Tyra “Smize” Banks is currently filming the next season of America’s Next Top Model in New Zealand. Rumor had it she recruited Kimora Lee Simmons and Vogue’s André Leon Talley to judge with her. However, New Zealand’s celebrity-hungry press are watching Banks and her crew’s every move, and they have unearthed that, contrary to what we suspected, André Leon Talley is a new full-time judge on the season. Kimora Lee Simmons is merely a guest judge. New Zealand–based Cassius blog reports:
Tyra, Nigel, Jay M., Jay A., and new judge, Vogue Editor-at-Large, André Leon Talley, have been in Auckland since the first week of December, and we’re not kidding when we say, everyone is obsessed with spotting or stalking them like an endangered species lol, which they are as New Zealand rarely hosts many Hollywood celebrities.
TVNZ even has video of the crew fetching their bags in the airport, which mostly consists of people holding cardboard over the camera lens and a cloud of black umbrellas hiding someone who must be famous. But there’s a flash of Miss J (Miss J, people!) going through customs or something.
With Talley on every episode, all you people who could never get into the show and only watched it on Oxygen those weekends Bravo was playing marathons of Shear Genius now have a reason to tune in every week — for at least the last twenty minutes. Cassius reports that they shot the CoverGirl challenge yesterday. We’re curious whether they’ll engage in any bungee jumping, canyon swinging, or other “miscellaneous madness” New Zealand is known for. We’d definitely tune in to watch Tyra tell some poor 19-year-old she has to go home because she failed to smile with her eyes while swinging across a canyon at 150 kilometers per hour suspended only by a rope. If she puts blackface makeup on a terribly sunburned white girl, we wouldn’t put it past her.
Summoned by America’s Next Top Model [Cassius Blog]
Tyra Banks touches down in Auckland [TVNZ]
