Scheana Shay of ‘Vanderpump Rules’ talks ‘Scandoval’ in Toronto: ‘I was duped. We all were’

Does she have any regrets about that crop-top wedding dress she oh-so-infamously donned for her wedding (the first of two different weddings filmed for television, years apart, incidentally)?

Hell no!

Has doing reality TV for all these years made her innately more suspicious of people and/or aware of how often people are performing, so to speak (especially in our world of social media feeds)?

Yes. But, OK, no.

Does she think it is nuts that her show, “Vanderpump Rules,” has become such a pop phenom in recent months that it was even name-dropped at the White House Correspondents Dinner the other week, during the main monologue, while POTUS looked on?

Well, kind of.

Strolling into Soho House in Toronto this week, in vertiginous black platforms and a silver-and-black catsuit that was giving Eurovision, Scheana Shay (gotta love a gal with alliteration) was only too pleased to be quizzed when plopping down with moi at a booth on the second floor. Transparency, after all, is the superpower of someone in the reality TV arts as long as she has been, and transparency was what she was giving.

One of the OGs of the long-gestating “Vanderpump Rules” — a show that I have often called a kind of sleazier, battier, real-life “Melrose Place” and also a West Hollywood answer to “Downton Abbey” — she was here for a little cocktail party, hosted by Hayu Canada, and later a larger Q&A, which would draw a lively, seriously packed house (testament to the chokehold the show has had lately on tabloid culture, courtesy of an extraordinary, friend-group-blowing-up cheating scandal now known as “Scandoval”).

“A bit like going back in time,” the 38-year-old charmer told me when I nudged her about the rabbit-hole-ness of having a literal reel of your life, for a decade-plus, and the experience of watching parts of herself back. Weird, but strangely therapeutic.

“Hot Tub Time Machine,” I quipped, which elicited a laugh.

“I actually auditioned for that movie,” she came back, pinging me again with the realization of what made “Vanderpump Rules” (a spinoff of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”) so irresistible to me from the start: its depiction of a certain kind of L.A. hustle. The way it put a lens on a specific breed of restaurant servers who represented a sort of ambition that lands in the city year in, year out, hoping, praying, to make it, while trying to dodge the crush of expectations and negotiate impostor syndromes that have been a mainstay forever in Tinseltown.

That it just happened to be anchored by a messy mix of waiters, working for Lisa Vanderpump, who had all been screwing and feuding for years before there was a show? Well, that — as I have written before — is what gave it an organic-ness that simply was reality TV gold. And so … life became the show, which became life, which became the show, which became …

As much as the series has had its devoted fans — including “real” celebs like Rihanna and JLaw, who have both publicly declared their loves — none of us Bravoholics (I include myself) could have expected the Richter scale-ness of Season 10 (a point at which most reality shows are long in the tooth).

Long story short (although there is nothing short about it): Scandoval began when one of the other OGs of the show — the Peter Pan-ish Tom Sandoval — was found to be flagrantly cheating on his partner of nine years, the level-headed Ariana Madix, with their close friend, Raquel Leviss, a Bambi-eyed innocent (or so we thought) who herself had been engaged to DJ James Kennedy, until last year, and had crossed a line recently in the middle of the latest, ongoing season with Sandoval’s BFF, Tom Schwartz, who just divorced his wife of some time, Katie Maloney, another mainstay.

A handy explainer for those still catching up? One that went around the internet after it all went down (and Page Six did over 100 updates in a week, covering the story like it was its Ukraine War)? Well, someone put it in “Friends” terms: “Imagine if Chandler cheated on Monica with Rachel secretly for seven months and Joey knew all along?”

“I saw that! It was perfect,” Shay said when I asked if she had seen that particular meme circulating. Her eyes widened under the allure of her Viva Verano lashes (her hit brand).

“Clearly, my judge of character is off,” she continued, musing on how she had been a friend and supporter of Raquel: something we are seeing on the show now, as the narrative onscreen catches up to the split-screen of real-life developments, and part of what has made this season so bloody layered. The show essentially making detectives out of its audience, causing us to catch clues and little bread-crumbs of what was actually going on.

From my perspective, it has been super compelling television in the way there is text and meta-text. As much as reality TV is sometimes derided, this is an example of a show asking some pretty knotty questions: How well do we know our friends? How well do we know anyone?

The masks that people wear. And how everyone sees what they want to see and through whatever lens they are sporting. Some of its other undercurrents: the kind of indelible storytelling that explains why even the New York Times did a Scandoval explainer back in March and why JLo, too, was seen weighing in on it with the women of “The View” last week.

“To see the two of them together is the most shocking thing. And just watching back, knowing what we know now,” Shay said about her own experience watching the show. “I was duped. We all were.”

Can she see herself ever talking to her ex-friend Raquel (nee Rachel) again? Or Tom? The million-dollar question. Given the legal brouhaha that occurred with the former — Leviss famously filed a restraining order against Shay after an alleged altercation over Scandoval, one that was later dismissed — it does not seem likely. “I am done,” she said.

As a student of Bravo, though, I left our conversation not entirely persuaded. Knowing that these shows — essentially modern soap operas — depend on a see-saw of conflict and conflict resolution, I would not be surprised to see more surprising shifts in the friend group. As there have always been. It is, after all, what keeps the series going.

In fact, just this week, Bravo announced that “Vanderpump Rules” had been renewed for Season 11.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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