Jersey Shore star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi reveals how looking for her birth parents helped her
“relate” to costar Angelina Pivarnick during an exclusive interview with Life & Style.
“I feel like we can relate to that in some way,” Nicole, 37, tells Life & Style about Angelina, 38, while promoting season 8 of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation. “We definitely had our ups and downs and I feel like now we’re at a good place to where if we do have drama with each other, we know to just, like, nip it in the bud.”
While fans previously saw Angelina look for her birth father during past seasons, Nicole – who was adopted – will be searching for her birth parents during the upcoming season of the MTV show.
Angelina has previously had issues with Nicole and other costars in the past, though she says that she believes “Angelina knows we don’t wanna have problems with her.” Nicole continues, “We don’t want drama. We just wanna have a good relationship. So I feel like we’re on a good page right now.”
Not only did Nicole share an update about where she stands with Angelina, but she also reveals to Life & Style why she wanted to learn more about her birth parents.
“I feel like everyone knows I was adopted. So, I never thought that I would wanna, like, reach out or, like, find my birth family or anything. But then I saw Angelina do it. Trying to find her birth dad and everything that happened with her,” Nicole explains. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’”
Nicole says that Angelina’s journey to meet her birth family “sparked [her] interest to just reach out” to investigative genealogist Pamela Slaton, whom Angelina previously worked with, to see if she could help her.
“But I only wanted to, like, see pictures of what they look like. Like, what does my birth mom look like? Do I have any siblings? Because I always wanted siblings,” Nicole continues. “I was like … I just wanna see, like, what everybody looks like. And then it turned to, ‘OK, maybe let’s reach out.’ Like do a text and say like, ‘Hey, like, thank you for giving me life. I have a great life.’”
After Nicole opened up communication with her birth family, she said it snowballed “into things that [she] wasn’t ready for.”
Nicole Polizzi, Angelina Pivarnick
Nicole adds that she leaned on costar Jenni “JWoww” Farley during her journey to meet her birth family because her mom was adopted.
“It was just a lot of things that I didn’t know that I was gonna do and I did,” Nicole says of the experience. “And I’m still going there.”
Jenni, 40, adds that the experience was “very natural” for Nicole, noting that the show didn’t force her to find her birth parents.
“It was very natural. It was beautiful,” Nicole agrees. “I was just like, ‘All right, let’s try it out.’ But yeah, it’s crazy.”
When it came to her parents’ reaction to her searching for her biological family, Nicole insists they were supportive from the very beginning.
“They always supported me. I just feel like me as a parent now and thinking of adopting a child and then they wanna figure out, you know, where they came from. I know exactly how my mom would feel and my dad,” Nicole shares. “But also, they wanna protect me.”
Jersey Shore: Family Vacation season 8 premieres on MTV Thursday, May 29 at 8 pm ET.
