Was Mark Consuelos a stripper? Truth behind Kelly Ripa’s husband as bronzed hunk at Tampa strip club in '90s photo
A few old pictures of ‘All My Children’ star Mark Consuelos have left many jaws hanging where he can be seen posing shirtless surrounded by many women. The polaroid picture from the '90s was shared by a Florida woman called Candace Yowell, who claims to have frequented a male strip club in Tampa with her girlfriends.
Talking about the picture from years ago, with a man who appears to be Consuelos, Yowell told Daily Mail, “I found it in an old box of stuff at my home. I looked at it and was like, 'hey, that's Mark Consuelos.’ He wasn't famous then, to us he was just one of the strippers in banana hammocks at Stingers.”
To check out the old photo that seems to be circulating all across social media platforms, click here.
Did Mark Consuelos strip for money?
If what’s been said is true, Consuelos is seen posing for the camera with a wide smile while putting his sculpted bronzed body on display. Yowell recalls, “It was always fun in that bar. The guys all had their own little, sexy individual dances and they also danced together as a group. Then they'd walk around the bar and you'd put money in their g-strings and they'd kind of hump your leg and grind all over you.”
However, much before these pictures were made public, his wife Kelly Ripa had said in an interview with Vanity Fair that her husband stripped when he was yet to established himself in the industry and even gushed about his ravishing looks.
She had said, “A lot of hot guys in Hollywood have done that. He was straight out of college — he went to Notre Dame but he finished his degree at the University of South Florida. So, there he was in South Florida. He’s gorgeous [and], looking to break into show business. So, he started off as a roadie to a group of these guys, and then they talked him into stripping.”
“He is so unbelievably gorgeous, with a Mexican father, Italian mother born in Spain and raised in Italy. And, I will never give him up," she added further before explaining how her parents “worshipped” him and never were upset with him for taking his clothes off for dollars.
The cutest love story
Despite a rather wild and fascinating past, Consuelos is now a happily married man and father to three children with Kelly. They first met on the sets of their 1995 show ‘All My Children’ and Consuelos played her lover interest, Mateo Santos. For Kelly, it was love at first sight, apparently.
She once told Redbook Magazine, “When I met Mark, I was just sort of thunderstruck. The next day I went up to him and, although I didn’t even know his name, I said: ‘I had a dream about you last night. We were married and had a little girl and were on a plane to Rome.’” The duo eloped after a year of dating and got married in Las Vegas in May 1996.
Stripper or not, Mark Consuelos' stunning photos always make girls go weak in the knees. Don't they?