At first, the reversal upset him. “There were definitely emotions. But each one of us had our reasons why we did what we did,” Berk says. “I can’t be mad—for a second I was.” But he didn’t reconsider his own decision, largely because he’d already started preparing for his next chapter: “All the plans that I had made when I thought we weren’t coming back, I just wasn’t willing to change those. I would have had to pump the brakes on multiple other projects that are already in process. We had mentally just prepared ourselves to move on—that’s why I left.”
His absence will have an enormous effect on Queer Eye, a reboot of the early-2000s Bravo series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The show made a star of each member of the Fab Five, all of whom were virtually unknown when the series debuted in February 2018. Viewers are as invested in the group’s friendship as they are in the show itself, which is why many have wondered whether Berk’s departure implies that there’s a rift between him and his costars—or that he’s tired of working so much harder than the Fab Five’s other members. (The comparative difficulty of renovating an entire home in a matter of days has become a long-running joke among Queer Eye fans.)
While Berk denies the accusations for the most part—“You will have never found me quoted as saying that I have the most important job and I do the most work. All five of us are of equal importance”—he will admit to clashing with France. Last fall, eagle-eyed fans noted that Berk had stopped following France on Instagram. They’ve also noticed that Berk hasn’t been tagging France’s personal account in group Fab Five photos on that same app, even the one he posted earlier this month after the group won an Emmy for outstanding structured reality program.
“Tan and I had a moment,” Berk says. “There was a situation, and that’s between Tan and I, and it has nothing to do with the show. It was something personal that had been brewing—and nothing romantic, just to clarify that.” Instagram’s settings, by the way, are behind the lack of tags—as with many public figures, only mutual followers can tag France in images.
“Should I have unfollowed Tan? No,” Berk continues. “Maybe I should have just muted him. But that day, I was angry, and that’s the end of it. We became like siblings—and siblings are always going to fight.”
Through his spokesperson, France declined to comment.
At the Emmys ceremony, Berk adds, “we both embraced each other, and we both said congratulations. And that’s where we are right now.” Chilly as things have been, he can see a thaw on the horizon. “I will always have a very special place in my heart for him and Rob [France’s husband] and the kids. I can foresee in six months or a year, Tan and I at each other’s house being good. The Emmys was already the first bandage on that wound.”
Queer Eye’s breezy nature belies what a beast it can be to film. “It’s beautiful and amazing and heartfelt, but behind the scenes, it’s an emotionally hard show to make,” Berk says. “Queer Eye has opened up a lot of wounds—not just for me, but for my castmates too. We’ve had to open up wounds that we thought we had forgotten about and healed from, from our childhood and our past. That takes a lot out of you, to revisit those again in front of the world.”
The 42-year-old Berk has alluded to a few of those wounds onscreen. He grew up on a farm in the small, conservative city of Mount Vernon, Missouri, and left home at 15. His religious family and community were incredibly hostile to queer people: “Some person came out and they literally tried to kill him. Some guys ran him off the road one night. So I couldn’t live with this mask anymore,” says Berk. “I had to leave.”
He lived in his car, on the streets, and in a classmate’s basement until her parents discovered him. He relocated to New York in 2003 without a high school diploma and with very little money in his bank account. “When I lived in New York, there was a grocery store on 14th Street that I always had to walk to because it was the only ATM that I could find that could dispense a $10 bill,” says Berk. “I never had $20 in my account.”
Everything changed when he landed a job at Portico, a housefurnishings company. Berk worked his way up to creative director and built the company’s e-commerce division. He was running Bobby Berk Home, his own home design company, by 2006. Then, in 2017, his publicist at the time told him about a casting opportunity at Netflix. He nearly skipped the audition to go on an all-expenses-paid work trip to Spain, but ended up changing his mind at the last minute.
