Stassi Schroeder Is So Over Secrets

It’s the job of a reality television producer to take even the most mundane moments and spin them into high-stakes drama. But the medium’s most gifted stars don’t need any help crafting a story out of nothing — and few do it better than Vanderpump Rules alumna Stassi Schroeder.

Over high tea at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, I ask the 36-year-old to walk me through a “scene” from her day-to-day life now as a mother of two. (She married casting director Beau Clark in 2020.) “The second we get in the car, Hartford and Messer are screaming bloody murder at the same time, the whole ride home,” she tells me in the emphatic rhythm of someone who spent their 20s filming “confessionals,” the narration-style interviews that hold reality shows together. “When we get into the house, we ignore her tantrum. I can see her, I make sure she’s safe, but we literally go about our life as if this blood-curdling scream isn’t happening for an hour.”

Sounds normal enough for life with two kids under 4. But how does she think this would play out on Vanderpump? “We would look like the most neglectful freaking parents. They would probably zoom in on the messes, the dirty plates in the kitchen sink,” Schroeder says. “Anything that would help shape [the idea] that ‘Wow, they’re awful parents. Their lives are falling apart.’”

Sure, there are a few things that Schroeder misses about the Bravo show that made her famous — she admits to feeling FOMO when it received its first Emmy nomination in the wake of “Scandoval.” But feeling like a pawn on a chess board? Not so much. “I don’t have to sit at a table like, ‘OK, I have to talk about how Scheana [Shay, Schroeder’s former co-star] called blah blah,’” she says. “There’s a wonderful freedom in that.”

These days, Schroeder keeps busy with her lifestyle podcast, Stassi, which she branched out into a live tour last year that sold out nearly every stop; the riotous crowd at New York City’s 1,500-capacity Town Hall that I saw felt like a sorority I didn’t know I wanted to pledge. She’s also an author: Her latest irreverent self-help book, You Can’t Have It All: The Basic B*tch Guide to Taking the Pressure Off, about rethinking “girlboss” ambition, comes out Sept. 10. “Something I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that I love the word ‘no.’ There is such a power when you say no to opportunities or going to a party,” Schroeder says. “In terms of becoming a mother, your backbone gets so much stronger.”

Schroeder says she turned down a spot on the Vanderpump spinoff The Valley. (“There’s a better chance of me doing Celebrity Big Brother UK,” she tells me.) “Everyone has a fear of ‘remaining relevant,’ but there’s so much power in being out of the spotlight. You have to evolve a little bit. You need to let people miss you,” she says. “No one wants to see, hear, watch, or read the same thing over and over. So taking a break and not being relevant is powerful — just like saying no.”

“One of the main things that keep me up at night is: ‘What are the things that my kids are going to be talking to their therapists about?’”

Her absence on TV, it turns out, is indeed just a break: Three weeks after our tea, Schroeder shocked fans by announcing new development deal with Hulu that will see her join the second season of Vanderpump Villa (reuniting her with her former boss, Lisa Vanderpump) and create her own show, Stassi Says (a “docu-comedy” in which she helps people through various identity crises).

By the finger sandwich portion of the hour, Schroeder starts hinting at her comeback. “Are you under the impression that I wouldn’t go back to reality TV?” she asks, with an amused look on her face.

I tell her she’d have to be offered a really, really good deal. “Yeah, that’s how I feel,” she says. “I love reality TV. Even through all of the sh*t, how it makes you a psychopath, [how] it’s not good for your mental health, I still enjoy doing it.” She shrugs. “I know that there’s something out there that will make sense that won’t be cat fighting, and it will be safe for my kids, my marriage.”

Schroeder never had any intention of leaving Vanderpump. She’d been part of the show — which follows the lives and messy affairs of a group of friends who, at least in the first few seasons, were servers at Lisa Vanderpump’s SUR — since she was a dark passengering, birthday b*tch of a 24-year-old. She was fired in the summer of 2020, however, after former castmate Faith Stowers, who is Black, recalled a racist incident involving Schroeder and fellow Vanderpump star Kristen Doute. Schroeder apologized, and, in the aftermath, began working with a diversity coach and wrote a book about her “cancellation,” Off with My Head.

“My whole adult life was on Vanderpump Rules. It was all I knew. I would’ve stayed on forever,” Schroeder tells me. “I’m still friends with a lot of the producers, and they always joke, ‘Remember when you said you were going to give birth and let one of the cameramen just literally be right there in your vagina?’”

“I love reality TV. Even through all of the sh*t, how it makes you a psychopath, how it’s not good for your mental health, I still enjoy doing it.”

Her willingness to seemingly bare all made her a breakout star of the show’s early seasons. Yet in You Can’t Have It All, Schroeder opens about some struggles that weren’t on camera. In raw, relatable, and at times still brutally funny prose, Schroeder details her experiences with self-harm, suicidal ideation, and Adderall addiction. Schroeder is uneasy when it comes up in our conversation; she fiddles with her diamond pinky ring and instinctively touches her forearm and wrist. It’s her first time talking about a lot of this publicly, not to mention her first profile interview in nearly five years. But she credits motherhood with inspiring her to speak up.

“When I look at myself naked, Hartford will see a little line, and she’ll be like, ‘Mommy, ouchie,’” Schroeder says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God, that feels dirty. How will I ever explain to her that this was something that I chose?’” She hopes sharing her story will clear up some of the stigma around self-harm and make it easier for others to talk about. Plus, she likes the feeling of being a truly open book. “It just feels like it’s been a secret, and I don’t like secrets. I think that's part of maybe why I do what I do — podcasts, just living out loud. Because there is this feeling of: ‘I’m free. Everyone knows my sh*t. I don’t have to hide anything.’”

Schroeder’s best friend, podcaster Taylor Strecker, says that resilience is Schroeder’s secret weapon. “She doesn’t second-guess herself. She doesn’t spiral. She doesn’t overthink things,” the Taste of Taylor host says. Strecker recently saw this in action when she accompanied Schroeder to the photo shoot for her book cover. “There are thousands of pictures to choose from, and of course, she looks hot in every single one. But she would come to me with: ‘These are my six [selections], this is what I was trying to convey.’ I would toil over that decision for months.”

Returning to television, however, required some careful deliberation. “I never felt like I was completely done with reality TV,” Schroeder tells me after her Hulu announcement. “I knew it would have to be what feels authentic to who we are as a family, and Beau was super supportive of the idea.”

“Doing a reality show was originally something I didn’t want to be a part of,” adds Clark, who appeared in later seasons of Vanderpump. “Then I enjoyed it on and off, but it put a lot of negative strain on my emotions, and I went to therapy after. So when this stuff came up, I was just like, ‘I don’t want to be around people who are one minute smiling at you and the next minute stabbing you in the back.’ I don’t want my children around that or seeing it.”

Even now, Schroeder still wrestles with how to juggle motherhood with the cameras. “One of the main things that keep me up at night is: ‘What are the things that my kids are going to be talking to their therapists about, the way that I talk about my parents?’” she says. “The only thing I can think of that they could be pissed about is that I showed them to the world.” Schroeder recently showed Hartford a scene from Vanderpump — her and Clark’s engagement — for the first time, and while Hartford didn’t quite understand what she was watching, her enthusiasm for seeing mom and dad on the TV was undeniable. “But then I think, ‘What’s the alternative?’ They could also, 18 years from now, say, ‘Why didn’t you ever show me?’”

Will Schroeder still be on television then? She’s not sweating it. “I’ve already been at a point where I felt like, ‘Oh my gosh. I don’t have any more jobs. Should we move to Italy?’” she says. “I’m like a roach — a survivor. You can’t get rid of me.”

Photographs by Pat Martin