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Ricki Lake made a name for herself after she became one of the most iconic talk shows of the ’90s, and now, she’s opening up about how she got the gig in the first place. In a new video she shared on Instagram, Ricki, who is now 57, shared the story of being cast on her show — a time when she really beat the odds and managed to be the producers’ top pick out of the 100 women who were vying for the job.
Ricki was just 23 when she was cast on the show.
And in her Instagram Reel, which she posted on Monday, Ricki explained that she was just one of many women that the team was meeting with to find the perfect host for the show.
“I was one of 100 women that they met with,” she said. “There were journalists and models and all different types of people. I was an actor. I went and met with Garth Ancier and his team, and they chose me to do a pilot.”
Little did they know at the time they had a hit on their hands, and after The Ricki Lake Show premiered in 1993, it would go on to run for a total of 11 seasons.
She didn’t realize The Ricki Lake Show would end up becoming such a big pop culture moment.
At the time, she was just a girl in her early 20s, and suddenly, she became one of the most recognizable public figures of the ’90s.
“I was 23 at the time we did the pilot and I went on the air at 24, and the show was just this sort of overnight success,” Ricki said. “To this day, I look back on it. It was such a phenomenon and no one expected it, most likely me. I had truly never, ever thought that it would be the hit that it became and sort of the cultural touchpoint for so many people.”
It probably helped that most millennials tuned in to the show every time they stayed home from school. But really, who could look away from all that drama, especially when the audience got involved?
This isn’t the first time she has talked about the show on Instagram.
In a Reel that Ricki shared earlier this month, she offered a peek behind the scenes of what filming the show was really like — including the struggle of making sure that the guests who were scheduled to appear on her show actually showed up when it was time to film.
She didn’t cast the guests herself, and she often didn’t meet them until the show began, so she never quite knew what she was getting into.
“Many times those guests would fall out. We’d have lots of things happen, whether someone was arrested, someone didn’t get on the plane, they got in a fight,” she said. “And this was back in the day of fax machines. We didn’t have smartphones or anything like that. So when a guest would fall out at three in the morning, the poor producer working on my show would have to rebook it by tomorrow’s show.”
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