Chrishell Stause Will Play the Villain If She Needs To

Chrishell Stause doesn’t seem like the kind of woman you’d associate with murder—even of the metaphorical, reality television variety. It’s a December morning, on a warm Australian day, and even though we’re speaking through Zoom, she immediately makes me feel like an old friend. As she absent-mindedly plays with her hair, she checks in on my life. What are my holiday plans? How’s the weather where I am in London?

It’s the exact type of good-natured bonhomie that fans have come to expect from Stause, who they’ve gotten to know through her appearance on Selling Sunset—a Netflix show that’s spent eight seasons following a cohort of Los Angeles real estate agents who broker big deals in neon-colored designer outfits cut both as low and as a high as decency and physics will allow.

Stause, 43, is the arguable breakout star; the one who shows up for her first day of work at the Oppenheim Group in the series premiere eager-to-please and ready to werk. To cement her position as the one-to-root-for, her famous ex, This Is Us and Tracker star Justin Hartley, told Stause he was filing for divorce via text while she was in the middle of filming season three and then allegedly leaked the news to TMZ less than an hour later. The reality-viewing public rushed to her side and hasn’t left since—an unheard-of feat in a genre where the viewership is known to be loyal today, gone tomorrow.

But we’re here to talk about Stause’s stint on season three of Peacock’s hit reality show The Traitors, which debuted January 9 and runs through March. For the uninitiated, The Traitors—whose blockbuster second season won the Emmy for Best Reality Competition Series—puts 22 celebrities (this season includes Bravo stars Dorinda Medley and Dolores Catania, Bob the Drag Queen from RuPaul's Drag Race, and Bachelor in Paradise star Wells Adams) in a Scottish castle and designates a few as “Traitors.” Each night, the Traitors murder one of the “Faithful,” who by day have to select someone to banish from the castle that they suspect of being a Traitor. (They are almost always comically wrong.) At the end of the game, if there are any Traitors left, they win the $250,000 prize pot, but if the Faithful get them all out, they split the money among themselves.

It’s a game of murder and mayhem, one that requires a bit of a cut-throat edge. And so it’s perhaps fitting that as Stause speaks to me, she shows a different side than the sunny reality TV sweetheart we’re all used to.

“My plan going in was to lay low and make friends,” she says, sitting at a vanity in a magenta-colored hoodie. “But day one that was shot to hell. I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say; I definitely made friends—but I also made an enemy.”

Stause didn’t start her career out in reality TV, but instead in scripted, daytime drama, appearing on All My Children for six years and then Days of Our Lives. When work started to slow down, Stause decided to get her real estate license and began selling homes around LA, mostly the San Fernando Valley. That eventually led to her being recruited for Selling Sunset.

That’s when things really took off for Stause. There was the reality TV show fame and the tabloid-ready divorce from Hartley. There was the book Under Construction—Stause’s memoir about growing up in small-town Kentucky—and the obligatory appearance on Dancing with the Stars in 2020. Then there was the news of a new relationship, when Stause fell in love with non-binary Australian musician G-Flip and got married five short months later, in 2023. The couple now split their time between the U.S. and Australia.

It was Stause’s relationship with G-Flip that caused her to pass when asked to appear on an earlier season of The Traitors. “When they filmed season 2, I would have basically missed G's birthday, and you can't have your phones on The Traitors, so that was really hard for me,” she says. “Then season three came around and I realized they were filming at different times. So I was like, Okay, okay, I'm in this time, because I love this show.”

Of all the hardships that Stause faced in the castle—the late nights, the physical challenges featuring a variety of bugs and serpents, facing off against other practitioners of the reality television arts and sciences—it was the lack of a phone that proved hardest. “When G and I are away from each other, we always FaceTime for over an hour a day, all the time,” Stause says. “It's just our routine. It's what we do. To go from talking literally all the time to nothing was crazy.”

She adds: “I'm very protective of my love. I feel like I spent my whole life trying to get this right, and I know that I got it right. So the last thing I'm going to do is do something that in any way puts that in jeopardy.”

The intersection of her real life and her reality life came to a head in season seven of Selling Sunset when Stause was squaring off against Marie-Lou Nurk, the new girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend and boss Jason Oppenheim. She dinged Nurk for not knowing that G uses they/them pronouns, a correction that meant a lot to those in the trans and LGBTQ communities.

“When you're on Selling Sunset and you've got all these cameras aimed at you, it is my duty to protect my partner,” she says. “They didn't sign up for this. It's the only thing I'm just terrified about, because it's the only thing that actually matters to me. I would give up everything else if I needed to protect that.”

As we’re talking, an assistant appears on screen, arriving with Stause’s iced coffee. But Stause doesn’t need the caffeine when it comes to her excitement around The Traitors. “I will say, I definitely think this will be the best season [of The Traitors],” she says animatedly. “It was insane to the point where I was just like, Oh my God, I don't know how they're even going to edit this. Because we were all on the edge of our seats and even a round table would take an hour. I think the editors need a raise because there were a lot of juicy things happening.”

Due to some strict embargoes on spoilers, she can’t say much about the show’s twists and turns. Except maybe just one teaser: “Listen, I want to play. I want to have fun. I want to get in there. But at the end of the day, I do have limits. I'm a good person. I think there's certain people that really excel at these types of mental psychological warfare, and I don't.”

Not that Stause doesn’t have a strategy. At one point, describing her “Barbie goes to Scotland” style (think: pink, polka-dot Balmain a lá Margot Robbie in Barbie and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless), as a way to get other players to intentionally underestimate her. “I actually went into this experience thinking I'd be kind of good at it because I've done acting and not everybody knows that,” she says. “I've got a bit of a fighter spirit that not everybody knows. So I thought, Oh, let me dress in a bunch of pink. But I’ve got this scrappy side to me.”

Her previous experience on reality TV helped, too. “I can't think of any other life experiences where you go into this little bubble and it's so all-encompassing,” she says. “Granted, with Dancing with the Stars, you still get to have your phone and go home, but you really get in this crazy world where it's like all you do is you eat, sleep, start dreaming about that. And the same exact thing happens with The Traitors. That experience, psychologically, and the lack of sleep and the crazy breakneck pace of it all, is very similar actually.”

Compared to other shows she’s been on, The Traitors was different for Stause. “I've never done a game where you have to backstab people or anything like that,” she says. Stause wouldn’t describe herself as a full-on villain. More that she’s “activated,” adding: “I’m a nice person, but it’s like, don’t mess with me and my people.”

“There are definitely times you'll see on The Traitors, you'll see Selling Sunset—the latest season that we're working on now—where you’re not your best self and you're not the nicest, but it is one of those things where if you have your reasons that make sense, that somebody's pushed you to a certain point, then it's like, Okay, I'm standing up for myself and I'm going to put you in your place at the same time.”

While The Traitors is about to become our newest obsession, Stause is only letting it take up some of her time. She says about a quarter of her time is spent on Selling Sunset, a quarter is spent promoting The Traitors, and a quarter is still working on real estate. (Yes, her license is real and she posted it on Instagram to stop the haters.)

As for that last quarter of time, Stause says she’s reserving for the next thing, but what that could be is still up in the air. She just finished hosting an Australian dating show (again, she can’t talk much about it) but she’s excited to be on a show where she can sit back and let everyone else be outrageous. She also recently had a cameo in Netflix’s holiday movie Hot Frosty. The role, she reveals, came about after previously losing the role of Lindsay Lohan’s best friend in the Christmas film Our Little Secret.

“It was down to me and one other girl for her friend,” she says. “I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, and so I'm just going to tell you because I think it's cute and I'm sure they wouldn't care.” (She’s manifesting her own holiday movie for the next festive season.)

Speaking of things she’s not allowed to say, I can’t resist bringing up her Traitors’ enemy one more time. Could it possibly be Tom Sandoval of Vanderpump Rules? “Obviously. He annoys the hell out of me.”

Photographer Anthony Urrea | Location The Caster House