Choreographer Robin Antin turned The Pussycat Dolls from a little known burlesque troupe into an international phenomenon in under 10 years. Now she’s hoping to work her magic again with a new group, and this time she’s documenting the entire thing for a reality series. On February 18, the CW premieres Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious, which will find Antin and her crew attempting to find three girls out of thousands to form a new girl group known as Girlicious.
Today, BuddyTV sat down with Antin to discuss how the show differs from The Search for the Next Doll, whatever happened to previous winner Asia Nitollano, and how many dramatic catfights we can look forward to in the new series. Continue reading for the complete transcript and mp3 audio file of the interview.
Hi, this is Don from BuddyTV, and today I’m talking to Robin Antin, the creator of The Pussycat Dolls and The Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious. So with the new show premiering on February 18, I just wondered if you could give us an overview of the series and explain how it differs from last season.
Sure. Well, same format in the way that we have girls auditioning. This time they’re auditioning for a new pop group, before we were auditioning for one girl to be in The Pussycat Dolls. This time I wanted to do something that was different, obviously. I’ve been planning on starting up a new group for quite some time, and I thought this was the perfect way to be able to show what I do, show how it’s done, and the real thing. It’s not fake, it’s not like I’m just making it up and I’m going to start a group that’s never gonna happen. I’m really doing this. It’s a group called Girlicious, and I got the name sort of like I was inspired by just thinking that I love the word “delicious,” and I thought, well, I wanted to do something with the word “girl” in it, so I put “girl” and “licious” together and it worked. This one is 15 girls, we auditioned all over the country, they moved into a house, and each week we narrow it down one by one and we end up choosing a group of three.
I heard that Girlicious is going to be a different style and a different look from The Pussycat Dolls. How is that going to differ?
Yeah, it’s going to be, I would say kind of a more urban style twist to it. It’s still going to have the pop flair for sure, but more urban than The Pussycat Dolls, in a way if you think of a Ciara or sort of a TLC kind of vibe. The girls, they’re not going to be wearing high heels and all that. It’s going to be more like they’re wearing super funky high-tops, and the styling is really, really cute. It’s really more kind of the sexiest version of a girl going to the gym. They wear these tube striped socks and these little gym shorts, and it’s real athletic but in a real sort of high fashion kind of way. I’m just really into fashion, I’m really into staying ahead of the curve and making it something that’s fresh that young girls are gonna love, but the women are gonna love, because it’s always about female empowerment for me.
When you bring in all the girls to audition and you have to narrow it down to 15, what do you look for in those girls?
Well, first of all I look for a girl with confidence. If a girl comes in and she’s got sort of everything, and she can sing and she can dance and do all that, but she’s not confident, it’s hard to teach someone confidence. Not having that confidence sometimes might come from so many other things that it’s hard to dig through, hard to get to the root of it. Although I’m really good at getting into a girl’s head and sort of trying to make her feel good about herself, because we’re all different and we all come in different shapes and sizes. Some girls are maybe more obsessed about their weight or about whatever, and they want to be a different kind of body, and I’m all about own what you’ve been given, own what you have, but just make it better. Just make it the best you can make it. I’m all about confidence.
Is there any particularly good drama that we can expect on this season?
There’s such good drama that you’re not going to believe it. There’s one catfight that’s just like, are you kidding me? You have a bunch of girls living together and there’s always going to be something. The thing is they go into this reality show competition, and you know they talk about it now, after choosing them they’ve all calmed down and they’ve all realized what they have and how appreciative they are now, but we talk about what happened back then. It’s all real.
After the winners are announced, how long will it take before we get an album and a tour and everything from them?
Well, our first single is going to drop literally that night. You’ll see a video that night on the finale, you’ll see the video of the single. The album’s going to be done, so now we’re just making our decision on exactly what date that’s going to be dropped. It’s probably going to be within that first couple weeks.
Last season Asia won The Search for the Next Doll, but didn’t end up joining the group. Was there anything else behind that or did she just want to go solo?
Yeah, that was really what it came down to. I love Asia, and I picked her for a reason, because I think she’s so talented. She’s a great dancer, she’s a good singer, she’s beautiful, and I really got along with her. Even though there were problems on the show, in the end she’s a good girl, she’s a mom of a baby herself, she’s a mother. She really, really had dreams of being solo, so putting her in a group wasn’t her ideal thing, and maybe that’s something I should have known, but I really didn’t see that coming. It was okay, it’s fine. Everybody was cool with it. We were cool, she was cool, and I’m there for her no matter what. Whatever the girl wants to do, she knows I’m there for her, she knows I’m supportive of her career and all that.
Aside from Girlicious, do you have any other projects coming up that you wanted to talk about?
I am actually creating another group that’s going to be launching in Europe. It’s more of a European thing, it’s more dance oriented music, and it’s called The Paradiso Girls. Actually, I put Chelsea from the first season in that group. She’s in that group, and that’s going to be launching straight out of Europe. Like I said, it’s real dance music, very different than The Pussycat Dolls and very different than Girlicious, so that’s really exciting. Then I’m working on a Pussycat Dolls boot camp dance convention. It’s just gonna be teaching girls who want to know how to become a Pussycat Doll, or to know how to become a solo star or a girl group. It’s like a dance convention, or a convention of dancing and singing and everything. It just kind of travels all around, and will have a lot of people, a lot of staff that are teaching dance classes, vocal classes, hair tips, makeup tips and all that. It’s great for young girls, and it’s great for women of all ages actually, because there’s going to be a lot of women too who want to know and learn how to dance like a Pussycat Doll and all that. So that’s going to be Pussycat Dolls boot camp.
– Interview conducted by Don Williams
(Image courtesy of Exposay.com)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
