The Talented Mrs. Ripa

Most people are terrible to talk to over the phone. If nothing else, we've learned that much over this unholy year. Kelly Ripa, who Zooms under the unassuming handle “Kelly’s iPad,” is the rare exception. The moment I enter the chat, she launches into a story. “I had to go to a specialist to have this root canal, and he said to me, ‘Who’s tall in your family?’ Which is a very strange thing for an oral surgeon to say,” she begins. “And I said, ‘Oh, my mother’s tall. Wait, why would you ask that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, you have tall teeth.’” She pauses just long enough for me to express mild confusion, then continues: “So I said, ‘What does that mean?’ And he said, ‘You have the teeth of a tall person. In your X-rays, your teeth are about 20% larger than the rest of you should be.’” I ask whether she took this as a compliment. “I was excited!” she says. “I couldn’t wait to tell Ryan [Seacrest], because we always feel like we are short people that were supposed to be tall.”

Kelly Ripa’s Big Teeth Energy is the kind of charming pleasantry that has been disarming Live guests for 20 years. As the female half of the most-watched talk show in syndication history, she toggles between psychologist, comedian, and cheerleader without ever visibly changing gears. Comedian, writer, and podcaster Danny Pellegrino put it best when he tweeted, “Kelly Ripa is really great at her job, and I feel like no one talks about that.” As with hair color or cosmetic work, if it’s good, no one talks about it.

And Kelly Ripa, who turned 50 last year, is categorically good. As of late December 2020, Live With Kelly and Ryan was the most popular daytime talk show among women between the ages of 25 and 54. With each iteration of the show—Ripa first starred alongside late broadcast veteran Regis Philbin, then media newbie Michael Strahan, whose clunky departure was a pain point, and now her longtime friend Ryan Seacrest—she intuitively expands or contracts to balance the dynamic. “The learning curve has been a 20-year process. I learned a lot, early in the beginning, that women and men are judged very differently. Very, very differently,"” she says. “The qualities that are admirable in the male cohosts are often detestable in the female cohosts.”

It’s true, there is nothing Kelly Ripa does, or doesn’t do, that isn’t news. Before our interview, I set up a Google Alert, and in a single week I was notified of countless articles including “Kelly Ripa Lifts Killer Legs in Spandex After Bizarre Thigh Walk,” “How Kelly Ripa’s Husband Defended Her Against Unkind Comments,” and “Why Kelly Ripa Was Told to Keep Her Hands in Her Pockets on 'Live’ Today.” Last month her husband, Mark Consuelos, prompted a flurry of breathless headlines when he made a “hilariously raunchy” joke on her Instagram pic of a glittery sweatshirt. I’ll save you the click: He said, “Is that a G or a C?” But “clitter” isn’t a thing.

Consuelos has been away filming Riverdale, and COVID precautions prevent them from seeing each other. “If I get two weeks off, say for spring break, and I go to visit him in Vancouver, I would have to leave the day I got out of quarantine. So that's really a lot of time and energy for a booty call,” she says. “Once in a while we’ll leave a flirty comment on each other’s posts. And then, obviously, that blows up into something else, especially when he gets disgusting.” I ask whether she and her husband slide into each other’s DMs, and she demurs. “We don't really DM, no,” she says. “We’ll just…sort of how you and I are talking over Face—whatever this is. This is Zoom. We’ll do, like, a Zoom call.”

Ripa’s mass popularity isn’t so much calculated as it is algorithmic. The DNA of the show hasn’t changed in the 20 years she’s hosted—a heterosexual “couple” bantering about soft, apolitical news—but the world around it has. To stay in demand, Ripa has had to develop a certain both-ness: She’s the booty call and the Zoom date. The leading lady and the sidekick. The tiny person with the big teeth energy. And the line between her private and public selves must be constantly redrawn.

For 10 years Ripa’s oldest son, Michael, who was three when his mom started at Live, didn’t want his name uttered on air. “I was not allowed to discuss anything,” she tells me. “I could not talk about his life, his grades, even though they were great. I couldn’t talk about school. I wasn’t allowed to show his prom picture on TV, even though I may have, as long as I got the girl’s permission from her parents.” It's a courtesy she has extended to all three of her children: Michael, who is now 23, Lola, 19, and Joaquin, 17. “It would be very unfair to use my bullhorn to discuss somebody that did not want to be discussed. I’m always very mindful of that being the boundary.”

She has other boundaries in place too. She doesn't have a Google Alert on herself or know the passwords to her Twitter or Facebook, though she runs her own Instagram. She worries about what all the oversharing is doing to our brains. “I keep saying that Instagram, during the pandemic, has made everyone 300% more of whatever it is we think they are. If you believe this person is great, you believe this person is 300% greater right now,” she says. “And if you don’t like me, or any person, you now believe I’m 300% worse.” She refuses to watch The Morning Show, even though everyone says the Apple+ TV series is about her. “I was like, I don’t know what that means, and that makes me very nervous. No, I’m not watching it,” she says. “I’ve made a decision, and I’ve stayed with my decision to not watch it.” And while her personal comedic icons include Wanda Sykes, Lucille Ball, and Tracee Ellis Ross, she purposefully keeps her on-air persona more sensible than screwball. “I learned to temper my humor,” she says. “Because anything I said in jest or as a joke would be regurgitated sans the laughter of the audience, sans the obvious humor, for any number of tabloid stories.”

Perhaps the only time she’s flouted this rule is when she played a booze-hound, coke-fiending version of herself on Broad City. If you haven’t watched it yet, you absolutely should. “I’m not kidding, 99% of the people that come up to me say, “You were amazing in Broad City.’ They don't talk about the talk show, or the years on the soap [All My Children], or my own sitcom. They talk about Broad City. That’s it,” she says. “Anytime I’ve been asked to play myself, outside of myself, even when I did Saturday Night Live, it was always about making me demented, or making me some horrible version of myself, or some drug-addled version of myself, or some hideous, monstrous, snobby version of myself. I have to say that it is so fun and liberating to play an evil or twisted or demented version of yourself. It gets it out of your system.”

I ask why she thinks people enjoy watching Kelly Ripa break bad. She says it’s because the truth is “too much for people to bear.” That the real Kelly is a total snooze. “Back when all of the reality shows were starting, I cannot tell you how many companies approached us to do a reality show. Mark and I would say, ‘No, no. I don't really think you understand. There's nothing to shoot here,’” she says. I tell her I doubt that, but she won’t budge. “There’s nothing exciting that happens,” she insists. “It truly would be like television’s version of paint drying.” I don't believe her, but that doesn’t matter. She has me right where she wants me: wanting more Kelly Ripa.

Justine Harman is the former features director at Glamour and a writer and podcaster based in Los Angeles. Her new documentary podcast, O.C. Swingers, drops March 29.

Originally Appeared on Glamour