The King of Bravo, Andy Cohen, is opening up about the emotional toll of the heated Summer House reunion amid Amanda Batula and West Wilson’s ongoing romance drama.
“I would say that the Summer House reunion was top 10 most tense reunions that we’ve had,” Cohen, 58, told Us Weekly and guests at the Newport Beach TV Fest Present’s Variety’s Creative Impact in TV Award to Andy Cohen event on Friday, June 5. “I think that, especially when you see next week’s episode, you’ll see what I mean.”
The Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen host continued, “This is a real group and there was real emotional fallout among this group and it was… it’s [that] this group is rocked and devastated and it’s very real and it was very emotional.”
Cohen even went so far to admit that he “left” the reunion “truly spent,” despite not being “in it” in the same way as the hit reality TV series’ cast.
“I was just, you know, directing the conversation,” Cohen clarified.
News broke in March that Amanda and West’s once platonic relationship had turned romantic in the wake of Amanda’s split from her estranged husband Kyle Cooke and West’s previous relationship with Amanda’s former BFF, Ciara Miller.
“This isn’t, like, a sex scandal. It was, like, hanging out,” West told Cohen in the official teaser of the three-part reunion, which has given fans a front row seat to the fallout of the pair’s romance.
“Over the past six years, I have been your f***ing champion,” Ciara told Amanda during the reunion. “I couldn’t fathom that I would be sitting here pissed that you’re f***ing my ex.”
Despite the ongoing drama engulfing much of the cast, an insider exclusively told Us that the romance between West and Amanda is only growing stronger.
“West and Amanda are still dating,” the source told Us in May, revealing that “the cast doesn’t think they’re going to last.”
“West took Amanda to meet his parents already in May,” the insider added at the time. “So they are getting serious.”
On Friday, Cohen admitted to Us that after a while, the timeline of the pair’s friendship-turned-relationship became irrelevant after it was discussed during the emotionally-charged reunion.
“The story was the betrayal and the feelings and how it affected the group,” he explained. “And I think that, to me, I guess that the headline was how visibly shaken a lot of them were. I mean, there was Jesse Solomon — [he] spent the good chunk of the last 25 minutes [of the reunion] sitting there, kind of crying for real. He was very shaken and so I guess it was the emotion that really stood out to me.”
Despite the high-stakes reunion, Cohen told Us he wasn’t nervous heading into filming.
“I felt the weight of it in the same way that I was in,” he said. “I was leaning in, I was hyped, I was energized — I wasn’t nervous. Sometimes I get nervous, you know, when I went in and talked to Ciara before the Summer House reunion, and then I went in and talked to West and Amanda. I get nervous for that a little bit, because it’s intense.”
He continued, “It’s intense, being on a reunion, if you had a normal season. This was so elevated and intense.”
