Summer House’s Kyle Cooke breaks down in unseen late-night footage, confessing his alcohol-fueled party persona was just a mask to survive a crumbling marriage with Amanda Batula - suong

It didn’t happen just when the cameras were rolling. In a never-before-aired late-night conversation, Kyle Cooke — the man behind the Loverboy brand — had a rare, emotionally raw moment when he confessed that his drinking habit, so familiar to Summer House viewers, was nothing more than “a mask for everything I didn’t want to face in my marriage.”

The exchange, reportedly filmed late one night in the Hamptons after most of the cast had gone to bed, showed Kyle alone in the kitchen, swirling his drink while speaking with a longtime producer he’d known since Season 1. “I know people think I’m just the party guy — some beer-loving idiot yelling in the backyard,” Kyle began, his voice low. “But honestly… if I don’t drink, I have to sit with what’s really going on between Amanda and me. And I don’t know if I’m strong enough for that.”

According to a Bravo insider, this was the first time Kyle openly admitted that the tension and emotional distance between him and Amanda Batula — long speculated by fans — was very real, and something he’d been numbing himself from with every bottle of Loverboy.

Amanda, often seen as the calmer and more nurturing one in the relationship, had previously hinted on-camera that she sometimes felt like she was “raising a grown child.” But this unseen moment reportedly revealed the other side: Kyle was drowning not just in alcohol, but in fear, self-doubt, and the weight of a marriage slowly pulling apart at the seams.

Even more surprising? The footage was completely cut from the final edit of the season. According to crew members, producers felt the tone “didn’t fit the flow of the show.” But to those present, that quiet, unfiltered breakdown was “the only time Kyle ever truly asked to be seen.”

That summer in the Hamptons, cracks became chasms. From conversations about starting a family, to frustrations about finances and communication, Amanda and Kyle seemed to be living parallel lives: one clinging to their image as a “power couple” running a booming business, and the other silently wondering, “Is anyone even asking how I’m doing?”

“There are moments I feel like I’m living with the broken version of myself,” Kyle reportedly whispered in that late-night footage. “I love Amanda. But I don’t know how to love her in the way she needs. And drinking helps me forget that.”

Longtime Summer House fans have debated for years whether Kyle and Amanda were truly happy, or just holding each other together out of habit — or contracts. But the truth might be somewhere in the middle: they love each other, deeply, but they’ve become trapped in the expectations that reality TV built around them.

It remains unclear whether Bravo will release this emotional footage in bonus content or at the reunion, but insiders say there’s a growing push internally to show more of “the real Kyle” — not the yelling, beer-chugging persona, but the husband quietly unraveling behind closed doors.

And if that clip ever airs, viewers might finally see a different version of Kyle Cooke: no longer the chaos-loving party king, but just a man trying to drink away the loneliness of feeling unseen in a house full of people who think they know exactly who he is.