“Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness used his live podcast show at Vulture Festival to enlist the audience into trolling Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s wife Louise Linton on social media.
“You know who I really hate?” Van Ness, 31, asked the crowd on Sunday during a live taping of his podcast “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.” “Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary who has this Scottish wife, who’s a nightmare and she has a head full of terrible extensions … She’s kind of like the republican Erika Jayne, but I like Erika Jayne. She’s got like the knock-off bad version of Erika Jayne’s hair.”
He went on to explain the story in which Linton went after a commenter on social media who posted on a photo of her in designer gear getting on a private jet, “Glad we could pay for your little getaway #deplorable.” Linton shot back at the commenter that she and her husband have given more to the economy per year than she’d be willing to sacrifice, adding the commenter was “adorably out of touch.”
Van Ness asked the audience, “Did you guys see that story? … Should we all get on Instagram and say something weird to her right now? This is really a lesson in two wrongs do make a right and it also shows that hell hath no fury like a gay man who saw a news article that they did not like.”
He then asked the crowd, which included his surprise guests Justin Theroux and co-stars Tan France and Antoni Porowski, to pull up Linton’s Instagram so they could all leave the same comment, “You’re not @theprettymess [Erika Jayne’s handle] … We remember.”
Over 72 audience members, including France and Porowski, commented on a photo of the Secretary of the Treasury’s wife in a sound studio.
Van Ness and Theroux’s hour-long chat covered everything from the actor’s childhood and spending time in China to working on “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
At the end, Van Ness brought his co-stars onstage for audience questions, and like most “Queer Eye” episodes, had the cast and audience shedding tears.
