Why Kelly Ripa Is Absent From ‘Live’ After Husband Mark Consuelos’ Break

One week after Mark Consuelos took the week off from his cohosting duties on Live with Kelly and Mark, his wife, Kelly Ripa, is taking her much-deserved break.

Ripa, 54, is on summer vacation, which in the past has lasted for about a week. Consuelos, also 54, has been doing the show with a rotating cast of cohosts in her absence.

Nobody Wants This star Jackie Tohn joined Consuelos on Monday, August 4, with Step Up actress Jenna Dewan filling in on Tuesday, August 5, and Rita Ora pinch-hitting on Wednesday, August 6.

Guest hosts David Muir, Jerry O’Connell, Carson Kressley and Steve Patterson all stepped in for Consuelos while he was off last week.

Live, which premiered as The Morning Show in 1983, has a long history of guest hosts. When Ripa and Consuelos first met Tohn, 45, they agreed she was a perfect candidate.

“When Kelly and I got done meeting you and walked off, we said, ‘Wow, she would be a great fill-in,’ ” Consuelos told the actress on-air.

“Really?” she replied. “That makes me want to cry. Thank you.”

Despite her current vacation, Ripa has been hosting Live since 2001 when she replaced Kathie Lee Gifford alongside Regis Philbin and has shown no signs of slowing down. She told Entertainment Weekly in 2023 that, while she has thought about retiring, she doesn’t have any plans to do so.

“I am always thinking about retiring,” she said with a laugh. “It is my favorite topic of discussion.”Ripa and Consuelos married in 1996 and have three children together — Michael, 28, Lola, 24, and Joaquin, 22. They have cohosted Live since 2023, though Consuelos admitted in July that the two of them see less of each other now than they did before they were coworkers.

“We work together in the morning and then we usually go off in our separate ways and we see each other for dinner,” he told Us Weekly exclusively at the Running With the Wolves premiere on July 23.

Regardless of how much time they spend together, the dynamic between the couple works. As Consuelos said, it’s because he doesn’t just love his wife — he likes her.

“I really like my wife. A lot,” he said. “The love’s always going to be there, but I really like my wife.”

Ripa added that the two have been together for so long that their shared history has strengthened their bond.

“We have a shared history and there’s something really nice,” she told Us. “Our kids have been watching, like various documentaries about things and they’re like, ‘Were you and Dad alive for that?’ And I go, ‘We were married for that!’ Like, we were married when that happened. So it’s very nice to have a combined decades long history with a person.”