Place your bets now, folks. Kelly Ripa revealed that the long search is over — she’s going to announce her new Live! cohost on Monday almost a year after Michael Strahan‘s sudden departure.
The former soap star, 46, teased the announcement with a video on Twitter that showed her wearing a dressing gown as she sipped from a Live With Kelly mug that had a big question mark drawn on it.
“Tune in tomorrow,” Ripa said. “Trust me!” The clip is captioned, “We’re going to need a bigger mug #TuneInToLive #BigAnnouncement #LiveKellyCohost”
We’re going to need a bigger mug. #TuneInToLive #BigAnnouncement #LiveKellyCohost pic.twitter.com/QRKQ9S9NGn
— Kelly Ripa (@KellyRipa) April 30, 2017
Strahan announced his departure from Live! in April 2016, taking the audience — and Ripa — by surprise when he revealed that he was moving to Good Morning America.
After his final show the following month, a large roster of celebs sat in as guest hosts alongside Ripa, including Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Jerry O’Connell, Fred Savage, Seth Meyers, Rob Lowe, Josh Groban, and Ripa’s husband, Mark Consuelos.
Several women also filled in, including Erin Andrews, Wanda Sykes and Sherri Shepherd, which led to speculation last year that Ripa’s new cohost could be a woman.
The All My Children alum addressed the long-running search during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live in November, where she described her close friend Cooper as “the one that got away.”
When Cohen asked if the CNN host would have been her number one pick, Ripa replied, “He’s my life. He really is. He’s the one that got away and keeps getting away and gets away all the time.”
Ripa admitted that the search was taking a long time because they were making sure whoever occupied the seat next to her was a perfect match.
“We really didn’t set a time frame for ourselves,” she told Cohen. “We just wanted to wait until we found the right person. What we didn’t anticipate was that we would have such an outpouring of interest, so our list got very long very quickly. So we’ve been trying to keep it as narrow as possible, but then people pop up.”
Admitting that she’d had a “great time” with all of her guest cohosts, the mom of three added, “I have to say I feel really lucky and really embarrassed at our good fortune.”
