Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix
Interior designer Jeremiah Brent is no stranger to the world of reality television. Alongside his husband, Nate Berkus, Brent has starred in home-makeover shows across HGTV, OWN, and TLC GO. Nothing, though, could have prepared him for the emotional ride of Netflix’s Queer Eye, which he joined last year for its ninth season, set in Las Vegas.
Brent, who lives in New York City with Berkus and their two children, Poppy and Oskar, founded his own design firm in 2011. With offices now in Los Angeles and New York, he also published his first book, The Space That Holds You, in 2023. Following Bobby Berk’s departure early last year, Brent joined Queer Eye veterans Jonathan Van Ness, Antoni Porowski, Karamo Brown, and Tan France, taking on the role of the show’s design expert and reimagining the homes of the everyday people — or “heroes,” as the show affectionately calls them — who are their clients. It’s the heroes, Brent says, that ultimately define the show, and it’s their stories that have made for such a poignant season. “There were bits of us,” he says, “and bits of our own stories in everyone we worked with.”
Let’s begin with how your adventure with Queer Eye started. When Bobby Berk decided to leave, how did you get involved?
Well, here’s what really happened.
Tell me about it.
They actually asked me to do the show before they asked anybody else, but we had just had Poppy. She was a year old. There was no way that I was leaving, even though I really wanted to do it. I respect the show tremendously; it’s this Trojan horse. It’s all fabulous and silly, but the truth is, it’s about connection and reframing the perspective and the lens through which you’re looking at people’s lives and their stories. So I was super sad to say no to it, but it was the right decision.
Fast-forward to the ninth season. I’d become really good friends with Tan France and Antoni. And so, the producers came to me and they said, “Would you ever consider doing the show?”
It’s not at all what I expected; it is such an emotional journey! I was in tears throughout Jen’ya Reynolds’s entire episode.
It pushed me way outside of my comfort zone. I gave the show everything I could possibly give it, but I still got so much more from it than I could have ever given it. I’ve never had a clear community around me before. You know what I mean? Like a real community with an unspoken connection. I’m still trying to unpack everything that I learned and everything that it gave me. And it was just the wildest thing because I don’t think people realize what the show really is. And in my opinion, there’s never been a more important time for it.
And you were the new kid on the block. That’s never easy.
The cast had been through a lot. They were thrown into controversies this last year that they really didn’t deserve to be thrown into. We’ve got Jonathan Van Ness, who’s been speaking out for transgender rights, advocating for communities, and there’s a lot of responsibility that they carry around.
I think my one intention going into the show was … well, two: I wanted to be a soft place for them to land. I really wanted them to feel the support, because I don’t need to be number one. I don’t care. And I also wanted to remind them what they do. I must’ve said it 300 times while we were shooting — “Do you see this? Does this ever get old to you?” This isn’t fake TV. You really change people’s lives. You can’t fake that.
From left: Karamo Brown, Jeremiah Brent, Antoni Porowski, Tan France, and Jonathan Van Ness.
Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix
How do you select the people that you end up working with?
They all go through casting. They’ve been developing and working with them for a long time. Jen’ya Reynolds, her name came into casting through my mother-in-law. They’d worked together. Jen’ya’s never seen the show before, she didn’t know anything about it. It was not something she submitted for. But it is one of those moments where you just knew instantly.
And I think that’s just a testament to how I believe we need to move through the world currently. It’s showing up with somebody wide open and asking them to share everything. Our design firm handles multimillion-dollar projects, and it’s a whole different world. But in the show, we have $40,000 for an entire renovation. And it’s not about the opulence of anything. It’s about reflecting people’s experiences. It’s exactly what design is supposed to be about, what it’s always supposed to have been about.
I’m shocked to hear that $40,000 is the budget. What’s the time frame to do the makeover?
Three days.
That’s crazy!
It’s why I look like I’m 98 years old the whole season. I did not sleep. Which is fine, I’m not complaining. I’ll never complain about the work, because it’s a privilege. That’s where it’s all at. But I’m a unique personality type for it. I live for it.
Photo: Netflix
How long were you in Las Vegas filming?
I was there for 14 weeks altogether.
Nate said that he and the kids came out every two weeks or once a month.
I sat down, because I’m a type A, which I’m coming to terms with — type A creative, though — but I organized everything within an inch of its life. I talked to Poppy’s school, and I found a homeschool teacher in Vegas. They came every two weeks, would go back for two weeks, come back.
How did you feel about Vegas?
I felt like it is a real microcosm of what’s going on in this country. And I think that’s why it was an interesting choice. The abundance of wealth versus the lack of it. It reminded me a lot of where I grew up, strangely. As a matter of fact, the house that I rented while we were there had the exact same floor plan as the house I grew up in, the same kind of track house. And I walked in, and for the first 20 minutes, it was like the last 20 years of my life just didn’t happen.
What was the most surprising thing to you about your experience?
We’re loud. We’re over the top. But even Clyde, for example, Clyde is not aligned with me politically. And I can guarantee you, he doesn’t have a lot of nonbinary people in his living room often, or small gay decorators. But watching that show and going through that experience with him, it’s a reminder for me to go through life without pretenses. Our culture is one side or the other, but there’s this entire space in between. Coming in and not trying to tell you what to think, but instead showing you how I live, how I love, how I value, how I see you. That’s the real beauty of the show.
Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix
Do you think the people you worked with understood that this kind of transformation would be so deeply emotional?
No, I don’t think so. My castmates are like, This is one of the most emotional seasons we’ve ever had. And I think that’s because everybody cared so much. Antoni overthinks, like the lineage of food and where it comes from, what’s affordable for someone to make, what’s got a long shelf life. Tan spends copious amounts of time with the wardrobe and what’s going to make a silhouette work for this or that body. Things that are not easy. Somebody said to me the other day, “The makeovers don’t look like what I would expect for you to make over for TV.” And I was like, “Well, that’s great because I’m not decorating.”
But what did they mean by that?
I think with decorating on television, it’s very prescriptive. It’s been a decade of how you can create something to flip it and sell it, and you just move on. It’s very transactional.
And a lot of decorators have one style that they do really beautifully. For me, with the show in particular, in this show, I wanted to make sure that every episode felt incredibly different because every individual is different.
And I really wanted it to feel like this kaleidoscope of different design styles, because I’m not designing for you. I’m not designing for me. I’m designing for each person, and if Paula likes bunnies and flowers and hummingbirds, so be it.
Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix
When we see you come into the house, is that the actual first time you’ve seen the space? Or were you able to sneak in before cameras rolled and get a sense?
I would say 70 percent of the time, I only see imagery. Sometimes if the schedule’s okay, I can sneak in, but I ask to not do that because I have to be in the space to kind of figure out what I want to do to it.
So is the next season also going to be in Las Vegas?
No, it travels every year. I don’t know where it’s going to be next season. By the way, it’s not even fully officially picked up again for another season, so nothing’s guaranteed. I hope it is. There are so many other stories, especially going into next year with everything that we’re about to navigate. Right now, it’s the only queer television show on Netflix, on that streaming platform. So, when you think about the importance of it, I really hope that it resonates with people and that it continues.
If it is picked up again, would you start filming in the spring?
I think so.
What was the biggest takeaway for you?
How far I’ve gotten away from myself. I had kind of compartmentalized, as most people do. And I remembered where I began. There were so many full-circle moments in this show, like helping a single mother. As somebody who was raised by a single mother for the first half of my life, I’ll never be able to describe what it felt like to give her the opportunities you wish you could give your parents, you wish you could give her.
It’s an unpopular thing to be a decorator saying that design only goes so far, but it’s true. Beautiful stuff is one thing; it’s very American to make something because you want it to be beautiful. I’m interested in something being beautiful because it’s yours. I think that’s kind of my mission and what I’m hoping to keep chipping away at.
For someone who’s watching the show with a space that isn’t working for them, where would you tell them to start? What would you say to them about making changes without being overwhelmed?
Well, I think there’s a lot of power to changing the way you’re curating the things you already own. Sometimes I think back to when I lived on my own and I had $2 to my name, I would move everything out of the room, put it in the bedroom, be in an empty space for an hour, or sometimes a whole day, and then I’d bring things back and place them completely differently. For me, design is so rooted in ceremony and ritual. And I think just trying to reprogram everything you’ve been told about home, and instead crafting a space that’s for you, not for other people, that’s the really important distinction.
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