KELLY RIPA
The Live With Kelly and Mark host, 52, returns for a second season of family fun on the game show Generation Gap (June 29 on ABC), which began as a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! before transforming into its current hour-long format. Season two will feature new teams of seniors and their grandkids in challenges requiring them to answer pop-culture questions from each other’s generations to win the prize money.
You’ve called Generation Gap more of a comedy than a game show. How so? I like to say that the right answers win the money, but the wrong answers win the laughter. The more wrong the answer is, the funnier it is and sometimes you cannot believe what comes out of people’s mouths. When they’re wrong, they’re all the way wrong.
Which generation does better overall? I think you’d be surprised. This is our second season, and the takeaway is that the senior generation knows a lot about a lot. Just because the older generation is older, it doesn’t mean that they are forgetful. Maybe their finger on the button isn’t as fast, but guess what? They know a lot about a lot— their generation and their grandkids’ generation.
This game started as a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! How did you become the host? Jimmy and I have been friends for many, many years. He’s seen me with my kids when they were young—now they’re adults — but he’s seen me raise small children and bring my parents or my in-laws everywhere, so he has seen me walk that line between the generations. He was like, “Wow! You’re good with young people and old people, you’d be perfect for this show.” It was really just as simple as that.
He and I really value working with your family—working with a close set of friends who are like family or your actual, literal family—so we’re very similar in that sense. Also, we have a similar sense of humor, a similar sensibility and we’re not big on being a pain in the butt or working with pains in the butt. We like to keep it free-flowing and have an enjoyable environment. That’s what we both bring to the table.
Does your dad, who is a series regular, love it? The Kimmels know my dad. He and Jimmy’s Aunt Chippy have hung out together. When I’ve done the talk show in Las Vegas, Aunt Chippy and my dad, Joe, were together the entire time. She’s like his unofficial tour guide.
My dad is so comfortable being himself that when we shot season one out in California, we thought, Wouldn’t it be funny to have my dad play a role in some way? We thought it would be funny for him to sing lyrics and see if either generation could figure out what he’s trying to say. Spoiler alert: my dad doesn’t sing anything; he just speaks like himself no matter what. So, this year, we’re shooting it in the New York studios and within the studio, we built my dad an at-home version of how he consumes television in his own home.
So, we’ve got the reclining chair, we’ve got the side table with his water cup, his bowl of loose change and snacks right there on the studio floor. And now we have my dad saying movie lines or saying lines from a commercial, but always as himself. He gets very impatient with me. He doesn’t care that we’re in a studio shooting a TV show, if he’s got to use the bathroom he just gets up and leaves.
When you ask a toddler in the Toddler’s Choice to pick between a car and a toy, has anyone ever picked the car? This year, we switched up the Toddler’s Choice because we were afraid that parents would be like, “They’re going to offer you a car or a toy. We’ll buy you the toy, take the car.” So, this year, we offered a variety of things; sometimes there was a car involved. Tots of that age have an impulse to go for the instant gratification thing and, so inadvertently, a couple of times, they have chosen wildly expensive and thrilling prizes because they thought they were getting a toy because they saw a prop that was showing what this incredible prize is, or a couple of times a tot was hungry and so they reached for what they thought was grapes but really what they chose was an extraordinary trip somewhere. So, it’s still the most thrilling one minute of television, I think, available to a viewing audience.
You’ve been doing Live for 23 years. How do you keep it fresh? There is a newness to it every day. It’s live television and so there’s constantly an element of danger to it. I like to remind myself that it’s never as good as I think it is, and it’s never as bad as I think it is. Gelman [the exec producer] taught me that many, many years ago and it’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten; to just live in the moment, be present, pay attention, listen and engage, and that’s what we do every day. It’s always fresh because it’s always something different. Every show presents its own unique challenges. Every show has its own thrill aspect and yet there is a certain comfort in the day in and day out of going to the same place with the same group of people: our producers, our director, our sound people. We don’t have writers. We are a show that is happening in real time. As it’s happening, as you’re seeing it, it’s coming out of our mouths and so there is something dangerous and thrilling to all of that.
Do you ever miss acting? I have been spoiled by the Live hours. Working on All My Children, those were long hours. But I never say never because I am an actress at heart. That was my chosen profession and that is how I got my start in show business. I loved working on the sitcom [Hope & Faith] with Faith Ford. That was probably my favorite job I’ve ever had. I really did love that format. It was challenging doing it while I was hosting the talk show. It seemed like my day never ended during those years, but my kids were young. I got to bring them to work with me every day, so I still managed to formulate a life within the work life. I never say never to anything.
You have a podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera [With Kelly Ripa]. How is that different from the kinds of questions you ask your guests on Live? I think people are more inhibited when they’re on camera. I certainly am. When you take away the camera and you’re just having a free-flowing conversation, usually an hour long, you can cover a wide swath of topics, whether it’s political activism, whether it’s a recipe that they like to make, whether it’s their marriage, whether it’s their film career. You really get to delve deep with people. I’ve talked to friends and celebrities and sometimes it’s just people I admire, and so it gives you a lot to unpack.
Because of the nature of the questions you ask, do you only book people that you know? We’ve booked a lot of guests like Salma Hayek, Joel McHale, Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. If it’s a celebrity like that, it’s usually topic specific, but with Anderson Cooper, who is many decades a friend of mine, we had no topic. Nothing was off-limits, so it was more of a rambling discussion about our families, our friendship, how we both got started in the business, how we met and where our lives intersect. Then when it’s somebody like Carol Burnett, we were there to interview her about her 90th birthday special, but it again rambled back to when we first met when she was on All My Children and I was on All My Children. We cover a lot in a one-hour discussion versus a 4-minute discussion.
Between the podcast and Live, you share so much about your personal life but are there certain things that, for all your candor, remain private? Oh, yeah. There’s a lot I keep private because some things have to be just for me, or just for me and Mark. You have to have that. Everybody’s entitled to a little bit of privacy.
Of course, but we all think we know who you are… You do, but there are certain things you wouldn’t want to know. Trust me.