Tyra Banks Opens Up About Her Biggest Career Regret
Tyra Banks, at 51, still shines like the superstar she’s always been, but even icons have moments they wish they could rewind.
While co-hosting Today with Jenna & Friends on April 15, Tyra got real about the one major move in her career that still tugs at her. And it’s not what you might expect. The former supermodel admitted she actually regrets stepping away from modeling.
Speaking to Jenna Bush Hager, she said, “I was a model and I decided to walk away from the runway and magazines on my terms. And it wasn’t just about empowerment, it was fear.”
Back in the day, Tyra explained, the modeling industry had a brutal shelf life. Models were seen as replaceable. She’d already been working with Victoria’s Secret for a decade when the brand offered her a shiny new three-year contract. It was flattering — especially since they weren’t pressuring her about age.
“They were loving the age and all of that,” she said, “but I walked away because I was like, ‘But y’all gonna kick me out in three years.’ And I felt like I couldn’t be taken seriously as a talk show host at the time, and so I walked away.”
Tyra also confessed she was worried people wouldn’t take her seriously if she tried to move into talk shows while still modeling. So, she left, not because she had to, but because she believed she couldn’t be more than one thing.
When Jenna asked if she regrets that decision, Tyra didn’t even blink: “Yes, I do. Oh, Jenna, I regret it.”
She admitted she let old-school ideas about women’s careers box her in. In her words: “I was still in that mindset that you were told, ‘Oh no, you’re going to get kicked out and you can’t be more than one thing. You can’t be a Renaissance woman. You have to be one thing.’ But Victoria’s Secret was telling me that I could be more but I still was saying that I couldn’t. So that was kind of weird.”
Now, though? Tyra’s done limiting herself. “Just leap and keep going,” she said, “and defy what people are telling you. Now I am.”
After retiring from modeling in 2005, Tyra threw herself into America’s Next Top Model, which ran from 2003 to 2018 and made her both a household name and a lightning rod for controversy. She recently responded to the backlash at the ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Awards in February, where she became the first-ever Luminary Spotlight honoree.
“Did we get it right? Hell no,” she said during her speech. “I said some dumb s—. But I refuse to have my legacy be about some stuff linked together on the Internet when there were 24 cycles of changing the world.”
