Kelly Ripa Calls Anderson Cooper the Co-Host ‘That Got Away’ – and Explains Why Her Search Is Far from Over
They’re the three best friends (and hosts!) that anyone could have.
Andy Cohen had his close friends Kelly Ripa and Anderson Cooper as guests on Wednesday’s episode of Watch What Happens Live, and viewers learned quite a few new things about them, including some of Ripa’s potential co-hosts that could be the one.
It’s been six months since Michael Strahan left Live and more than 50 celebrities have filled in for him in the meantime. But if it were up to Ripa, Cooper would be her choice as permanent co-host.
“Anderson re-signed with CNN, but he would have been your No. 1 pick, right Kelly?” Cohen asked Ripa, who sparkled in a Topshop dress. “He’s my life. He really is. He’s the one that got away and keeps getting away and gets away all the time,” she responded.
And during a game of “Hosty or Not Hosty,” the mother of three said she could see celebrities such as the Kardashian siblings, Billy Bush, Lindsay Lohan and Kathie Lee Gifford co-chairing Live! episodes.
As for the timeline of the official co-host announcement, Ripa revealed that there’s too long of a list to determine the final pick.
“We really didn’t set a timeframe for ourselves, we just wanted to wait until we found the right person,” she told Cohen. “What we didn’t anticipate was that we would have such an outpouring of interest, so our list got very long very quickly. So we’ve been trying to keep it as narrow as possible, but then people pop up.”
An extra tidbit we learned: Cohen and Cooper were once set up on a first date – though it never worked out because the Bravo exec was a bit obsessed with Cooper’s Vanderbilt ancestry.
“When Andy and I were first set up on a blind date — which never happened because we had a phone call and after two minutes, I was like, ‘I’m not dating this guy,'” the CNN anchor dished. “He broke my cardinal rule, which is, he mentioned my mom within the first, like, four sentences of meeting me. If somebody does that, that’s a deal breaker. I was like, ‘And we’re never going on a date.’ “
