Simon Cowell Opens Up About Rift with Cheryl Cole

If she gave him a chance, Simon Cowell would take Cheryl Cole back on X Factor UK tomorrow, Mr. Nasty says in a brand new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Also here, he goes a bit into the details of the rift between him and his former protégée.

Fans of the show know that Cole was brought over to the US for Cowell’s new show from its British counterpart so that, when she was fired from the former after just 5 days on the job, she lost the other gig as well.

Cowell says that he doesn’t regret any of the decisions he’s made about Cheryl because they were all business, but he does wish she hadn’t taken all this so personally.

Though he doesn’t say what happened to make producers fire Cheryl so soon after she started the job as judge on the US version of the show, which premieres this fall, Simon hints that Cheryl’s attitude was to blame.

He tells THR that she kept acting like Princess Diana and was shocked when he told her she needed to up her game, because the American market was considerably tougher than the British one, where everyone knew who she was.

However, after producers sacked her, Cowell reached out to will.i.am, Cheryl’s manager, to let her know that she could always come back to the British show, with her salary intact and no hard feelings.

“I never heard from her. That was it. I think her silence was quite damning,” Simon recalls. He hasn’t spoken to his former protégée since.

“I stand by the decisions I’ve made, and I knew the implications when I did it publicly – that I was going to get slaughtered, and I did,” he adds.

However, it’s all about money – nothing of this was personal and Cheryl should have been wise enough to see it.

“[I]n a heartbeat – you’re not drowning puppies here,” he says of the possibility of working with Cheryl again, sometime in the future.

“You’re offering someone who’s got millions of dollars more money and more work. And if people think that’s cruel, then they can do that to me on a daily basis. I’ll take it twice a day,” Cowell adds.

For the full interview, which also features Cowell’s fellow judges on the US X Factor, see here.