Not sorry for her lot
Kelly Ripa has gone from camping up Gilbert and Sullivan to hosting a popular daytime show, which visits Banff next week
Kelly Ripa isn’t going anywhere.
That’s an unusual state of affairs for the popular 41-year-old host of Live! With Kelly, seen weekdays at 9 a.m. on CTV.
Not only does her energetic interviewing style make her seem like a helicopter always about to take off for somewhere exciting, she’s getting ready to present her show next week from Banff, Alta.
Right now, however, she’s stuck in traffic and our interview is conducted on a cellphone to the background soundtrack of Manhattan car horns squawking their anger over the latest gridlock.
“If I let everything that goes wrong in the world bother me, I’d go crazy,” she laughs in that distinctive voice that has retained just a trace of her New Jersey accent. “If you’ve got 10 things on the go one day and five of them fall through, you’re still batting .500, which is pretty great in anybody’s book.” Ripa’s visit to Banff will mark the third time she’s broadcast the program from Canada, the first two with her longtime co-host Regis Philbin, who retired last November. The duo went to Niagara Falls in 2006 and Prince Edward Island in 2010, both visits yielding visible results in tourism. Banff is hoping for the same, which is the reason Travel Alberta forked out $1.5 million to make this happen. “I’m so excited about going there, because I always wanted to be an outdoorsy mountain girl, but I grew up along the Jersey Shore and never saw a mountain except on postcards,” she says. She was born in Stratford, N.J., on Oct. 2, 1970 to a homemaker mom and a bus driver dad who went on to be a labour union president. “There was always a lot of love and laughter in the house, and tons of fun. My mom and dad are the reason I am who I am today. What you see on the show is just the way I used to act at home. Add my husband and you’ve got a support system that every woman should have.” Ripa admits she’s almost invariably nice on camera and that’s certainly how she comes across in an interview but credits that to the fact that “I mostly talk to nice people and I give back what I get. That’s easy. But treat me with disrespect and you’ll learn real fast that I’m from Jersey.” Ask Clay Aiken. Back in 2006, the singer-songwriter actually covered Ripa’s mouth with his hand to block a question and the whole world soon knew how unhappy she was about it. “I’m no pushover,” she says unapologetically. She was also no actress or so she thought until Grade 6, when her school’s theatre director, Jim Beckley, got an idea that would shape the direction of Ripa’s life. “I was not a good singer and our school only did musicals then, so I wasn’t even going to try out until Jim asked me to. He thought I was a natural performer and so he gave me a lead in the next show.” That sounds great until you realize the show was the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore and Ripa had been cast as the soprano love interest, Josephine, with many demanding solos. Ripa’s solution was “to turn songs like ‘Sorry Her Lot’ into a full-blown sitcom, with me sobbing and blowing my nose.” Gilbert and Sullivan may have done a 360-degree revolution in their graves, but the New Jersey audience loved it. “And I learned something very important. When you get an audience laughing, you get them on your side. And if you can laugh at yourself, they’re bound to like you even more.” It’s a lesson Ripa learned well. It also explains that while some of her seemingly ingenuous on-air comments and outbursts of “too much information” about her personal life may be spontaneous, that doesn’t mean they’re not part of a long-term strategy.
“When you get an audience laughing, you get them on your side. And if you can laugh at yourself, they’re bound to like you even more.”
Ripa didn’t have to wait too long after school before landing her first big break, playing the character of Hayley Vaughan on the long-running soap opera All My Children from 1990-2001. “When you’re playing a character, you only see things from your point of view,” recalls Ripa. “When I got the role, I thought I would be a glamorous soap star with long nails and cascading hair and wonderful clothes, but I wore the same outfit for a year because I was a runaway. It didn’t matter. Audiences loved her because she was an underdog.”
Although she loved doing the show, it’s surprising to hear her declare that “I try never to look back because it’s so painful to look at myself.” I ask if there was some emotional trauma connected with that period and she bursts into laughter.
“No! I’m talking about looking at my bad acting! I just cringe when I see those early shows. Thank God they were all so generous and let me learn on the job, because I learned a lot.”
She also met her husband, Mark Consuelos, who was her co-star on the program. They married in 1996, have been happily together ever since and have three children.
The problems of being a popular soap star helped prepare Ripa for the attention she had to face as the host of a hit show.
“People would come up to me all the time and talk to me like I was Hayley. They’d even call me Hayley. I don’t think they knew my real name.
“I played a recovering alcoholic and so when I’d be out at dinner with my husband, they’d see me drinking a glass of wine and turn on him for enabling me. “It could get pretty hairy!” Her next big role took her in totally the opposite direction and she loved it. Starting in 2003, she spent three seasons on the sitcom Hope & Faith, playing Faith Fairfield, a former soap star who moves in with her sister Hope (Faith Ford), wrecking havoc on her family life.
“I absolutely loved playing that role. I could bring everything I knew about the world of soap opera to it, but the character was so juicy! We’ve all met people who are that self-involved. It doesn’t really matter what you’re saying. They’re only waiting for you to stop talking to tell you what they think.
“There’s something very compelling about that level of narcissism and it was so liberating to never have to be nice.”
But the big job of her career had been running in tandem with these other gigs for several years.
In 2000, she went on what was originally called Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee as a guest host and soon became the obvious choice to share the sofa with Philbin, which she did from Feb. 5, 2001 until he retired last November.
“I was truly a fan of Regis and Kathie Lee from the beginning, and when I got the gig it’s like everybody who watches the show got the gig as well.” There’s going to be a new co-host named soon, but Ripa is mum on the subject, preferring to talk about how much snowshoeing she plans to do when in Banff and conveying genuine excitement about one of her co-hosts in the coming week.
“I’m going to be working with Ben Mulroney on April 5 and I hear he’s just like Canadian royalty.”
Well, I told you Kelly Ripa was a nice person.