Kelly Ripa on Who She'd Want to Co-Host 'Live' Besides Ryan Seacrest

The TV personality has also co-hosted Regis Philbin and Michael Strahan.

Kelly Ripa has worked with several co-hosts in her reign on daytime TV, most recently Ryan Seacrest, who sits alongside her for Live With Kelly and Ryan. 

Seacrest, 47, joined the show in 2017 following Michael Strahan's feud-filled exit, and the pair seem to get along well. But on Thursday's Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, Ripa, 51, was asked by some fans who her second picks for co-host were at the time. 

"It's so much a deeper discussion, and it has so little, actually, to do with me," Ripa said of the selection process, which took a year before Seacrest was chosen. 

Referencing her longtime friends and fellow TV personalities, Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper, Ripa said, "I love my ACs, of course, but they have jobs." 

She also mentioned her actor husband, Mark Consuelos, saying, "My MC I love, but he had a job too. At the time he was working in California and then in Vancouver."

Live with Kelly & Ryan

Cohen reminded Ripa that she had previously expressed interest in having a female co-host to work alongside her. 

"I would have had a woman in a heartbeat. Like I said, it's a decision that's not... I don't make that decision," she shared. "But I have always found the idea of two women hosting a show very appealing."

She jokingly added, "That way they can share the blame." 

Ripa's first co-host on Live was the late Regis Philbin, whom she worked alongside at the start of her daytime career. She talks about their forced relationship in her new memoir, Live Wire

"I had and still have enormous respect, admiration and reverence for Regis," Ripa recently told ET of the late TV personality, who died in 2020. "I, like most of the viewing public, felt like I knew him, but to expect two people from such different generations to have some sort of weird, forced friendship when they never knew each other is a very strange thing to put on one person. It was only put on one person and that is how I describe it [in the book]."

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