Irish chef and journalist Stuart O’Keeffe is alleging that he was originally cast to be the food expert in Netflix’s Queer Eye reboot, but was shocked to find out he had been replaced with Antoni Porowski via an Instagram post.
O’Keeffe was talking to his guest Zack Peter on his podcast Don’t Let It Stu, when he revealed that he was originally cast in the Netflix show.
“So back when they were casting, I went for casting. I went for the show, and I actually got chosen. Like, I was one of the five” he revealed. “We were in the room. I was in one group of five, there was another group of five, they came in [and said to us] ‘You’re the Fab Five.’”
“We all went outside the room, screaming, jumping up and down. I was like, ‘Let’s get a photograph. This is such a great moment for us,’” O’Keeffe said.
He shared the picture of him alongside Tan France, Bobby Berk, Karamo Brown, and Jonathan Van Ness that they took at the time.
O’Keefe said that as the weeks went on and he was told that filming would begin soon, he started to worry about his lack of a contract. When he asked the other members of the Fab Five if they got contracts, they all said yes.
“Cut to we all go to dinner – Tan doesn’t go to dinner with me, so the other four do – I’m like, why’s he not coming to dinner? So I’m like, something’s up. Somebody knows something. He was kind of like, being a bit of a dick. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is weird.’”
O’Keeffe revealed that then he was asked to come in and audition again, “and two days later I get pulled out and Antoni gets pulled in.”
“The production company wanted me on the show. I'd done other shows with them. They were like, ‘You'd be perfect for this. You have a cookbook out. It all ties in perfectly,’” O’Keeffe continued. “My agent called me, he's like, ‘Look, I know this sounds totally kind of shitty, but they said that you kind of have done too much stuff.’ I had a cookbook out and I'd done multiple shows before, where the other four hadn't. So they were like, they kind of want everybody on the same level.”
“I was like, okay, that's kind of a lame excuse, but fine, I guess,” he said. “But the worst part was I found out on Instagram that I didn’t get it. That they swapped me out, which was really shitty.”
“And then the production company called me, they were like, ‘We're really sorry. We didn't know the assistant was going to post this video.’ I was like, I'm fine. I'll just like cry for the next year,” he added.
O’Keeffe also said that he has also heard a rumor that original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy food expert Ted Allen may have advocated for the casting of Porowski, who was his friend and assistant at the time.
You can watch the entire podcast episode below.