One of the phrases Madix uses when describing the moment she found out her ex-boyfriend was cheating is “women’s intuition.” Despite being a “snooper” in past relationships, she says she made a conscious decision to not be that version of herself when she started dating her ex nine years ago. How she discovered his betrayal has been well documented—she was holding on to his phone for safekeeping while he was performing with his band one night, when something made her punch in the (unchanged) passcode. One sexually explicit video later, here we are. “I think the shock prevents you from being sad immediately,” she says when I ask what she felt at that moment. “It was like the air was sucked out of my lungs. It was shock, disbelief on some level, but then also anger.” And his reaction when she confronted him? “When you've been caught red-handed like that, there's no denying it,” she says. “It's cold, hard evidence. So I think he was struggling. I think he was really mad that his little house of cards was crumbling.”
The narrative around sex—or rather, the lack of it—is particularly hard to watch. “I feel like I'm someone who craves intimacy outside of just penetrative sex,” Madix says. “And that was something that I was deprived of for so long. As women, we might bring something up a bunch of times and then we just stop. That's where I was at. I was like I cannot keep nagging this man to want to come home and spend time with me.”
I nod, and then she says: “The way that so many men act like they are entitled to your body and entitled to sex because you're in a relationship with them. I am not your Fleshlight. I spelled out what I needed, but hello. It's a two-person situation.”
Madix wasn’t able to confront Leviss in person that night, as she was in New York for Bravo’sWatch What Happens Live, but she did send her a succinct text message—“You’re dead to me”—before calling her up and demanding answers. “She was somewhat emotionless,” she says of her former friend’s reaction,a word that’s become synonymous with Leviss during the last 97 days. “And I was devastated.”
Public humiliation is the lifeblood of reality television. If fans wanted prize-winning narrative arcs or themes worthy of Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Goethe, we’d haveThe Sopranos orThe Wire or evenThe Simpsons on loop. No, we want table flipping, we wantcatchphrases, we wantproposals and retracted proposals, we wantScary Island, we wantshocking exits. We don’t so much wantjail sentences,fake cancer diagnoses, orreal-life monsters, but we understand those are often byproducts of a genre that exists without scripts. We aren’t watching idols or finely drawn characters dreamed up in the writers room. These are real people who, as we love to point out, signed up for—gestures wildly—all of this. Maybe we won’t admit it, but we enjoy feasting on the bones of other people’s poor choices. Even the people who try to do the right thing on reality TV are often considered jesters, jokes, sad sacks. Almost everybody appears to have an unquenchable thirst for fame or infamy and it shows. But Ariana Madix, as fans ofVanderpump Rules will surely attest, always seemed a little bit different. More content being her actual self, lessme, me, me!
Madix was born in 1985 and raised on Florida’s Space Coast, a 72-mile stretch along the Atlantic Ocean that’s home to orbital-launch stations like Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and describes her upbringing as “pretty great.” Her late father was a commercial roofing contractor, and her mother is a project manager who deals primarily with space-related companies. “My parents both worked really hard,” she says. “We weren’t rich by any means, but we certainly had the best that they could have given.” Growing up as a ’90s kid, Madix became infatuated with horses and begged her mom for lessons, something she says her mother never got growing up and wanted to give her daughter. At the age of six, she started riding and also got into theater. “Horse girl, theater kid. Those were the two things,” she says. She was also an exceptional student—the phrases “big overachiever” and “teacher’s pet” get thrown around—excelling mostly at math and science. By high school she was in AP classes and had added cheerleading to her list of extracurriculars. “I think my senior year, I was in eight or 10 different clubs,” she says.
I ask whether her parents ever pushed her and she says no, but she does have some newfound realizations that came from doing inner-child work in therapy as an adult. “My dad would not come home,” Madix shares. “He’s no longer with us and I love him and feel like he was going through some stuff and doing his best in a lot of ways, but he would have a tendency to be done with work and be at the dive bar as opposed to helping us with our homework. And my mom did everything.” Therapy has helped her realize that maybe her overachieving was a coping mechanism. “If I’m perfect, then he’ll want to be there.”
Eventually, it was her acting teacher who convinced her to try it out. She was featured sporadically in early seasons after hooking up with her now ex-boyfriend—who was in a relationship with another castmate at the time, Kristen Doute, it should be noted—and became an official cast member in season three and emerged as a cooler-headed foil to everyone else’s hysteria. Madix’s storylines tend to carry more gravitas than others and often center around her struggles with mental health, body image, and personal losses. The deaths of her father, her grandmother, and her beloved dog Charlotte, were all heavily documented. And then came the Scandoval. Suddenly the cast member with the least proclivity for drama is the reason that people who have never seen a single episode of VPR were starting from season one just to join the cultural conversation. Still, she hopes the worst is behind her. “Sometimes I’m like, Can’t I just have a really fun summer where nothing bad happens, where I’m great, you know?” she says. “Maybe this is the year.”
