Scheana Shay Reveals “Scripted” Vanderpump Rules Scene

According to the Vanderpump Rules cast, nothing from the long-running Bravo reality show is scripted — except for maybe one scene. In her new memoir My Good Side, out July 22, Scheana Shay revealed that she, her co-star Lala Kent, and husband Brock Davies staged an explosive scene on Pump Rules — and explained how it almost went completely wrong.

The scene happened in the Season 9 finale, when Shay and Davies revealed their engagement while the cast was at an alpaca farm as part of co-stars James Kennedy and Raquel Leviss’ engagement party festivities. Kennedy and Leviss weren’t present when the announcement was made, but as Shay recalled, producers wanted someone from the cast to inform them about what had happened.

“Lala said to me, ‘I’ve got to tell you something. I’m getting pressure to bring up your engagement at James and Raquel’s party tonight. This is being put all on me. You and I have made so much progress in our friendship and we’re finally in a good place. I don’t want to do it,’” Shay wrote.

Shay said the entire cast felt “pressure to produce an explosive finale,” even stating “all of our jobs were kind of on the line if we didn’t deliver.” Therefore, she came up with the idea of having Katie Maloney tell Kennedy and Leviss about their engagement, and both Kent and Ariana Madix were in. “Predictably, Katie was into it, too, as she was always game to pick a fight with me,” she wrote.

How The Plan Almost Went Wrong

However, at the engagement party that night, Maloney apparently “got overserved and couldn’t see straight,” to the point of not being able to argue with Shay. “I swear if someone had asked her, she probably couldn’t even remember her name,” Shay quipped. In the end, a fully sober Kent told Kennedy and Leviss on camera, causing a huge debacle between everyone involved.

But that was exactly what they planned, and it did not affect Shay and Kent’s friendship. “I went back to the hotel in the same car as Brock and Lala,” she wrote. “I remember Charli [Burnett] seeing us leave together. She was so confused because we’d all been fighting and then we were peacefully driving away together. But we didn’t care. We’d fulfilled our self-imposed assignment and were proud of ourselves.”

In a follow-up interview with Us Weekly, Shay said she and Kent “absolutely scripted that finale,” but clarified that it was the only moment throughout her 11 seasons of Vanderpump Rules where she had planned what was going to happen in advance.

“[Lala and I] pulled Ariana and Katie aside, and we’re like, ‘We’re not going to tell production that we’re going to fake a fight … Production won’t know we did that until this comes out,’” she recalled. “That was a one-off and the only time we faked something. It was desperation over wanting to save our jobs and get another season.”