Chrishell Stause Has a Few ‘Traitors’ Regrets

Chrishell Stause is wearing a truly unique ensemble when we meet for coffee at Hotel Chelsea on a blistery January afternoon. Despite the frigid temperature, she’s outfitted in a purple-pink Zhivago minidress and blazer—with a twist. “It’s a mood outfit. It turns pink the warmer you are. The cooler you are is purple,” the realtor turned reality star tells me, twirling to show off the fit. “Bringing a little LA to New York.”

Apparently, you can take the girl out of Selling Sunset, but you can’t take the Selling Sunset out of the girl. Stause proves as much during her stint on Peacock’s Emmy-winning reality competition The Traitors, in which Alan Cumming asks a menagerie of reality television stars and notorious cultural figures to play an extended game of Mafia in his Scottish castle.

From the jump, it was clear that Stause would play the game on her terms. “It’s psychological warfare,” she says. “I think it’s easy to watch the show from the sidelines and say everything you would’ve done. It is a lot harder being in the house.”

But on Thursday, Stause’s battle came to an end when she was chosen by traitors Danielle Reyes and Carolyn Wiger to be murdered. Befitting her roots on Selling Sunset—the soapy Netflix hit where she’s starred for eight seasons—Stause’s exit was appropriately dramatic. Instead of learning of her fate by reading a letter, she was murdered by Reyes and Wiger face to face.

“It’s a juicy murder. I’m glad I went out the way I did,” Stause tells me a few weeks after our coffee chat. Did she suspect Reyes and Wiger were traitors hiding in plain sight? “With Danielle, I was mad because I was like, ‘Oh, I freaking knew it,’” she says. “And then Carolyn, I was blown away. I had no idea Carolyn was a traitor.”

The writing was, perhaps, on the wall for Stause when she snatched her hand out of a box full of creepy crawlies in the prior episode, leaving her and her partner—Real Housewives of New Jersey star Dolores Catania—vulnerable for murder. While Stause has some regrets regarding her Traitors game play (more on that later), removing her hand from that box before anything was even put into it is not one of them. “For a billion dollars, it’s just not my thing,” she says. “I can’t do it. I’m such an arachnophobe. I made them swear up and down that there would be no spiders.”

Technically, there weren’t any—just giant millipedes, giant scorpions, cockroaches, and a healthy dose of maggots. And to be fair to the producers, sniffing out untruths is a big part of playing The Traitors. As a non-gamer, Stause went into the castle thinking it might be fun to be a traitor—but quickly realized she wasn’t cut out for that job. “I think I would have faltered in having to stab people in the back that I was really close with,” she says. She’s also still haunted by her gut impulse to vote against Nikki Garcia—a member of her own alliance, the “Bambis”—in episode four. “I truly, genuinely feel so bad about that,” she says. “To this day, that was the hardest episode to watch.”

After spearheading the mob that voted out one of her faithful besties, Stause tells me she felt she “had PTSD.” That made it difficult to choose between two more competitors during her last round table: Her unexpected ally who was clearly a traitor, Survivor’s Boston Rob, or the quiet but innocuous Britney Haynes from Big Brother. “I couldn’t confidently vote for either of them. So I just thought, Who can I throw my vote to?” The answer, of course, was her number one enemy in the castle: Tom Sandoval.

At Hotel Chelsea, Stause makes clear that she still has deep disdain for Bravo’s chief villain. “He hasn’t got two brain cells to rub together…. He just is such a little weasel.” she says. When I point out that it feels like she came into the castle primed for beef with Sandoval, she politely pushes back. “I have to correct you on one thing. I actually didn’t come in like that,” she says. “I wasn’t excited to see him. I wasn’t sure if he knew I was friends with [his ex] Ariana [Madix] or not. So I kind of made mention of it, and I was like, ‘I hope that’s not going to be weird in the castle,’ and he was like, ‘Oh my God, of course not.’”

Then came the round table where Sandoval, seemingly out of nowhere, threw out Stause’s name as a potential traitor. “That’s when I thought it was personal,” she says. “If you’re going to come at me and you’re going to make it personal, now you’ve activated me. I could make friends with whoever, but don’t make it personal, and don’t come after me.” Recounting the anecdote, her ensemble goes from purple to pink.

Sandoval isn’t the only Traitors player that can raise Stause’s blood pressure. “It’s frustrating to me. I brought Danielle’s name up to over three people…. I’m really mad that none of that aired, because I look like an idiot,” she says. Reyes’s much-remarked-upon penchant for bursting into tears seemingly at the drop of a hat is what made Stause suspicious. “I’ve seen my fair share of fake crying. That wasn’t real.” But despite her correct hunch, Stause’s theory never got traction with the other contestants, and she never brought it up at a round table—a move she regrets not making. “I should have pushed harder on that one, because I really was onto her for a while.”

Stause will have the chance to air all her grievances and would-have, should-have, could-haves when The Traitors films its reunion in Los Angeles in a few weeks. She’s excited to reunite with her beloved Bambis, and mentions, somewhat cryptically, that she’s talked to everyone in the Traitors cast except Danielle since filming wrapped. Maybe that has something to do with the way Stause was axed from the show. “Carolyn’s really nice about it. Danielle, not so much,” she says.

In the meantime, she’s keeping busy shooting the ninth season of Selling Sunset—which began with some very real and very unexpected drama when filming had to be paused due to the California wildfires. While the LA home Stause shares with her partner, nonbinary Australian musician G Flip, was spared, as a real estate agent, she’s “working with people, trying to help place people,” Stause says. “Hearing their stories, it’s really devastating. Everyone’s kind of traumatized.”

At least filming The Traitors was a welcome break from the drama of Selling Sunset, which follows a handful of Barbiecore realtors working at The Oppenheim Group as they sell multimillion dollar properties and spar with each other. “I feel like we had such a good close-knit [group] of women in the house,” said Stause of The Traitors. “It was obviously very opposite of Selling Sunset at times. Sometimes we can work together, and sometimes we can’t.”

Drama or no, Selling Sunset has been a boon to Netflix, and has inspired a number of copycat real estate reality series on the streamer—including but not limited to Buying Beverly Hills, starring Real Housewives of Beverly Hills husband Mauricio Umansky; Owning Manhattan, led by Million Dollar Listing’s Ryan Serhant; and most recently Selling the City, a New York–based spin-off from Selling Sunset creator Adam DiVello. As the star of the original, Stause is, in some ways, the face that launched a thousand Netflix franchises.

“It’s such a compliment,” Stause says of the copycats. “It’s the mark of success, and I think that it keeps us on our toes. A lot of people want to be in our position, and I think that’s always good. Otherwise, you’ll get complacent, and you’ll get lazy.”

Nine seasons later, Stause’s life is almost unrecognizable from when she began on Selling Sunset. Back then, she was a former soap actress and wife to This Is Us star Justin Hartley, wading into the real estate business and reality television for the first time.

“I’ll always be so grateful to Selling Sunset, because regardless of what I ever do, I’m aware that this is one of those things where it’s like, ‘I’m going to be known for this.’ So you can fight it or you can embrace it,” she says. But whether she’ll be holding Selling Sunset close forever remains to be seen. “There have been so many times where I’ve thought, ‘I can’t do it anymore. This is crazy,’” she admits. “ I’ve worked through so many of those situations. The latest one hasn’t even aired yet. It shows I could be really resilient, and I can make things work for me. You just have to set the right boundaries.”

For those wondering, the latest situation involves none other than Oppenheim group agent Nicole Young. She and Stause have been feuding ever since Young joined the show on season six, and despite seemingly reaching a détente in season eight, the upcoming season is “very explosive,” says Stause. “I got to a place where I thought we really put everything behind us, but you only get so many of those with me.”

While details are still heavily under wraps, Stause hints that this season, she and Young reach a point of no return. “She digs her own grave,” Stause says. “She goes after me in such a disgusting way. You know how low you have to go for reality producers to be like, ‘You’ve crossed a line?’ Any chance of redemption she thought she might have is completely shot…. I can’t give too much of it away, but I feel great about it now,” she continues. “The show did her a few favors, and then they got to where it was like, Okay, now we can’t help you anymore. You’ve gone too far.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Selling Sunset producers for comment.)

“I’m giving you the tea…and I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for that,” she adds, taking a girlish sip of her flat white with almond milk. From the looks of her now purple ensemble, it doesn’t seem like she’s too worried.