Kelly Ripa doesn’t agree with Jenn Tran‘s comparison of their journeys to love. The Bachelorette‘s latest star appeared on Monday’s episode of Live With Kelly and Mark and had a somewhat awkward exchange with the host during the interview.
“You’re drop dead gorgeous. You could meet anybody, anywhere, at any time. Why, why, why?” Ripa, 53, questioned.
“I mean, is Hinge any better?” Tran, 26, quipped of the dating app.
Ripa had an answer for that, telling the physician’s assistant student, “No, not Hinge! The office! Medical school! I don’t know!”
Tran fired back with some reasoning of her own.
“I have a question,” she said. “Where’d you meet your husband?”
“At work,” Ripa replied of Mark Consuelos, her husband of nearly two decades whom she met on the set of All My Children, the soap opera on which they both starred on.
Tran acknowledged that, but went on to point out that their work was “on TV, no?”
Both Ripa and Consuelos, 53, were quick to reject the comparison, with the former telling their guest, “Those are not the same! We were both professionals. Are you acting on your show?”
“I didn’t marry Mateo Santos,” Ripa added of her husband’s All My Children character. “I married Mark Consuelos.”
With that, Ripa circled back to her point telling Tran, “What I’m saying to you is you could meet a nice physician’s assistant.”
“Now you sound like my mom,” Tran joked, before admitting that her mom “of course” had reservations about her taking on the role.
“She has never really watched reality TV,” Tran said of her Vietnam-born mother. “… There’s a lot of differences between Vietnamese culture and American culture. I think for her to really see me grow into my own on Joey [Graziadei’s] season [of The Bachelor] and see me have these conversations about the way I grew up and my emotional vulnerability… I think it really brought us closer because she was able to understand me a lot more as a person.”
When Tran landed The Bachelorette role, her mom immediately had one concern.
“She knew she was going to have to go on TV at some point… so her first response was, ‘You’re going to have to hire an actor to pose as your mom, because I’m not going on TV,'” Tran recalled. “She came around and eventually she did it for me and came on. She was so excited for me as the Bachelorette and to be the first Asian-American Bachelorette. She knows how much that means, too.”
When ET spoke to Tran ahead of her journey for love, she teased her mindset for the adventure.
“I’m really just gonna be my freaking self and that means all the good, the bad, and the chaotic, and the psychotic,” she said. “That’s really what you’re gonna have to look forward to. You’re not going to get polished Jenn, sad and perfect Jenn. You’re going to get crazy Jenn.”
Season 21 of The Bachelorette will premiere July 8 on ABC.
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