Bobby Berk has a warning about the upcoming season of Queer Eye: “It’s definitely a much more emotional season,” given that “the world has been through so much” since we last saw the Fab 5 on screen. The interior design expert, 39, recently spoke to HollywoodLife about the “waterworks” of a season — and teased that the much-anticipated premiere date is not very far off after the COVID-19 pandemic halted production last year.
“You can expect a bit of a difference from me and the boys: me and Jonathan [Van Ness] and Tan [France] and Antoni [Porowski] and Karamo [Brown],” Bobby teased of season 6, explaining that the year away helped the Fab 5 with some burnout. “I know as many seasons as we’ve been cranking out so quickly, in just a matter of two and half years, I think we were starting to get a little jaded,” Bobby revealed. “I think we weren’t getting touched as emotionally as we had in the past, but my god — this season. There [were] a lot of waterworks.”
“We were all back in it,” Bobby continued. “We were all fully recharged and ready to be open and emotional. I don’t think we got through 10 minutes of the first episode we filmed before I was bawling. It’s definitely a much more emotional season. It felt really good to be back to helping people again.” While the designer couldn’t divulge many details on a premiere date (“we technically don’t even really know”), he offered the following: “Give or take, less than six months I’d say,” signaling a fall or early winter debut. (The crew wrapped filming in Austin, Texas just last week.)
While the new season will “definitely acknowledge” the new pandemic world in which we live, Bobby revealed that the general format of the beloved reality series will remain the same. “It took over a year for us to get back to work because Netflix thought it was really important for us to really go out and do what we normally do: give those hugs, give that self care, really connect with people,” Bobby said. “If we went back too soon, we wouldn’t really have been able to do that for everyone’s safety. So once we were all vaccinated, we were able to really get in there and do our thing.”
Still, the pandemic was formidable. “One thing I do think it changed was our stories,” he said. “Every single hero we worked with had, of course, been affected in some way.”
Since wrapping, Bobby has been promoting his furniture line (now available directly to consumers on BobbyBerk.com!) and partnership with Affirm, a buy now, pay later shopping platform. “I wanna make design accessible for people,” Bobby said. “My whole philosophy is design can make your life better: design can help your mental health, design can help your relationships, design can help your home be that charger just like your phone that charges you to get through the next day.”
“When I decided to design my own line it was a fine balance between making it super affordable to where the quality wasn’t as good, and furniture that wouldn’t last and people would be replacing,” he continued. With Affirm, the company “had the same type of philosophy that I did,” Bobby said. “I want people to be able to get the furniture that they want and be able to break up [payment] over time so that they can order quality furniture that’s not gonna end up in a landfill over the years because they ordered something on a budget, and it was crap.”