The original cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has done pretty well for themselves in the sixteen years since the show first aired. They’re now the stars of Chopped, Drag Race, and a home renovation show I’m sure my mother loves. And if they had the chance to do it all over again, they wouldn’t.
A fab three out of fab five Queer Eye guys, Carson Kressley, Thom Filicia, and Ted Allen, recently reunited at the Paley Honors Gala and said that their first reaction to news of a reboot was dread:
“‘I’m really glad that they’re doing that instead of us,’” Allen, 53, joked. “I got a call from the creator of ‘Queer Eye’ and my first thought was ‘Oh God, they’re not going to ask us to do it again, are they?’”
Even watching the reboot stresses him out:
“I’ve seen a couple of episodes and I realized that I was getting post-traumatic stress disorder from watching them,” he said. “‘Queer Eye’ is a hard show to make, ‘Chopped’ shoots in one day, ‘Queer Eye’ has mountains of meetings on Monday and then shoots for three or four days.”
Thom Filicia didn’t say whether he watches the show or not but says he’s interested in the fact that the reboot takes hosts to rural locations he’s not sure he would have made it out of alive back in the early aughts:
“‘It was harder for us to make that global connection outside of the show that they’ve been able to do which is really cool,’” the design expert explained. “I think the fact that we were really based in cities … it felt like that was the beginning of what was happening. Now they’re really going into these sort of unbelievably remote locations.”
“‘Could you imagine if we did that back then? They’d be looking for our bodies!’”
That is terrifying. Yet probably accurate.