Producing the Real Housewives may actually involve a lot of artifice, but there’s one thing that can’t be faked: the staggering amount of money spent on parties and glam.
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna shocked her fellow Melrose Place alums Daphne Zuniga, Laura Leighton, and Courtney Thorne-Smith on a recent episode of their Still the Place podcast when she revealed that it’s the cast who foots the bill for those expenses, not production.
“You said that each cast member has to pay for her own parties?” Thorne-Smith asked incredulously.
Rinna confirmed: “And your own hair and makeup and wardrobe! Imagine that. That’s the part that’s the hardest, because we’re used to being dressed,” she said, gesturing to the prolific TV credentials of the assembled actresses.
“They want your real life,” Rinna said, repeating the explanation she said she was given during her nine-season stint on RHOBH. “Their take on it is: You should look how you look, because this is your life. So they want that. But I didn’t love that part of it, because I spent all my money on hair and makeup and wardrobe. You know what I mean? You just spend it all.”
Leighton shared in Thorne-Smith’s shock, reasoning that Bravo, the network behind the sprawling Housewives franchise, must not want true pictures of their stars’ lives, because “at home, you don’t do your hair and makeup every single day, so you’re in their world. So they should pay for how they want you to look in their world.”
Rinna agreed, saying of the explanation she was given, “I still don’t buy it. I think that wardrobe — they’re just cheap, and hair and makeup should be covered. I really do. That was the hardest thing for me.”
Courtesy Everett Collection
Rob Estes, Andrew Shue, Marcia Cross, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Thomas Calabro, Jack Wagner, Josie Bissett, Grant Show, Laura Leighton, Brooke Langton, David Charvet, Doug Savant, Heather Locklear, and Lisa Rinna for ‘Melrose Place’
Rinna joined The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in a guest role in season 4, and was promoted to main cast the following year, where she remained until she resigned after season 12. During that time, she threw and attended countless parties, had to pack numerous costume changes for international trips in far-flung locales like Dubai, China, and Italy, and cycled through a number of hair and makeup transformations — all on her own dime.
Bravo exec and Housewives wrangler Andy Cohen has detailed the budgetary breakdown in the past, explaining that while it’s the network that pays for most vacations and group dinners, he did admit, “The women take the planning of the vacation really seriously, and so it’s case by case, but we have paid for them.”
Leighton, Thorne-Smith, and Zuniga may have been surprised, but it’s well known among Housewives fans that cast are expected to pick up the tab on their parties and glam — because many of those cast members have been open about that expectation.
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“People always ask about the planes and the parties and stuff, and they do think everything is paid by production — even other cast members from other shows ask about that,” RHOBH O.G. Kyle Richards said at BravoCon in 2022. “We are actually paying for those things ourselves.”
Real Housewives of Dallas star Stephanie Hollman concurred in a 2024 TikTok, explaining, “Whenever you throw events — so usually you have to throw one big thing a year — you pay for that and those events can be very, very pricey because they’re expected to be nice and look good on film and that will cost you.”
You can listen to Rinna’s full conversation with Leighton, Thorne-Smith, and Zuniga on Still the Place above.
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