Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
The past year has been filled with change forScott Foley.
In addition to navigating the pandemic, theScandalalum and his wife, actress Marika Domińczyk, along with their three children (Malina, 11, Keller, 9, and Konrad, 6) moved from Los Angeles, where he’d lived for the bulk of the past 30 years, to Connecticut.
Then, Foley, 48, agreed to do something he’d never done before: He became host and judge ofEllen DeGeneres' furniture design competition series,Ellen’s Next Great Designer, which premieres Thursday on HBO Max.
“I’m not a host! I’m an actor,” he tells PEOPLE with a laugh in the latest issue. “I have no idea what I’m doing, but I took it very seriously. It was a lot of fun.”
Of course, those weren’t the only big changes for Foley and his family in the past year. They also adopted an adorable puppy, named Duke Pumpkin, who joined his pet family that includes two more dogs and an “old cat.”
Below, Foley describes his transformational year, from his new role — which plays on his love of both reality television and woodworking — to what led his family to leave sunny California behind in exchange for East Coast winters.
Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max
How did you wind up involved withEllen’s Next Great Designer?I’ve been a furniture builder, sort of tinkerer my whole life. Four or five years ago I was on Ellen’s show and I said one of my dream jobs would be to hostThis Old House. And Ellen said, “Why can’t you do that?” and had me do a mock audition. That episode must’ve stuck in her craw and when they were looking for a host for this, they reached out. Of course, I jumped at the chance.
How was shooting it during the pandemic and traveling to visit the designers at their warehouses?This was unlike a lot of these other competition reality shows that I’ve been watching — whether it’sBlown Away, which is the glass blowing one, or the flower arranging one, which my kids love — where they rent a warehouse space and everyone does the challenges in the same space. Which is interesting and allows for a certain amount of drama to be there. But because of COVID, the challenges were given to the contestants over Zoom in their own studios and shop spaces. I’d just moved to the East Coast and over half of them were within driving distance from me. So I’d hop in my pickup truck to see them work in their own environments. Everyone was masked and tested all the time and we were very careful. And then we would all sort of converge in Los Angeles. It was a really clever way of doing a show like this.
Do you think the show benefitted from that format? Because some of the pieces and materials are quite large.Some of these pieces are HUGE! I had to come up with a design challenge — it was like Scott’s episode — and we’d just moved to a new house, so I tasked these challengers with building a structure for my kids to play on that would fit in my yard. Some of these things were massive. I mean, monkey bars and swings and gravity balls. Crazy things they came up with. If we had done it the normal way, I don’t think we’d be seeing some of the final products that we were ultimately able to get from them.
What inspired the move to Connecticut?My wife grew up on the East Coast and had been longing to return for awhile. I was sort of hesitant because of the nature of what I do and being in Los Angeles has always seemed sort of important. But about two years ago, my oldest came home from school and said, “Dad, why don’t we have a plane?” And I thought, “Hey babe, it’s time to move!” So that was really the main impetus. Not that they couldn’t have a normal life in Los Angeles, but we felt it would be a bit easier to make their lives normal somewhere else.
Gregg Deguire/Wireimage
How has the transition been?Okay so far. Because of the pandemic, we haven’t really been able to take advantage of the town or the community the way we hoped to. But we’re getting there. And we really like it. I’ve lived in L.A. for 30 years and came to believe winter sucks. I’ll tell ya, winter’s not that bad! We kinda liked it, being inside and hanging out with one another.
Have your kids been able to go to school or has it all been from home?When they first started school this year, it was all home school and then they went into a hybrid model. They’re back in school now but there was a positive case in my middle child’s class about a month ago, so his whole class had to quarantine after they’d been in full-time school. We had to break the news to him, and he said, “You know, it’s OK. At least I’ll get to see my friends without their masks on.” Poor kids! Way to look at the bright side, but it just broke my heart. I don’t even know how to wrap my head around what they’re going through. But everyone’s just doing their best.
Ellen’s Next Great Designerpremieres Thursday on HBO Max.
source: people.com
