Mark Consuelos on How He Knew Kelly Ripa Was ‘The One’: ‘She Looked Like This French Vixen’

Mark Consuelos can’t forget the first time he ever met wife Kelly Ripa and how the interaction blossomed into a beautiful love story. The All My Children alums’ relationship bloomed on the set of the show when he was cast as Mateo Santos and she was playing Hayley Vaughan.

“I thought she was hilarious. I remember seeing her in the rehearsal hall,” Mark, 53, remembered during an episode of SiriusXM’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa. “She had these big curl rollers. Or had you just taken them out? I thought she was adorable. But you have to understand my position there.”

“I came from Tampa on an audition that I wasn’t, my agent said, you’re not ever going to get. And a week later, they flew me to New York,” he said of the All My Children opportunity. “The thought of me making the moves on anybody was absolutely out of the question. The whole thing was absolutely mind boggling to me. I knew I wanted to get this job because it would change my life.”

Mark said that Kelly, 54, made a great first impression on him. “She was very kind, very funny, and adorable. Maybe if I’d been on my third job, there might have been a different perspective,” the Riverdale alum gushed. “I was on a tight wire. If I met her, when I was on a tight wire going across the Grand Canyon, I would have the same reaction. Hey, hi. How’s it going? She’s great. She’s cool. OK, I’m gonna make it across but …” Mark trailed off before Kelly chimed in to say, “Flash forward a week later, he was dating a girl on every network.”

“Well that was a week later!” Mark said, which caused everyone to laugh.

He was then asked by a producer if there was a moment where he knew Kelly was “The One.”

“Yeah, for sure. But I would say that the beginning of the first tremors beneath the surface where you start feeling some different things was when I was running lines with her and she offered to run lines with me for an audition,” Mark said. “She told me to come to her apartment. I’m like, OK. And she answered the door in a robe. I was like, OK.”

“You were on time. And I was expecting him to be late,” Kelly responded. “I was not expecting him. It wasn’t a play. I wasn’t making a play. I was expecting him to be late and he was on time. So I answered the door and I was shocked that he was on time.”

Mark said that even before that, he remembers running lines with Kelly in a dressing room.

“She had these great shoes on, these heels with these crazy tight but not too tight jeans, but just perfectly,” the Pitch alum said. ”You were holding a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette like out of a Parisian editorial page. She smoked a cigarette like someone who’s been in Paris all their lives. She looked like this French vixen.”

“And I used to smoke cute. I’ve been told by people that I smoke cute,” Kelly said.

Kelly had a boyfriend at the time, and Mark had a girlfriend, but eventually, when their other relationships didn’t work out, they found their way to each other. The couple got married in 1996 and welcomed three children together, Michael, Lola and Joaquin. Mark officially became Kelly’s cohost on Live With Kelly and Mark in April 2023.

New episodes of SiriusXM’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa” are available every Wednesday on the SiriusXM app and wherever podcasts are available.