Stassi Schroeder has come a long way from her days backhanding her castmates, dating chuds and lording over SUR like an icy sorority queen on “Vanderpump Rules.” She’s now a mother of two, married to the charming (and astonishingly tolerant) Beau Clark, pens New York Times bestsellers and hosts a hit podcast. She’s also the star and executive producer of her own reality show, “House of Stassi,” currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
“This is not ‘Vanderpump Rules’ and this is not ‘The Kardashians,’ this is somewhere in the middle,” Schroeder tells Variety.
Throughout the debut season of “House of Stassi,” we see Schroeder struggle mightily with trying to balance motherhood, family and her professional life, leading to clashes with her hubby Clark, who feels underappreciated and emasculated after stepping away from his casting job to be a stay-at-home dad raising their kids; her sister, Georgi, who’s still reeling from a divorce, crashing at Schroeder and Clark’s home and almost certainly hooking up with Clark’s best mate Rob; and Katie Maloney and Kristina Kelly, her former “Vanderpump Rules” ride-or-dies, who lightly disapprove of her dismissiveness toward Beau. There’s also her longtime pal Taylor Strecker (and her pregnant wife Taylor Donohue), Beau’s Italian half-sister Georgia (who’s also crashing with Schroeder and Clark) and, yes, Rob, a dude pushing 50 who only dates twenty-somethings.
Things come to a head in the eighth and final episode of the season, titled “Queen Mary’s Revenge.” The entire gang (sans Donohue, who’s beaming in via iPad) is having dinner aboard the historic Queen Mary ship in Long Beach, California, when they all hatch a plan, conceived by Maloney, to confront Schroeder over her treatment of Clark, who’s spent the entire season lamenting the dearth of affection in their relationship and missing his 9 to 5. Nearly everyone at the table, Clark included, airs their grievances toward Schroeder and, needless to say, it does not go well.
“I felt like Julius Caesar. Literally,” Schroeder says of the intervention. “Katie Maloney was Brutus, and Beau fell for the bait. I watched it happen and was like, ‘How are you falling for this?’ Kristina Kelly was like, ‘Poor Beau!’ and Beau was like, ‘Poor me!’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, my life is flashing before my eyes right now.’ I did not spend over three-and-a-half years working on this for it to lead here. It was wild. I felt very hopeless and devastated in that moment.”
Schroeder says she felt like all the progress Clark and her had made during the latter part of the season — including a romantic date they went on at the cemetery where he’d proposed — all “unraveled so quickly,” and that she and Maloney, the architect of the intervention, still have some work to do to fully mend things.
“I’ve said some things to her and we’re good, but I still have some more to say to her,” Schroeder explains. “I also think she wasn’t doing it to be cruel or to make me look bad. I think she was looking at Tom Schwartz and her marriage in terms of how resentment can build over something. I think Katie saw herself in Beau and Kristina saw herself in Beau, in the sense that they hadn’t gotten what they needed at certain times, so that was their concern. I choose to look at it like that versus friends who are out to get you.”
Beau Clark and Stassi Schroeder in the “House of Stassi” finale.
Freeform
After the gang gives her the business, Schroeder’s “Dark Passenger” comes out — her name for her explosive alter ego — and she finds herself lashing out at everyone before crumbling into a ball of tears on the floor of the ship. But don’t be alarmed: She is adamant that she and Clark are in a good place and, even though she infamously dropped the D word on “Vanderpump Villa,” that is not in the cards for the couple.
“As far as what it took afterwards, I feel comfortable being on a reality show with [Clark] because no matter what, we have that foundation where we do have each other,” Schroeder maintains, adding, “My parents have both been married four times each and his mom has been married a few times, and that was something we discussed. Unless someone does — you know what I mean — you can work through almost anything when you have respect and love for each other, so it makes having those fights and arguments on-camera easy to deal with because I know that we’re going to be fine. That might not make sense to someone who’s not on reality TV, but it does for me.”
And as far as the future of “House of Stassi” and where the friend group goes from there, Schroeder shares that she wants the cast to remain intact and may have some tricks up her sleeve as far as getting the show renewed for a second season.
“I hope that this [cast] remains intact, but it’s going to follow the stories that are naturally happening. So, if someone isn’t talking to the rest of us then that story is going to fall off,” says Schroeder. “It’s time I let everybody else’s stories also spider out, and I would like to go to each of them and pick up where we left off.”
What about her and Clark? “It took time after filming to have those difficult conversations again and force ourselves to refocus and see what the real issues were,” she admits. “And we still have those conversations.”