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Bronwyn Newport, 40, is sitting across from her husband, Todd, 65, in a rare 2016 Gucci sweatshirt adorned in glittering parrots. She is broaching the idea of an open marriage, if Todd so desires.
“If you wanted to do something different, or have an arrangement, or be open, I would consider it,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I would do whatever I needed to do to evolve with you.”
Todd rejects the idea, but it’s the sort of conversation plenty of women across the globe have with their spouses. It’s just that Bronwyn is choosing to do so to an audience of over half a million, alongside a running online commentary from Bravo’s many feverish, parasocial viewers. But that’s what it means to be a cast member on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City—one of the television network’s most popular franchises.
“I’m fascinated by the people who I’ve seen put things on TV that really resonated, or showed me a different perspective,” Bronwyn says now, over Zoom, from the Four Seasons hotel in New York, the morning after filming the show’s presumably theatrical reunion. She’s wearing an uncharacteristically low-key grea knit jumper, her dark hair parted down the middle. “I [wanted] to pay that toll, for other people.” She cites shows like Couples Therapy (“Orna Guralnik is my hero”) as examples of others allowing cameras into the innermost corners of their lives. “I learned a lot from watching myself,” she adds. “I would recommend talk therapy for other people, but [filming such conversations] has been therapy for me.”
This tendency to step back and view things with a certain level of objective analysis is part of what sets Bronwyn apart from many other “housewives”—a term which, in the Bravo universe, doesn’t always mean you’re married, nor does it mean you’re not the breadwinner. While other cast members might throw out cheap shots pertaining to each other’s lack of wealth, Bronwyn feels more like “one of us.” If…we also owned multiple mansions and the $15,000 Saint Laurent heart coat. “For the most part, I try to be chill,” she says, when I point out that she lacks the delusional, grandiose energy we’ve come to recognize from some of our favorite housewives. “I have a different backstory to some of the women. I was a single mum for a long time. I was not always in a socioeconomic standing to be delusional; ‘I do big things’ would never come out of my mouth. It should also not be coming out of Lisa [Barlow’s] mouth, but that’s why we love her.”
Bronwyn’s backstory is fairly singular. After being raised under Mormonism, the now-reality star became pregnant out of wedlock as a teenager, after which she was swiftly excommunicated from the church, an experience she speaks about on the show, and is still clearly affected by. In the 2010s, she moved to San Francisco. She liked to dress up, go out, be seen among certain social circles. “Everybody was in a Zuckerberg hoodie trying to fit in the tech world, and I was wearing what I wore, you know?” she remembers. It was around then that Bravo—who at that point had only just hit their stride with Real Housewives—started sniffing around. “They definitely knew who I was,” Bronwyn says. However, it wasn’t until over a decade later, while living in Salt Lake City, that she was finally cast.
“They called me two years ago, the day after my birthday party. I was a little hungover, and they were like, ‘We really want you to do it this season.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, okay’ because I just couldn’t deal with a long phone call. I said yes without talking to anybody else in my family, just to get NBC to leave me alone.” Did she immediately regret it? Being cast on a housewives franchise notoriously turns peoples’s lives upside down. “I was kind of excited about it,” she laughs. “There was a little naivety. I thought that if I’m just honest, everybody’s going to understand me and get me—that is never the case. But it’s also been a really pleasant journey for me getting to know the women, and getting to know myself. There’s lots I’ve learned from watching myself. I’m a big believer [in] change starts with you first.”
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There’s a dichotomy to the way Bronwyn talks about being on the show. On the one hand, she takes it very seriously. (“I am so in it when we’re doing it—it’s my real life, so it feels high stakes.”) On the other, she agrees that there’s a drag-like element to proceedings. The one-liners, the endless looks, the camp appeal. “RuPaul’s Drag Race is my favorite reality show, and there are a lot of similarities. Housewives is not a competition, but the basis of some of the friendships on the show is competition. I approach each episode—or at least every event—like a Drag Race contest.” If RHOSLC is a drag contest, then who’s who? “We have a comedy queen. We have the verbal assassin. We absolutely have a stunt queen. Angie [Katsanevas] loves a prop. She loves to kick a chair over. And then I’m the younger drag queen who grew up on social media, who just cares about looks.”
The fact that Bronwyn knows what a “stunt queen” is probably gives away her immersion in the LGBTQ community—she loves a drag show (her favorite are in New York), she’ll often show up to a queer club (tomorrow she’s heading down to a lesbian bar in Bushwick), and she’s very vocal on trans rights; more so than plenty of others on mainstream TV at present. During one appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, she paired a red velvet Alessandro Michele for Gucci suit (a revival of the Tom Ford original) with Connor Ives’s “Protect The Dolls” T-shirt. “I think Housewives is this study in women of an older age getting their due—and we should absolutely be advocating for other people to have their due, too,” she says.
In an interview on that same red carpet, she made the point that plenty of housewives get access to gender-affirming care. “I hadn’t seen people talking about all the surgeries and hormones they get to enhance themselves,” she adds. “They should be advocating for it for everyone.” While a large portion of Bravo fans are queer themselves, there’s another faction who are presumably much straighter or more conservative. Bronwyn wants to reach those people. “For that portion of America—the Midwest mom watching this—I want her to be like, ‘Well, I think Bronwyn’s a decent mom and she stands up for the trans community, and I didn’t know that I could do both.’”
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Aside from watching and appearing on reality TV, Bronwyn is a fashion head at heart. She’s a front row fixture at Schiaparelli, writes a popular fashion-focused Substack and has “bought almost everything Jeremy Scott’s ever put on a Moschino runway.” Over Covid, she completed a degree in Art History, with an emphasis on museum curation—mainly because she’s obsessed with the stories behind garments. She could speak on her vintage collection for hours; she spends a good portion of our interview describing her favorite items, which include an original Judith Leiber ladybug purse that she’s too afraid to touch because it’s so special. She’s also a big Broadway fan. Oh, and she loves books. Essentially, Bronwyn sits at the intersection of “culture nerd” and “good-time girl.” How she fits in time to film her life for television is anyone’s guess.
What is she going to do after this interview, I wonder, which has run well over the 45 minutes we’d initially planned. Bronwyn, I discover, loves to chat—which works for me because I love it too. She’ll probably grab some dinner, she says, and then head down to her co-star Britani Bateman’s cabaret show in the city. Ultimately, despite the seemingly constant arguing, Bronwyn tells me that there’s actually a sense of support among the women she films with, for the most part. There’s “a shared understanding of what it feels like to put yourself out there, in the world, and have people talk about it,” she explains. “We understand each other in a way that other people do not. We have had these experiences together.”