Queer Eye reportedly a pretty toxic place to work, partly due to Jonathan Van Ness' "rage issues"

It seems like things were far from fabulous behind the scenes of Netflix’s feel-good hit, Queer Eye. This might not come as a total shock to fans who followed either the recent, extremely sudden departure of design expert Bobby Berk or reports of carjacking and other crimes plaguing the set of their most recent season in New Orleans. But the severity of the issue, specifically as it relates to grooming expert and internet personality Jonathan Van Ness, is troubling, to say the least.

This new information comes from a wide-ranging Rolling Stone report, in which the magazine spoke to 10 anonymous Queer Eye staffers, as well as an undisclosed number of other “well-placed sources,” that characterized Van Ness as an emotionally “abusive” “monster” and “nightmare,” who had “rage issues” and was constantly putting people down on set.

“[There’s] a real emotion of fear around them when they get angry. It’s almost like a cartoon where it oozes out of them. It’s intense and scary,” a source said of Van Ness, who uses he/she/they pronouns. One staffer estimated that they would have an outburst at least once a week. (“He was a yeller,” they said.) Another said that it was “at least once a day” that “they would need to yell at somebody. It might be something small, but there’s always going to be somebody to point out and blame and make the villain of the day.”

“When he comes on set, everything changes if he’s in a bad mood,” a source shared. “Working with him is very difficult in any capacity.” This apparently extended even to the other members of the Fab Five—Berk, Karamo Brown, Antoni Porowski, and Tan France—whom they “didn’t want to ever share the spotlight with.” “There were times when we couldn’t even shoot scenes with certain members of the Fab Five together because it got so bad,” the source continued.

It was all of this tension that indirectly led to Berk’s departure. According to the report, most people on set—including the stars of the show—assumed the series was going to end after its recently aired eighth season, and had already begun planning for other things. But when Netflix made the surprise decision to renew the show—owing, at least in Berk’s approximation, to a gap in programming due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes—he was the only one who didn’t re-sign. This came as a shock, he told Vanity Fair in a separate interview. “We’d just assumed that the show wouldn’t come back if we all didn’t come back. I was like, I’m not going to be having FOMO ’cause the show is not going to happen. I had become at peace with it.”

Unbeknownst to Berk, however, France had allegedly been campaigning along with Porowski to replace the former home-builder with their friend, interior designer Jeremiah Brent, who was announced as a full-time cast member last week. It was “mean-girl antics,” in the estimation of one source.

The full report delves a lot deeper into all of this drama and bullying and is absolutely worth a read if you’re a fan of the show or just like to read about drama in general, but the following quote from another anonymous production member sums it up pretty well: “It’s not a new story that a boy band falls apart,” they said. “Essentially they were a group of people put together in their mid-thirties and told to be best friends. But people don’t expect that Queer Eye could be that. That’s truly what it was: a manufactured boy band with big personalities that certain ones were favored and certain ones were not, and then eventually [things] turned really toxic.”

Representatives for Jonathan Van Ness and Netflix did not immediately respond to The A.V. Club’s requests for comment on this story.