Antoni Porowski on ‘No Taste Like Home,’ Getting Emotional About Jeremiah Brent Joining ‘Queer Eye’ and Not Being Familiar With ‘Wicked’ Before the Movie: ‘I Check Some Gay Boxes, But Not All of Them’
Antoni Porowski may not be as queer as you think he is.
On today’s “Just for Variety” podcast, he says he’s the “Wicked” movie but that was actually his introduction to the beloved “Wizard of Oz” origin story. “Full disclosure, I hadn’t seen the musical and I wasn’t really sure what it was about before,” Porowski says. “I check some gay boxes, but not all of them.”
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“Wicked” or not, Porowski has spent the last seven years as one of Hollywood’s most visible out celebrities as a member of the fab five of the award-winning “Queer Eye?”
Now in its ninth season, Porowski is hoping for an even 10. However, he says things may have gotten a little stale along the way. “I’m not going to say that I became jaded over time, but it’s like when you do anything…I think I just wasn’t as grateful,” he says.
Porowski struggled at finding fresh ways to talk about food during the makeovers. “I’m literally looking up synonyms on words. How do I ask in a different way, ‘Tell me about your relationship with food?’ Or, ‘What did your grandma make for you?’” Porowski says.
But then Jeremiah Brent came along as Bobby Berk’s replacement in Season 9. “I can get emotional thinking about it, him coming in with just with a new set of eyes,” Porowski says.
He also says that telling and amplifying queer stories – especially those of trans people — has taken on even more meaning as the LGBTQ community is being attacked by right-wing lawmakers. “If we don’t continue to tell those stories, history will repeat itself,” Porowski says. “We are seeing signs and symbols of the past that are coming up on podiums by very powerful people, and it’s extremely problematic to say the least.
“If we continue to tell those stories, we’re going to remember them, and there’s less of a chance that we’re going to repeat the same patterns or that we’re going to stand for it if we see those patterns coming back to life,” he continues. “So I think whether it’s a Republican, a Democrat, or some other third party, whatever it is, we have to continue to just tell diverse stories. I think we have a responsibility to do that as entertainers, or at least with ‘Queer Eye’ specifically.”
Porowski’s latest culinary endeavor is his new Nat Geo food and travel series, “There’s No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski,” which premiered earlier this week. Each episode features Porowski traveling with a celebrity guests to locations around the world to explore their ancestry and how it may have informed their eating habits and family traditions. The first episode featured Florence Pugh traveling through England. The lineup for the season also includes Issa Rae (Senegal), Justin Theroux (Italy), James Marsden (Germany), Henry Golding (Borneo) and Akwafina (South Korea).
If “No Taste Like Home” is renewed, Porowksi would love to visit Poland with Martha Stewart to explore their Polish roots. He remembers watching Stewart cooking cabbage rolls on her show with her mother. “I used to watch those YouTube videos religiously as a kid. It was the only depiction of a Polish person in media and she made cabbage rolls and she was proud of them, which was like, wow, I didn’t know that people could be proud of Polish food growing up,” Porowski says. “I say that as a Pole, so I’m allowed.”
You can listen to the full conversation with Porowski at “Just for Variety” above or wherever you download your favorite podcasts.
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