Chef Stuart O’Keefe Was Cast on ‘Queer Eye’ Reboot Before Being Replaced by Antoni Porowski

By Emma Chance | TV | March 13, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | TV | March 13, 2024 |

That’s right, Queer Eye almost had a real chef on the cast. Irish chef and food writer Stuart O’Keefe, who has appeared on shows like Private Chefs of Beverly Hills and Chopped (hosted by the original Queer Eye’s food guy, Ted Allen) was cast in the QE reboot but eventually got replaced by Antoni Porowski. He told the story on a recent episode of his podcast, “Don’t Let It Stu”:

“I actually got chosen. I was in one group of five, there was another group of five, which Antoni was in,” he said. “They came in [and said to my group], ‘You’re the Fab Five.’ We all went outside the room, screaming, jumping up and down. I was like, ‘Let’s get a photograph. This is such a great moment for us.’”

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Filming was set to start in a month, but O’Keefe still hadn’t received his contract or any production information. He even had a celebratory dinner with Karamo Brown, Bobby Berk, and Jonathan Van Ness. Then he says he got called in for another audition, “And two days later I get pulled out and Antoni gets pulled in.”

“The production company wanted me on the show. I’d done other shows with them. They were like, you’d be perfect for this. You have a cookbook out. It all ties in perfectly…My agent called me, he’s like, ‘Look, I know this sounds totally kind of shitty, but they said that you kind of have done too much stuff.’ I had a cookbook out and I’d done multiple shows before, where the other four hadn’t. So they were like, they kind of want everybody on the same level.”

So what he’s saying is that he, a successful chef and author, was replaced by Antoni, a nobody who I’m still not sure had boiled water before his first day of filming, because he was too famous for the rest of the nobodies. I mean … it’s kind of a compliment?

“I was like, OK, that’s kind of a lame excuse, but fine, I guess,” O’Keefe said. He thinks maybe Allen put in a good word for Porowski, who was his assistant at the time. In a 2018 interview in which Allen defended Porowski’s cooking abilities, he admitted that he introduced his friend to showrunner David Collins.

“I texted Antoni’s information and a link to his website to David, and his response was, ‘Yowza, handsome!’” So, that supports Chris’s theory that Antoni was cast for his abs.