Heidi Klum ‘Feels Invigorated’ About Her ‘Big Return’ to ‘Project Runway’ 8 Years After Her Exit

Heidi Klum is back to doing what she does best! The German-American model is making a comeback on Project Runway, and a source exclusively tells Life & Style about how thrilled she is to return.

“After almost a decade away, she was lured back to the show that she made so successful, and she’s really excited to be having another run at it,” the insider says. “When she left, she was really in need of a change.”

The source adds that Heidi, 51, and former Project Runway fashion mentor Tim Gunn “had high hopes” for their Prime Video series Making the Cut, which first premiered in 2020. However, the insider says the show “seems to have stalled, and the time away from Project Runway made [Heidi] miss it.”

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“She’s excited to make a big return. She feels invigorated and has no qualms about the long hours or the big demands,” the source continues.

Heidi also feels better than she ever did before physically, according to the insider.

“She’s confident that she looks as good as she did, if not better, than the first time around. She works hard to stay in shape, she’s very active and she also eats a very clean and healthy diet,” the source concludes. “But the truth is she’s also something of a freak of nature when it comes to her genetics. She doesn’t seem to have aged one bit and she jokes that having a hubby almost 20 years younger is her anti-aging secret.”

News broke on January 3 that Heidi would be returning to her role as host of Project Runway for the upcoming season 21, which is set to premiere on Freeform, Disney+ and Hulu sometime in 2025.

The America’s Got Talent judge’s return comes eight years after she announced her exit from the fashion competition alongside Tim, 71. Both Heidi and Tim appeared on Project Runway from 2004 to 2017.

“After 16 incredible seasons, I am saying ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to Project Runway, a show that I was honored to host and help create,” Heidi said in a September 2018 statement.

Two years later, the pair embarked on a new journey together as they launched Making the Cut, and they explained what led them to leave Project Runway.

“Our imagination was bigger than what we were allowed to do,” Heidi said in a January 2020 press conference, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Everything kind of fell apart … It was scary. We shopped it around and thought that Amazon was the best place, not only for the show but also for the designers.”

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Tim added in an interview with Variety that moving on to Making the Cut helped him and Heidi escape a creative rut they fell into during Project Runway.

“One of the reasons Heidi and I wanted to fly and saw the opportunity of Amazon as a brand new threshold is because we were in lockstep with [Project Runway.] We were stuck with the same vocabulary. We were stuck with the same sequence of events within the show,” he said.

However, he acknowledged that he and Heidi would not have gotten the opportunity to create Making the Cut had it not been for Project Runway.

“Full transparency about Making the Cut and where we are today, it wouldn’t have happened without Project Runway,” he concluded. “So for Heidi and me, there’s a lot of love and respect we’ll always have.”