As a viewer, the five members of the Queer Eye team, Karamo Brown, Bobby Berk, Tan France, Antoni Porowski and Jonathan Van Ness, seemed quite close. After all, in addition to working together to totally transform the lives of their weekly “heroes,” the five-some seemed like best friends, sharing funny and sometimes intimate moments with each other through the episodes.
Eight seasons in, however, the truth of their relationship is quite different, and new sources are not shying away from detailing why. According to a recent feature from Rolling Stone, the members’ growing divide was largely due to Van Ness’ “rage issues” and so-called “abusive” attitude on set.
“[There’s] a real emotion of fear around them when they get angry,” one source who worked with Van Ness told the outlet. “It’s almost like a cartoon where it oozes out of them. It’s intense and scary.”
As for how often these outbursts would happen, sources claimed Van Ness, who was labeled as a “yeller,” would get angry at least once a week, and sometimes even once a day.
“Jonathan’s a person who contains multitudes and who has the capacity to be very warm, very charismatic, and has the capacity to make you feel really special that they are paying attention to you,” a source detailed about the hair expert. “But at least once a day, they would need to yell at somebody. It might be something small, but there’s always going to be somebody to point out and blame and make the villain of the day.”
The tension from Van Ness’ behavior, of course, began to impact how the main cast behaved around each other. “There was absolutely tension between everybody else, especially from Jonathan Van Ness,” said a production manager. “[They] didn’t want to ever share the spotlight with anyone. There were times when we couldn’t even shoot scenes with certain members of the Fab Five together because it got so bad.” Eek!
In November, surely somewhat due to these tensions, design expert Berk announced he would be leaving the show. And while the decision surprised viewers, it makes all the more sense now.
“It’s not a new story that a boy band falls apart,” one source said. “Essentially they were a group of people put together in their mid-thirties and told to be best friends. But people don’t expect that Queer Eye could be that. That’s truly what it was: a manufactured boy band with big personalities that certain ones were favored and certain ones were not, and then eventually [things] turned really toxic.”
“How is it not obvious to everybody that none of these people are friends?” another source said. “None of them. They don’t hang out socially. They live very different lives.”
Knowing how bad the experience was on set, kudos to Berk for setting his boundaries and moving on!
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