Kelly Ripa, beloved for her role as Hayley Vaughn on All My Children and now a bona fide television powerhouse as co-host of Live, is the latest guest on Soapy, the podcast hosted by Rebecca Budig and Greg Rikaart.
In this installment, Ripa opens up about her early days in Pine Valley, meeting her future husband Mark Consuelos, and the all-too-familiar pay gap between genders.
Ripa dives into what it’s really like putting Live together every week, writing her book, and juggling motherhood with a career that barely slows down.
All My Children Days
At one point, Budig jokes about how back in the day Ripa would often say, “My accountant says I can retire and you can take my salary.”
In her defense, Ripa explains, “Because I had theories about salaries. I had very strong theories about salaries. Because I worked with Mark, who had been there—I think I’d been there for like five or six years when Mark showed up. And I remember going into negotiations and fighting like hell for a $25 pay increase. And it would be months-long negotiations. I remember Mark just sort of being… Mark came onto the show and made twice my salary just by being hired.”
She adds, “So I was like, if a woman leaves, then that frees up salaries for other women. ’Cause I believe in my mind—I have no proof of this, this is my own mental math—that they had a lump salary. They divided it in half. Half to the men, and then the half of the half—the big half, the half of the big half went to the stars, and then the rest of us divided up the scraps. This is my own theory, proven by nothing.”
Looking back, Ripa admits, “I was a terrible actress,” but says that comes from life experience more than self-criticism. “When I got hired there, I had no life experience. I was a child. I was a literal child.”
Marrying Mark Consuelos
As fans know, Ripa married Mark Consuelos in 1996, something she considers the ultimate twist in her own soap storyline. “Obviously, meeting Mark was the high point of my life. I won’t even say my work life—just my life.”
She also shares that while she cheered on her co-stars when they dated their castmates, it was a very different story for her. “I was not the person who’s going to hook up with somebody she’s working with. I actually found that gross… But here I was.”
She laughs, “For other people, I was all invested. But for myself, I was like, ‘I would never do that. It’s so predictable.’ But of course—who are soap stars going to date but other soap stars? You never meet any other people. You never go anywhere.”
Ripa also recounts the “wildly and accidentally” serendipitous story of filling in for Regis Philbin after the show suddenly needed a replacement for a replacement. And she opens up about the “dark press interest” and intense tabloid scrutiny that followed—attention she found “uncomfortable and weird and strange.”
All My Children Reboot 2.0?
And then we get to a very interesting part, when the hosts finally ask Ripa about the much-talked-about All My Children reboot. Ripa admits, “We’ve been working on it for so long. It’s really out of our hands. It’s in other people’s hands.”
Budig jokes about whether her AMC character Greenlee will appear in it, and Ripa notes, “Yes. We’re all going to be on it—and our cast children will be on it.”
She goes on to explain the frustrating stop-and-start journey behind the reboot: “It’s like one of those things where you get something off the ground and then—oh—there’s corporate restructuring, there’s new management, and then the project falls down. And then you get renewed interest and then—oh—the person championing it was let go and you’re like, ‘Oh no.’ So it’s like one of these things that has never gone away.”
Ripa says she’s always had a genuine interest in bringing the show back simply because she loves soaps. The way she talks about it, you can almost feel that Pine Valley heartbeat still thumping in the background.
Watch the full interview below!
Photo: Disney/Lorenzo Bevilaqua
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