CHRISHELL STAUSE
COMES HOME
By Jason Pham
has thoughts. It’s a brisk February morning in New York, and Stause, 40, is discussing her next look for her cover shoot, which she’s already joked about using for her dating app photos. “I’m selling a lot,” she says, wearing a red latex skirt set with a matching thong peeking out above her hip. “And also sunset.” It’s the day after the release of her memoir, “Under Construction: Because Living My Best Life Took a Little Work,” and Stause, whose signature dark golden blonde hair is slicked back behind her ears, is in the midst of a nationwide book tour. Her next stop is a book signing at the
Mall of America in Minnesota before she returns to Los Angeles for a
final stop at The Grove.
Back in L.A. also awaits Stause’s new $3.3 million home, in the
Mount Olympus neighborhood of Hollywood Hills. She
purchased it last summer, after a year and a half in a rental
“safe house” she moved into immediately following her
divorce from her ex-husband at the end of 2019. To help
with the down payment of her current home, Stause sold
her wedding ring. “I can be very resourceful. I know how to
be independent and be on my own, but I also know how to be
realistic," she says on Zoom weeks later. ‘What’s the point of
[the ring] sitting here in this drawer? Let’s put it to good use.’”
The house is a short drive away from her office at The Oppenheim
Group, a luxury real estate brokerage where she films her Netflix reality
show, “Selling Sunset.” (Season five premieres on April 22.) The home is also where she wrote the final chapters of “Under Construction.” Stause started writing the memoir in the first weeks of the pandemic—before she even had a book deal—as a cathartic release to her world falling apart: she was still living in her post-divorce rental; her dad had died from lung cancer less than a year before, and her mom was diagnosed with the same disease and would pass away a few months later. “Starting the book in such a dark, vulnerable place and ending it in a completely different headspace is exactly what I was hoping to give readers,” she says. “Of course, that loss never goes away. You learn to adapt and live with it. It’ll happen again, and that’s what life is about. It’s not about finding the high and trying to stay up there the whole time.”
CHRISHELL STAUSE
“I used to really hate my name,
and now, I love it.”
- CHRISHELL STAUSE
SO CANDID
with
MY FIRST CELEBRITY CRUSH:
Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Jordan Knight. It's a tie.
I was born in a Shell station. I don't know how it happened, but I went on the internet and realized why everyone thought that. It was on Wikipedia, and I was like, 'How can I change that?' It's not true.
Rihanna. She's such a fashion icon. Who wouldn't die to go raid her closet?
THE CELEBRITY CLOSET I WOULD RAID:
Set: Helen Anthony. Rings: Pamela Love.
Shoes: Femme LA.
Remember, they love money so pretend like you own a gold mine and you're in the club. Molly Brown from "Titanic"
THE MOVIE OR TV SHOW QUOTE I SAY ALL THE TIME:
I'm a Cancer. I'm on the cusp of Cancer and Leo. I can be a little Leo. I like to go out and have a good time, but I can also very much be a homebody. Empathetic. The bad parts of us are we can be too sensitive. That's very true. I'm working on that.
MY ZODIAC SIGN:
It depends on who I'm talking to. The kiss face. The skull is a really popular one with me, and the fire.
MY MOST USED EMOJI:
DRESS: CHANEL, SHOES: STEVE MADDEN
Raised in Kentucky, Stause and her family—which consists of her four sisters, mother and adoptive father (her biological father split from her mother before she was born)—often found themselves homeless. When she was in middle school, Stause lived in a tent that moved from campsite to campsite after her house burned down and she was forced to miss a year of school. As a teenager, she lived in an abandoned schoolhouse with a creepy room of dolls and a collapsed roof that made her mattress smell of mildew. When she was in high school, she lived in the attic of a duplex that became the scene of a drive-by shooting after a drug deal with her neighbor went wrong and a bullet was shot through the wall below her bedroom window. “Growing up, I lived a life I wanted to get away from,” she says. When it came time to leave for college, Stause, who was bullied throughout her youth, knew she wanted to get as far away from where she grew up as possible. Her first step was to change her name from Terrina—her first name that reminded her of the life she was shamed for—to Chrishell, her middle name inspired by the Shell gas station attendant, Chris, who helped her mom during labor. “I wanted to be someone else and to disassociate from the first half of my life that was just very hard,” she says. “I used to really hate my name, and now I love it. I attached such a dark self-image to that name. I hated her and everyone hated her."
Stause starred on “All My Children” for seven years before the show’s cancellation. Back in L.A. and unemployed, Stause spent more than a year on auditions and rejections for shows like “Happy Endings,” before she booked her second series regular role as Jordan Ridgeway on “Days of Our Lives.” When the character was cut before her contract ended, Stause, who found herself jobless once again, decided it was time to find a plan B. She turned to real estate, an industry she had no experience in but that would allow her to pay her bills and still audition for acting jobs. The transition wasn’t easy; it took her more than a year to sell her first house, and when she hosted open houses, she would be recognized by soap fans who asked if she had given up on acting. “It was definitely an ego check. All of a sudden, you go from having these successes on TV and being like, ‘Oh my gosh. I did it.’ Then all of a sudden, you’re sitting in empty open houses and people are like, ‘Wait. Is that? No, that can’t be her. That would be weird.’”
Stause persevered, and after about a year, she was contacted by “The Hills” creator Adam DiVello about a new Netflix reality show called “Selling Sunset,” following a group of luxury real estate agents at The Oppenheim Group. The brokerage is co-founded by twin brothers Brett and Jason Oppenheim, who met Stause at a party in L.A. and recommended her for the show. Stause, who had been offered reality shows like “Dirty Soap” and “Soap Divas” before, had her reservations about filming reality television but was convinced by DiVello’s idea that “Selling Sunset” would be a show about real estate, a pitch that was only half true. “He was very compelling in the meeting. He definitely knows how to sell his point. Granted, he leaned more on it being a real estate show,” Stause says.
CHRISHELL STAUSE
COMES HOME
By Jason Pham
“Selling Sunset,” which was nominated for an Emmy in 2021 and has inspired spinoffs in Tampa and Orange County, became a hit for Netflix. The show has also led to a wealth of opportunities for Stause, including a spot on “Dancing With the Stars” and a job as the host of Netflix’s “Reality Games” (with the possibility of even more projects with the streaming service in the future.) Despite the bevy of opportunities “Selling Sunset” has brought her, Stause is also aware of the effect the show may have had on her acting career. She was offered a role on Disney Plus’ “Cheaper by the Dozen” reboot—only for the network to rescind the offer and tell her it went a different way. “That’s one of those things where maybe it does hurt me that when you look at me, you think of Chrishell from ‘Selling Sunset.’ I don’t know if someone at the network thought that, and it was distracting to them," she says.
Another downside of “Selling Sunset” has also been the mega-obsession over Stause’s personal life, especially her divorce from her husband, Justin Hartley, in season three. The fervor is why Stause shied away at first from writing about her divorce in “Under Construction” until she realized the number of other divorcées who saw themselves in her. “Going through a divorce is something people relate to me about. Not opening up about it would be a disservice, because they helped me in that space when I remember feeling at the lowest of my low,” she says. “The world had shut down. My world had blown up. I braced for public humiliation. I didn’t expect this overflowing of people sharing their stories. Now, it’s my job to share and help somebody reading. I know how it feels in the moment. It feels like it’s over, like you have nothing to look forward to and you’re lost. You have to really fight to swim back up to the top—and then you can float.” While there were some exes Stause gave a head’s up to about what was written in “Under Construction,” she confirmed that Hartley wasn’t one of them, nor did she hear from him after the book was published. “There are certain people I am on good terms with or at least there’s a mutual respect there. But the one you asked about, no,” she says.
“Your version of happiness might not be my version of happiness, and that’s OK,”
- CHRISHELL STAUSE
Stause went on to find love again with her boss and “Selling Sunset” co-star, Jason Oppenheim. Stause and Oppenheim, whose relationship will be the main storyline on “Selling Sunset” season five, split in December 2021, months after she finished “Under Construction.” “I ended it in a way where I said I didn’t know what would happen. Obviously, when I wrote it, I was hoping for a different ending,” she says. Stause, who is still friends with Oppenheim, has been open about how their relationship ended over their different opinions on having children. “Your version of happiness might not be my version of happiness, and that’s OK,” she says. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a great foundation with someone. That’s the reason I still count that relationship as a success because there are so many good things there. But unfortunately, the endgame is not the same.” While Stause, who started freezing her eggs while on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2020, hopes to have a partner to start a family with, she’s also opened her eyes to raising a child on her own. “I want to keep an open mind,” she says. “I don’t think it was something I could’ve envisioned for myself before, and I’m becoming more open to it because I don’t want to put myself in a position of stressing. I don’t think that’s the way something comes about. I’m hoping once I open my mind up to all possibilities, maybe that’s when it will happen or maybe not and then I’ll go that route.”
Suit: Michael Chamberlin. Earrings: Nickho Rey. Rings: Bea Bongiasca. Shoes: Ruthie Davis.
It’s a sunny Monday afternoon in March, and Stause, dressed in a gray long-sleeve top with her hair and makeup done from a last-minute meeting earlier in the day, is on a Zoom call from her dining room as her adopted Yorkshire terrier, Gracie, rests by her side. Behind her is a modern stainless-steel-studded kitchen with a row of plush velvet and gold bar stools tucked under her countertop. In front of her is a series of glass doors that open to her paradisal backyard complete with a crystal-clear blue pool and lush canyon views of L.A. The home is in a safe, quiet neighborhood with enough room to entertain company or grow a family in the event Stause ever decides to have children. The house—which is still undergoing renovations to build out a closet from a smaller room behind it—is also a metaphor for Stause’s life. She will always be a work in progress, regardless of how put-together she looks on the outside. “I’m always going to be under construction because I want to keep that at the forefront of my mind and not get complacent to think, ‘Oh, this is my life now.’ This is not my life,” she says. “The same way you were at the beginning to get here is the same way you need to be to stay here.”
There are a lot of reasons the house is her dream home, but for Stause, the best part of the home isn’t the luxury finishes or million-dollar details—it’s that it’s her own. “It’s mine. It can’t be taken away,” she says. “Having grown up the way I did, that insecurity has gone away. I don’t think I realized that until I closed on this house and felt such a sense of relief that, God forbid, no matter what goes down with the show, anything, I’ve built a business where I can be independent and feel safe.”
THE
ISSUE
COMEBACK
Photographer: George Chinsee
Stylist: Andrew Gelwicks at The Only Agency
Hairstylist: Bradley Leake
Makeup Artist: Nicholas Wlodarski at Dew Beauty Agency
Stylist Assistants: Kyle Gleason, Antoinette Hester
Dress: CD Greene. Earrings: Nickho Rey. Gloves: Vex Latex.
Ring: Shine Like Me. Shoes: Jimmy Choo
Coat: Andreeva. Earrings: Bea Bongiasca. Ring: Laruicci. Shoes: Manolo Blahnik
CRAZIEST RUMOR I'VE HEARD ABOUT MYSELF:
THE FOOD I LOVE THAT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS IS GROSS:
Frozen waffles and jelly. It was a weird thing I started doing because I didn't have syrup, but I had jelly, and now I really like it. And butter on Pop Tarts. I eat Pop Tarts, and I butter them. Sometimes people think that's weird, but I think it's delicious.
Growing up, I lived a life I wanted to get away from.
“
After college, Stause moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor, a dream she had since she was a kid while watching soap operas with her mom. Success didn’t come easily. When she first moved to L.A., Stause rented a couch from a porn star she found on Craigslist before moving into a shared apartment that could barely fit her bed. To support herself, she worked three jobs: a hostess at Universal CityWalk; a hand model for a shopping network; and a camp counselor for the children of celebrities like Diane Keaton, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. “Pam and Tommy would take turns for who would drop their kids off. Many times it would be the nannies that would do it, but for them, it was always one of them,” she says. Her big break came when she was cast as Amanda Dillon, a beloved child character returning as an adult villain in “All My Children.” The job moved Stause to New York City and proved to be her first taste of serious wealth. Despite her new financial success, it took a while for Stause to see any of her money materialize. She later learned that her manager had taken it without her knowledge. “I didn’t have money. I was living in New York, working on TV, and I couldn’t get my money. I didn’t know what was happening,” she says. “It wasn’t until someone looked at the contract I had signed, and they were like, ‘I haven’t even seen something as bad as this before.’ This person basically had me sign away 20 years of my career on this paper. It took a lot of work to get out of it.”
