Lisa Vanderpump is spilling the tea on how the new Vanderpump Rules cast was chosen for season 12’s reboot.
“I felt that Vanderpump Rules, it was at its high, being nominated for Emmys. We had great ratings, but I felt like we told the story. And I thought at some point that it became a little bit more complicated to film,” Vanderpump, 65, exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the show’s Tuesday, December 2, premiere, adding that she was honest with production about “not wanting to go down on a sinking ship.”
After news broke that Tom Sandoval was cheating on his longtime live-in girlfriend Ariana Madix with friend and fellow castmate Rachel (Raquel) Leviss, Vanderpump told Us the “dynamic” among the OG cast — including Tom Schwartz, Katie Maloney, Scheana Shay, Lala Kent and James Kennedy — was irrevocably changed.
“People didn’t want to film with each other,” she explained. “The dynamic was broken. It was shattered in so many ways.”
That’s when she decided it was time to revamp the show and get back to basics. When Vanderpump Rules made its debut in 2013 with additional cast members Stassi Schroeder, Jax Taylor and Kristen Doute, all of the featured players worked at Vanderpump’s West Hollywood restaurant SUR as bartenders, waitresses and hostesses. The series followed the inner dynamics of 20-somethings mixing business with pleasure and the drama that comes with it. By the end, most of the cast had left SUR to pursue other ventures after finding fame on the popular reality show.
“I thought it was time to do something new. And I felt that we had many talks about it,” Vanderpump told Us. “The restaurant business is to actually have access to a restaurant. It’s a very unusual situation. Most people wouldn’t do it or couldn’t do it.”
Vanderpump added that new castmates Marcus Johnson, Natalie Maguire, Shayne Davis, Kim Suarez, Venus Binkley, Jason Cohen, Chris Hahn, Angelica Jensen, Audrey Lingle, and Demy Selem were already working at SUR when she approached them about the opportunity to star in a rebooted version of Vanderpump Rules.
“I knew we had another group of cohesive people that had worked here for years. So I thought, ‘Okay, let’s put them on camera, see what the network thinks,’ and they loved them, but the authenticity was key to me,” she said about the new group. “I didn’t want to start again and try to get a group of people together and have them start working for me. That wouldn’t have worked.”
She added, “There was history within these people. And also, Gen Z is very different. They’re very, very outspoken. They want to get their opinion out.”
Vanderpump also said a major difference between the new Vanderpump Rules cast and the old crew is how comfortable they are on social media.
“I think that social media wasn’t around when we first started Vanderpump Rules. We’d only just kind of heard of Twitter. So now, they’re so used to everything being on camera that cameras weren’t really a shock to them, how they were to the first group,” she noted.
Being relaxed in front of the cameras wasn’t the only thing that shocked her about the newbies.
“They were available emotionally to share the vulnerabilities. There’s some very interesting personal stories here,” Vanderpump told Us. “They’re lovely, they’re excited, they’re hungry, they’re working here. I don’t really want to do a show that kind of branches off. It’s about the restaurant business, and it’s about their lives and how they work together, and I think that’s a great nucleus to have. So they’re there with each other, because they have to be, and that drives [the] story as well.”
Vanderpump Rules season 12 premieres Tuesday, December 2 at 9 pm ET/PT on Bravo and streams the next day on Peacock.
