Vanity Fair: What were some of the biggest lessons you learned in your seven years away from reality TV?
Stassi Schroeder: I look at reality TV like therapy. I’m not a therapy person. I don’t know if I just haven’t found the right person or the people that I’ve been paired with just didn’t work for me. Reality TV is my therapy because everything that we’ve swept under the rug, all the things that we just didn’t say, we’re forced to talk about it, to work through it over and over and over and over again and address all our feelings. It happens to come naturally to me. I don’t understand what it is. The second that I was on The Amazing Race, I felt incredibly comfortable. When I did Queen Bees, I felt really comfortable. The second I started Vanderpump Rules, I don’t know. It comes very easily to me, but it doesn’t for most people. To do reality TV without wanting to build something and use that as a platform is a hard life. It’s hard to really put yourself out there. But being away from it also made me miss it.
Is any area of your life off-limits with this show?
Nothing is off-limits. You can’t make good reality TV and have boundaries. But there’s something very freeing for all my skeletons to be out of the closet. Try and find them. Because I really don’t like the feeling of having secrets.
At one point, you ask Beau why he didn’t resent you for the cancellation. What has it been like filming with your husband again, and putting your marriage under the microscope in the process?
Reality TV forces you to face issues that you didn’t even know you had. I learned a lot about him. There was a lot that he wasn’t telling me. Beau and I weren’t having those conversations every day because life gets in the way. And then if one of us is annoyed or we have something that we want to talk about, then the day goes on and by the time we put the kids down, we’re tired and we don’t feel like communicating and talking about these serious marital topics. But being on a show forces you to do that.
It’s just unfortunate because I fight hard. I feel my emotions very strongly quickly. That’s the dark passenger in me. Then I get over things quickly, which my closest people know about me, but I don’t think viewers know. I get heated so fast, so upset, say the craziest shit, like, “I never want to see you again,” and then I bounce back. I don’t harbor those feelings.
Does reality TV feel a little like the family business at this point?
We’re like this circus family. My children were born into this, for better or worse. And if they choose to dabble in that when they get older, at least I will have given them a head start at nepotism.
