for Shepherd to work up the courage to ask.

“And I think I called her one other time. I got off the phone and I said, ‘I just need career advice,'” she recalled. “And she said, ‘Specifically, what advice do you need?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Should I leave The View? Should I try to pursue standup?’ She said, ‘Be specific when you ask me a question. I will be specific and give you an answer.’ I never called her back, she scared me so bad.”

Luckily, the two have since bridged the gap and call each other to talk.

“So this time, when, when Oprah, she sent me the text and she said, ‘Hey, Oprah here, I’ve tried to call you a couple times. I guess we gotta get a date,'” said Shepherd. “So when she got in touch with me, I said, ‘Oprah, I just don’t. I don’t know if you Oprah from T-Mobile. I just don’t know. I just don’t pick up a phone.’ And from there she laughed and we, we joked and talked for a minute and then she got into the business of talk show.”

“Sherri” launched on Fox on Sept. 12.