Oprah Winfrey’s next big interview is not with British royalty, but with reality television royalty. Fixer Upper stars Chip Gaines and Joanna Gaines sat down with Winfrey for her next Super Soul special, which will be released on discovery+ on Saturday. In the interview, the Gaineses discussed why they left their hit series behind in 2018 and how fame left its mark on their family.
Chip, 46, and Joanna, 42, ended Fixer Upper in April 2018, around the time their youngest son Crew, 2, was born. However, a year later, they began planning their return. The couple now stars in Fixer Upper: Welcome Home and are planning to launch Magnolia Network programming on discovery+ on July 15. The linear Magnolia Network will launch in January 2022, taking over Discovery’s DIY Network.
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During their chat with Winfrey, the couple opened up about their thinking at the time, and what led them to end one of HGTV‘s biggest hits. “There were numerous things,” Joanna explained, reports The Wrap. “On my side it was, when you’re filming for four or five years, you begin to lose the ‘why.’ It’s now just this thing of like we’re just showing up. I think towards the end we just lost steam, we lost the purpose of it. We wanted to wake up every day and say this is why we’re doing this.” She later added that it “almost felt like it was wagging our tail and it was controlling us.” Chip also pointed out that the two came up with the idea to return to television in one year independently.
Elsewhere in the interview, the parents of five children said they also learned how difficult it was to handle fame. Winfrey asked the couple if they took time off from the show because they “wanted to reground.” “I want to speak on Jo’s behalf because she would never say things like this, but she is so incredibly wise, so incredibly grounded — all the things that you just described, is who Joanna is,” Chip explained.
He noted that he struggled with fame during the early days of Fixer Upper just as Joanna did. “Really what happened — and was the truth for Jo and I — was it was no big deal for her, but for me to become famous, I lost a part of myself that was really… it was sad,” the HGTV star said, notes PEOPLE. “I would say it took me a year or two while I was still filming to try to grapple with what exactly it was that I was losing.”
During that year outside the public spotlight, the couple was able to “hunker down and really kind of try to unpack what it was about fame that seemed so incompatible with my personality.” In addition to their new discovery+ programming, Chip has a new memoir, No Pain, No Gaines: The Good Stuff Doesn’t Come Easy, out on Tuesday. Their interview with Winfrey will also be available as an episode of the Super Soul podcast on March 17.
