Melanie “Mel B” Brown, who is back on America’s Got Talent for Season 21 alongside Simon Cowell, actress Sofia Vergara and comedian Howie Mandel, shared insight into her bond with some of her fellow judges.
Speaking to Billboard, the Spice Girls singer described her “spicy” equation with co-judge Cowell, saying, “He’s like my annoying older brother. He winds me up, then I wind him up. And then I go to his house in Malibu, and I take my kids with me, and we have a nice dinner, and we chill out together.”
When asked if it’s all meant for the camera and the show, Mel B insisted, “No, he annoys me. Just like I’m sure your siblings annoy you. It doesn’t matter if I’m on-camera or off-camera, if he annoys me I’m going to tell him!”
Mel B, who replaced Heidi Klum for the freshly launched season, previously served as a judge from 2011 to 2018. According to the singer, the showrunners “fired” and “rehired” her because “they couldn’t get enough of me!”
“It’s just a fun show. I would be watching with my kids, with my husband, with my dogs anyway… So it’s nice to be able to go back there and be involved in a job that I love, that I think of as my family,” she noted.
Elsewhere in the Billboard interview, Mel B talked about a rule of thumb/criterion she swears by when giving a golden buzzer to a contestant, regardless of what the genre of the act is.
“I just want to be mezmerized and I don’t want the act to stop, whether it’s a comedian, singer, dance troupe, magician, pole acrobat, I just want to be fixated,” she said.
She further addressed what it is like to be “very much like an empath” and support contestants on the show while also judging their acts.
“I very much feel what they’re feeling, so if they’ve really pushed themselves to their limit and laid it all on that stage, I’m on that journey with them, and I don’t want that journey to end,” Mel B noted.
The newly rehired AGT judge also spoke about the impact the show has had on viewers.
She said, “It gives the whole family something to talk about, something to look forward to, something to be entertained by… It’s a universal, happy place to be watching it.”