Kyle Cooke revealed he influenced the casting process for ”Summer House” early on. During an appearance on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” the Loverboy founder explained how he convinced producers to cast his friends instead of strangers on the Bravo reality show 10 years ago.
After Clarkson asked Cooke about the “crazy casting story,” Cooke explained that he originally responded to a “random casting call” for a show set in the Hamptons, where he regularly spent summers with friends.
“I’d spent enough time out there [in the Hamptons] thinking when I walked into the room, there’d be a bunch of familiar faces,” Cooke said on the May 16 episode of the talk show. “And when I hardly recognized anyone, I just told the casting director, I’m like, ‘You got it all wrong. Like get back to me when you want to like, you know, talk to my friends.’”
Cooke’s longtime co-star Lindsay Hubbard chimed in to say Cooke was like the “King of the Hamptons” at the time. “So he was like, ‘No this is not how it works. It’s usually a group of friends where we all know each other,’” Hubbard recalled.
Cooke noted that there were already shows like “The Real World” that featured groups of strangers living together in a house. “I think Bravo wanted to kind of latch on to an existing group of friends with some history, which I think just kind of lends itself to a little more [authenticity],” he added of how “Summer House” finally came to be.
Lindsay Hubbard Shared More Details About Kyle Cooke’s Influence on Casting
BravoThe first season of “Summer House” was filmed in Southampton and starred Cooke, Hubbard, Carl Radke, Cristina Gibson, Everett Weston, Jaclyn Shuman, Stephen McGee, and twins Ashley and Lauren Wirkus.
Speaking on Bravo’s “Hot Mic” podcast, Hubbard revealed that she met Cooke in the summer of 2014, a few years before “Summer House” premiered. “He had a house in Montauk,” she shared. “We’ve been living this lifestyle, and on season one, it truly started with Kyle and I’s group of friends. So everyone you see on season one, like we all hung out all the time/.”
Hubbard explained that the lifestyle of the group was to work in the city during the week and then get on the train or the jitney to get to the Hamptons every weekend.
“[We’d] party, let loose, go crazy, and then, you know, come back super hungover on Sunday nights or early Monday mornings back to the city,” she said. “So yeah, season one really started with mine and Kyle’s group of friends.”
Hubbard said a friend of Cooke’s told him about an open audition casting call for New Yorkers who go out to the Hamptons. “So Kyle goes to this casting call, he looks around, he’s like. ‘What is going on? This is not like the demographic,’” Hubbard revealed. “It was just a bunch of like young people who had never been to the Hamptons before. Almost, just like they were going on like a modeling casting call or for a scripted show.”
“So, of course, Kyle being Kyle, the alpha Leo that he is, was like ‘I need to talk to the casting directors, I need to talk to the creators. And he gets in front of them and is like, ‘Look, this is not how it goes in the Hamptons. You usually get into a group of friends and we all share houses together as friends. Like we already know each other. This is not ‘The Real World.’”
Hubbard said Cooke told producers about an end-of-summer rager that he held, so casting people showed up to the party that summer and “started plucking people left and right” to interview for what would become “Summer House.”
Kyle Cooke Posted About Another Casting Call in 2023
Cooke, who went on to launch the canned beverage company Loverboy, seemed to have something else in the works in 2023. He posted a video on Instagram to announce a casting call for a show centered on the beverage and hospitality industry. “Think ‘Summer House’ meets ‘Vanderpump Rules’ with ‘Apprentice’-like business challenges,” he teased. “That’s what we are shooting.”
Cooke noted that he was looking for larger-than-life personalities aspiring to be sales or marketing associates. He tagged the post #houseofloverboy. It is unclear whether the project is still in the works.,
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‘Summer House’ Star Shares Surprising Casting Story