“I thought I’d be the first one here!” Chrishell Stause says when she gets to The London West Hollywood hotel’s Boxwood restaurant 15 minutes early. She’s understandably antsy: It’s five days after Netflix dropped the ninth installment of Selling Sunset, the real estate docu-soap Stause stars in, and two days before the reunion airs. “It’s the weirdest feeling,” she says of the post-season period, when the spotlight is brightest. “Every season — whether you have a good one or a bad one — it’s a little surreal, because you’re the topic of everybody’s conversation.”
Stause has spent the intervening days posting defenses, regrets, and corrections about the season to her Instagram stories (always in her trademark style: baby blue or pink text bubbles). Yes, she wished she didn’t bring up castmate Nicole Young’s alleged prior drug use (which Young has denied). Yes, Stause looked contemptuous in that weird confrontation with new castmember Sandra Vergara — the woman didn’t even have her real estate license at the time. But soon, mercifully, none of this will be her problem anymore, because after nine seasons, Chrishell Stause is leaving Selling Sunset behind.
“I’ve vacillated back and forth with this decision in the past,” she says. “I have to be honest — having come from nothing, it’s really hard to turn something like this down.” Plus, the show’s producers can be persuasive. But now, even “Jesus Christ himself” couldn’t get her to come back for season 10 — and neither can Selling Sunset creator Adam DiVello, who Stause says has been calling and texting “100 times a day.” (Netflix did not comment.)
“I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t need the show financially,” she continues. “I’m lucky to have other forms of employment, because it’s no longer good for my mental health.”
Even for viewers who treat Selling Sunset like background TV, it was clear tensions between castmates were brewing far beyond what was happening on screen. This season, especially, Stause takes issue with the editors’ various omissions. “I get it, they want to make a light show,” she says. “And if I was doing a show with less problematic people, I can totally see their point.”
Stause has clashed with costars over alleged homophobic or transphobic language before (which her castmates have denied using or supporting). This season, though, one of her key conflicts was with Emma Hernan, whose boyfriend, Blake Davis, Stause plainly disapproves of, to say the least. “He compared being nonbinary to having a mental illness,” Stause alleges. (Her partner, the musician G-Flip, is nonbinary; Davis has denied using “derogatory language” in conversation with Stause.) “He constantly posts anti-trans stuff… He thinks it’s too woke if you don’t sing the N word in songs. He posted something the other day, with a gun in view, saying he wants to ‘sue [me for lying] my dick off.’” (Bustle reached out to Hernan and Davis for comment; Hernan disputed some of these claims on the Selling Sunset Season 9 reunion.)
Stause worries the way the show was edited makes her seem like the bad guy. “With Emma, I just look like an overbearing friend,” she says. “But there are so many things that would’ve completely vindicated me and my opinion, and they left all of it out.”
There’s also the matter of how Davis allegedly treats Hernan, Stause adds. “They would break up, and she would tell me these horrific things that he would say to her, that he would do,” she explains. “He thought it was funny to say, ‘If you ever do that again, I’ll beat you.’ Who jokes about that? It’s not funny.”
Before Stause tells me she’s quitting, it seemed like the show was already at a crossroads. Very few believable friendships remain, and there were a few hints this season that cast members might disperse across Netflix: Will Bre head to Selling the City? Will Mary head to Selling the OC? Either way, it’s hard to see how Sunset succeeds without Stause. Since the series debuted in 2019, she has been its most obvious star and moral center, and she comes off both charming and recognizably human.
“If they do continue, I wish them the best,” Stause says. “If they do do another one, by then, I may not watch it. I don’t know. But I have no ill will toward the show. The show has given me so many opportunities, and I don’t want to be bitter about it, even though I’m leaving not in the way that I would’ve loved.”
In one of Stause’s final scenes, she’s at home with G-Flip discussing their desire to have a baby and, potentially, move to Australia. Since filming, Stause, 44, has shared more of her experience with IVF on social media. “It was really hard going through IVF through the process of filming Selling Sunset,” she says. She tried a few rounds but was unable to secure viable embryos; now that G-Flip has finished their recent tour, Stause says they will start their own egg retrieval in hopes that the couple can conceive via surrogate. “Now that I’m done, and after the reunion airs and the chatter dies down, I might give it one more chance,” she says of IVF. “It’s a process and it’s expensive as well. And now I’m looking for a new job, so I need to be wise about this.”
Without Stause, Selling Sunset loses its only queer-identified cast member — a position she says could be isolating at times. When I ask if she experienced the show differently before and after coming out, she laughs, and says, “How much time do you have?”
“I think people think they’re an ally, but they’re not realizing the lived experience of having lived half of my time at the brokerage being ‘straight’ and then living the other half really noticing the stark differences,” Stause says.
One example: “I think in this group, it took a while for them to take my relationship seriously.” To some extent, she gets it: That music video was quite the hard launch — though they weren’t yet together when she shot it — and it came shortly after Stause’s breakup with boss Jason Oppenheim. “I actually understand a lot of the jarringness of the whole thing,” she says. “Iconic, love it, wouldn’t change it. We laugh about it now, but I can look back and understand.”
In her post-Sunset life, Stause imagines she’ll hang out with fewer straight people. “I just really love being around accepting, beautiful-hearted people,” she says. “And I also have to say to the allies that aren’t in the community — they are out there, and I love them just as much. The real ones that will stand up and fight with us and use their voices, I want to be around those people.” (Her wardrobe will “probably be more gay,” too, though she already rocked a number of menswear-inspired looks this season: “My inspo was bossy lesbians.”)
As to where you might see her on-screen next, Stause is tight-lipped but shares a few ideas. She previously campaigned on Instagram to replace JoAnna Garcia Swisher, who is straight, as the host of Netflix’s The Ultimatum: Queer Love, which was recently canceled. “I would love it if another streamer wanted to pick it up, and I would love to host it,” she says. Stause has also been pitching a new, more fluid dating show with a competitive element. “I have a passion for wanting to host a show like this, and I would die to do it,” she says. “It would be a dream job.”
She’d like to do more acting — a former daytime soap actor, Stause has kept her IMDb page full between Sunset seasons — and is shopping a script she says she loves. More queer roles are on the agenda, too. “Since I’ve come out, I think four or five things I’ve done have all been queer,” she says. “At first I was like, ‘Guys, I can still play straight!’ But to be honest, I want to lean in. Let’s do a holiday movie where I’m leading it and we’re doing queer stories.”
By this point, we’ve been chatting for more than an hour, and although our glasses of white wine are almost empty, there’s hardly a dent in the French fries we ordered. I lament how hard it is to eat while doing interviews. “You know what it reminds me of — when you’re filming a reality show,” Stause says. She seems relieved. No longer will she have to sit across from a woman she hates, order meals neither wants, and storm off before a single vegan egg roll is touched.
She looks back at her final reunion with mixed feelings: Of course there are things she wishes she had said, or had said better. But there was also a point during its taping when she felt herself withdraw. “I think, after so many hours, I felt like, ‘Sit here, get through it. You’re not a quitter, but you never have to do this again,’” she says. She starts to laugh again. “‘And I promise you, to your soul, you won’t.’”
