Real Housewives’ Brynn Whitfield Gets Into It
I am, without reason, explaining to Brynn Whitfield what it was like to stand outside in the hot suburban air, dancing on a street corner in a Chuck E. Cheese costume at 16.
It is an unexpected detour to take with the exceedingly chic star of The Real Housewives of New York City. We are deep into a conversation about the terrible jobs we’ve done for money. She spills to me about quitting restaurant jobs, or working as an adult nanny in D.C. for an eccentric couple. I counter with a story about how once, at that same animatronic child entertainment factory, cops who’d rushed in through our back exit had roped me into corralling a woman who’d taken a baby from a nearby store. I was tasked with delivering her a pizza and pretending to be normal. She gasps, and exclaims: “That is the craziest fucking shit I’ve ever heard in my life.” I joke that I walked away in complete shock, went straight out that same exit and grabbed my illegally acquired cigarettes from my 1987 Jeep Grand Cherokee. She bursts into laughter, inquiring: “Were they Lucky Strikes?” No, baby blue American Spirits, like a champ. “Back in high school I used to smoke Lucky Strikes,” she says, “because in the real cigarette factories, when they’re making a new cigarette, legend has it, they’d sweep it up and make Lucky Strikes.”
There is an ease to our conversation that I hadn’t expected an hour prior, when I’d nervously ducked into Sant Ambroeus in the West Village. I note to myself — and my editor, Matt Wille — that it looks like I’d been kidnapped in the night at the Bedford-Nostrand station by Italian mobsters. Women in Loewe and Balenciaga and ballet flats spill out around me, chatting about their chic jobs and the Sabrina Carpenter concert. The hostess isn’t shocked to see me, but she does give me the once-over as I nervously tug at my Prada jorts and Ann Demeulemeester-like knit sweater. Whitfield is quick behind me, rushing in for a hug and a smile, opting to sit side-saddle in our booth instead of across.
Immediately, I note that she is a practiced conversationalist, infinitely charming and utterly disarming. Whitfield is not my first brush with a Real Housewife, nor will she be the last, but she is totally singular in her willingness to really go there with me. Like an aside about shoplifting from an Old Navy in high school: “Last year, in the scene where Erin, Sai, and I are having coffee at a flower shop, I had this mauve colored thing on with Prada boots and a rain jacket. Sai goes, ‘Oh my god, I love this! Where’d you get it?’ It was Old Navy, and I was like, ‘I haven’t shopped there in 20 years. I used to shoplift from there, so I figured I might as well pay it forward, give them some air time.’” She laughs, and says much like me, producers had been totally disarmed in the moment. “I don’t care. Like, I was sixteen!”
The ease with which she glides through anecdotes other Real Housewives might hide from cameras — or reporters with recording devices — made her a standout in the much-debated reboot of the beloved Bravo franchise. Playful is how I described her in my notes from our lunch, but it’s not just that. She is lacking the self-seriousness that often comes with the position, like in her predecessors on the very same franchise.
I casually mention, deep into our second negroni, there is a Miss Piggy like quality to her personality, dressed up and outrageous with a vulnerable, sensitive core. I’ve visibly caught her off guard with the remark, and worry I’d overstepped, but she surprises me again. Then, she says, “Do you know how much I fucking love Miss Piggy?” I release the breath I’d been holding in. “I always try and trace back what I watched when I was growing up,” she says. I used to watch, with my grandmother, shows like I Love Lucy and Mary Tyler Moore, who were like, ‘I’m independent, but I’m helpless, but I’m a feminist.’” She bucks at accusations, often from castmates, that she’s fake or put-on. “This is 100-percent who I am, and it’s the real me. But I was trying to trace it back, and we watched so much TV. My grandmother told me that when I was a baby, when she got me a little playpen, I’d just walk around while Johnny Carson was on. She’d never seen a kid just watch or fall asleep to Johnny Carson.”
She sobers at the mention of her grandmother Mimi, who’d stepped in to raise (and later adopt) Whitfield and her siblings as children. It is an experience she’d been quite open about in the reboot’s first season, recounting to cast and viewers how it’d shaped her drive to make something of herself. “I think I only sought things from outside, because I didn’t have it,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be something, or to have something. I became so obsessed with different things, and that created who I am. So I think my personality was born from those older sitcoms.”
Did she expect to reveal as much on camera, or did she go in with a different plan? She thinks a moment, and then admits that perhaps a part of her wanted those secrets, or deeper truths, out there. “I actually went in thinking that I would be more reserved, and then it just, like, happened. I read on TikTok, and I support this, that maybe some people go on reality TV, or do these things, because they want to get it out. Subconsciously, they don’t even realize it yet, but they actually do.”
Following the train of thought, I ask about how she put herself together that first season. Did she plan ahead, or did her style express itself more naturally? “I was like, ‘I’m not gonna go into debt. I’m gonna wear the shit that I have, designer stuff, or whatever. There’s a scene of me and Jessel shopping, and it’s so funny. I was wearing thigh-high purple boots and a sweater and jeans I literally had taken out of my laundry basket. A dirty Hanes sweater from Amazon, and my fur, and I had my New York Times and my coffee because I had totally fucking forgot I had a scene,” she laughs. “They were like, oh, you got dressed! I was like, no, dude, it’s actually kinda dirty.” She gets quite serious for a moment, and tells me, sipping at her negroni, “Even if I made all the money in the world, I wouldn’t dress any differently. I’d spend money on, I don’t know, a boat.”
I broach the subject of the upcoming season, which I have seen a preview of before our chat. “This season wasn’t the easiest for me,” she says. But she jokes that she tries to maintain levity about the experience by “not getting sucked into the matrix.” She says her job description is “to get into it,” which can make it hard to not sink back into old wounds from filming months prior. Still, she beams when discussing her castmates. She loves to film with Erin: “Erin’s actually the best, I think, out of all of us. Better than me! When you’re interacting with her, she actually doesn’t see the cameras, and she can bring you into it, and it’s real.” On Jessel, who appeared in our PAPER People cover earlier this year, she says the accidental TriBeCa spokeswoman is unchanged by the cameras, and sometimes seems as if she’s forgotten they’re filming a TV show at all. Jenna Lyons, alongside Erin, is her “MVP” of the season. There’s one particularly delightful story, about wandering her palatial apartment while the many assistants mill about, eventually finding her way to Lyons’ bedroom, where she’s feeding her dog a french fry.
We stay on the subject of Lyons for a bit, as I’m intrigued about their relationship. Of all her castmates, Lyons and Whitfield had the most unexpected connection of the new cast. The disarming aura Whitfield carries about her pierced Lyons’ tough exterior, revealing a softer, more eccentric side. “It’s partly me, but it’s also her,” she says. “In 2D she’s so intimidating, and in 3D she’s not.” Whitfield’s childhood also came in handy here, too. “I came from nothing, and I don’t give a fuck who you are, or what you do, I’m not intimidated.” But her inclusion in the cast did push Whitfield to really go there in the first season. “I didn’t join because of her, but I joined because I was like, oh, if she’s doing it, then it’s going to be different in some way, shape, or form.”
The waitress arrives with a caprese for me and pasta for Brynn; we’re discussing our mutual small-town origins. She asks me: “Do you feel different when you go back? Do you feel that people make you feel different, or do you actually just feel different?” Disarmed, again, I think for a second. Hesitantly, I say that maybe it is just me. She nods, agreeing, and off-handedly remarks: “You’re looking at them and you’re seeing them in a different light. And you’re like, I make myself feel differently.” I say that I had a hard time of it, and when I go back, it feels like being haunted. Brynn grows serious again, telling me, “I’ve gone back, and I get a weird feeling. I get freaked out that I could have stayed and ended up there. That freaks me out, and it makes me want to run back to make sure that everything I created is real.”
Her mood grows pensive, fork idling in the pasta, and the conversation slouches towards the fact that her appearance on reality TV changed her relationship to the genre. “It’s hard for me now. I was so obsessed with reality TV. Now, when I watch things, it’s like, ‘Is this how I’m being perceived?’ People will say, ‘Oh, it’s an edit.’ No, it’s a mirror. It’s been fucking Windex-ed to shit.” She also says she didn’t want to be influenced, or “get in my head about what I’m doing.” She laughs, and says when the feeling gets too much: “I just shut it off and then go watch Industry.”
Her previous hesitancy immediately dissolves as we gush about the HBO hit’s impending season finale. She hastily admits: “I love Yasmin. I watched the latest episode and I literally said to myself, ‘I wish a guy would have done that to me.’ They’re at the hotel, and they’re out on the boardwalk. He brings her a hot dog, whatever, and she sees that it’s real intimacy, and she sees that it’s real love, and she turns it into a game. That was me. Maybe there’s still like, 10% of that left in me. I push it away, and I turn it into a game. ‘You want me? You can’t have me.’” She smirks, continuing, “I’m working on that myself, as I don’t have to have a person catch me on shit, call me on shit, snap me out of it. I’m learning how to snap myself out of it. That was 100% me verbatim, pushing people away the second I got that, and playing games, and falling back on my sexuality.”
Our conversation is winding down at this point, and I ask if the show has complicated her personal life, or made it harder. “Harder, for sure.” An answer I hear often, and I prime a follow up to ask why. But she surprises me again with that same lucid introspection: “Maybe it’s me, though, maybe I’ve raised my standards. Like wow, I’m capable, I did this. That was hard, that wasn’t easy, but I did it on my own.”
Photography: Charles Skyes
I am, without reason, explaining to Brynn Whitfield what it was like to stand outside in the hot suburban air, dancing on a street corner in a Chuck E. Cheese costume at 16. It is an unexpected detour to take with the exceedingly chic star of The Real Housewives of New York City. We are…