Days after her son Joaquin’s Broadway debut, Kelly Ripa joked that she thought she and Mark Consuelos “failed as parents” when her youngest son first told him he wanted to attend drama school.
“Having any job was out of the question for us,” Ripa said on the April 13 episode of “Live with Kelly and Mark.”
“So we were like, ‘I have to find a job,'” she recalled telling Joaquin, who graduated from the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theater and Dance in May 2025. “And he booked a Broadway show that was just amazing for us to see.”
Consuelos, 55, agreed that it would be “pretty wild” to see Joaquin perform on April 9 in Joe Mantello’s opening performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Joaquin, 23, has been booked opposite showbiz legends Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf. He plays a younger version of Biff, played by Christopher Abbott.
On Monday’s “Live,” Ripa, 55, said Consuelos “has been in this game for a long time” and will finally be making his Broadway debut, hinting that Joaquin beat his father to death.
Consuelos, whose show “Fallen Angels” opens on April 19, took the jab publicly, saying he “hasn’t forgotten” that it took more than 30 years for his big moment on the Great White Way.
Ripa also joked at the show’s afterparty that there were “strict conditions” for Joaquin to follow his parents, which boiled down to one rule: “Just be cool.”
“We were so cool! I thought we were pretty cool,” Ripa responded, noting that she left Joaquin “almost alone” for the night.
“I mean, I hugged him and said, ‘I’m so proud of you, congratulations,'” she admitted. “He was like, ‘Okay, okay.’ During that time, everyone else was able to hug him and tell him how proud they were of him all night, and that was fine.”
Ripa celebrated Joaquin’s Broadway debut in a social media post over the weekend, praising the show as “amazing.”
The post received love from the couple’s friends, including David Muir, Jennifer Garner, and Andy Cohen, to name a few.
Ripa and Consuelos, who met on the set of “All My Children” in 1995 and married the following year, will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary this year.
In addition to Joaquin, the couple also has a son, Michael (28), and a daughter, Laura (24).
