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Kelly Ripa Interview
The big career news, her nomination for an Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy, is, of course, cause for celebration, but it has not gone to Ripa's head. With no false modesty, she brushes congratulations aside by deflecting the compliments elsewhere. "The writers have been very good to me. I have been very blessed," Ripa insists, offering up her theory of soap opera success: "Your longevity in daytime depends on two things: the fans and the writers. The writers respond to the fans and the fans respond to the writers. It's a cyclical thing. If you don't have the blessing of both, you are not long for this medium. You can only play what they give you and they only give you what the fans want to see." What they want to see, it would appear, is Hayley. "I always say that my character is the one America watches and says, 'Well, Hayley hasn't killed herself yet, why should I?'" Self-deprecation aside, Ripa has fan mail to indicate what she means to the viewers, and that nomination to prove what she means to the industry. She's grateful and flattered, don't get her wrong, but that's not where she lives, not these days, anyway. "I haven't gone, 'Woo-hoo!' she confesses. "I felt really happy that my peers feel that way, but if you pick up a newspaper every day and read it, it sort of takes you out of the 'Gee, my hair didn't look good in that episode' kind of thing. It's a tremendous category, supporting actress, and snagging the nomination alongside Jennifer Bassey and Beth Ehlers and Sharon Case and Kathleen Noone! Well, I'm honored. But I know it doesn't get you anything else, it doesn't jack up the price of you. But it's nice. It's an honor." The 3 a.m. feedings and trips to the playground have well and truly disabused Ripa of any delusions of grandeur. "You'd be surprised how not-nice I can look on my days off," she says. "I generally do not have time to put on makeup or wash my hair. I usually roll out of bed, throw on the nearest pair of sweat clothes that don't have too much cookie dough or saliva dripping down the sleeve. The other moms at the playground sometimes recognize me, or think they do. It's funny because I hear them having discussion on whether or not it's me, right in front of me. When they don't think it's me, they will say anything. 'That's not her,' I've heard them say, 'She's old.' I want to tell them, 'Listen. I am not wearing 20 pounds of makeup. You would be amazed at how much younger you, too, could look if you had 12 people working on you around the clock to make you look desirable for America.' But this is not reality. It is not a mother's reality." Reality needs to be managed carefully whenever family concerns meet corporate demands and the expectations of an exacting public. For example, how do you work it out when your co-star and leading man, Mark Consuelos (Mateo), is the father of your child and the one you wake up to every morning? Do you share a dressing room? And what of the baby? Should you bring him to work? Ripa is on the case with practical systems all her own. "It takes a real special union to be able to live and work together 24 hours a day," she says with deadpan understatement. "We don't share a dressing room because that is both career and personal suicide. Now, we miss each other when we are not together. I have been married three times on the show, and far and away my most difficult marriage to play has been my marriage to Mark. People would suppose the opposite. They ask, 'Isn't it easier for you to do love scenes because you really are married?' But I think it is harder. You want to keep what you have together private, so you have to recreate a whole new public version. Whereas before, I could just jump into character with a TV husband and do my thing. I was very detached from it; it didn't matter. But I don't want to feel that they are going to be watching our personal lives, so we have to come up with something completely different. But Mark is amazing; he makes my job here easy. He's my best friend, and the best man I know. He is my lifeline." Ripa states that she and her husband never run lines at home or even mention the show when they are alone together. Instead, they play with their son. "Michael believes that everyone in the world in on television," Ripa says with a laugh, "because everyone he knows is on TV." Does Michael want to be on TV, too? "He doesn't even want to come to the studio. I used to bring him but I stopped when he was old enough to tell me he didn't want to come. It's only fair, because this is not the most exciting place for a 2-year-old. And he also associates this place with getting his hair cut, because this is where it happens. So even if we drive by the building, he's traumatized. You would think we were removing his tonsils without anesthesia! It's ridiculous." Yes, kids can be ridiculous, but it is clear that Ripa dotes on Michael and that she'd do it all over again. In fact, she just cannot wait. Her projected five-year-plan does not include feature films or pilot seasons. Given her druthers, Ripa would love to stay at home and be a full-time mom. "Thank god," she quips, fervently, "I am a much better mom than I am an actress!" But fans need not fear losing Hayley. Since a mother's reality includes both college tuition and buying clothing for a growing boy, Ripa is staying right where she is. But she'd like to have another child, "sooner rather than later." She's aiming to get pregnant in August, even though her memories of the fans' reaction to her first pregnancy are quite vivid. "I gained 60 pounds and I got a lot of hate mail. People on the Internet said terrible things about me. I just thought, 'What a sad existence you must have if your thrill in life is beating up on a pregnant woman.' I didn't color my hair because it has not been proved that it is good for the fetus. So if I quit smoking and drinking and coffee and nail polish and everything else that was an impurity, why would I pour bleach onto my scalp? I thought it might endear me to people, but it had the reverse effect. Very strange. I thought that every person who criticized me should have to include a photo of themselves when they were pregnant." Nothing - not the slings and arrows of irate fans nor months of hiding behind desks and large pocketbooks on-camera - can diminish Ripa's joy in motherhood. It was a cure for anything that ailed her life, including low self-esteem. "In this medium, you can never feel beautiful," she says. "I looked around the hallways here at the studio and I just felt, 'I am the ugliest one here.' Then I got married and had my son, and now I never have a day when I don't feel pretty, because I made something with feet!" Baby Michael put the finishing touches on the work-in-progress that was Ripa's self-esteem, but the road to self-acceptance was begun by Grant Aleksander during his time on AMC as Alec McIntyre. "When I came here, I wasn't trained," Ripa explains. "This was my first job, my third audition. Needless to say, I felt very inferior to everyone here. Very inferior and very overwhelmed. I had been on the show two or three years when Grant and I started working together. He gave me confidence in myself. 'Do you know you are very good at what you do?' he would tell me. It really mean something to have someone as brilliant as Grant telling me that I'm good at what I do." With the confidence issues on the job settled, and bliss at home, Kelly Ripa is a happy woman with no desire to reach for greater fame, or greater anything, except another baby. "I never really had the idea of being more famous than this," she says. "I've always had the theory that I should never leave work to look for work. I've acted because it is something I've always been able to do. I'm not talented in other aspects of life. I cannot balance books. I can't paint, not even my own bedroom. What I can do well is I can act and I can mother." |
