Filming for season 11 of Vanderpump Rules has concluded, and Lala Kent is feeling some major relief.
Kent, 33, told she’s “so happy” that filming is over for the Bravo show’s newest season while attending an event for the Brent Shapiro Foundation in Beverly Hills on Saturday.
“It was a very, very difficult season,” she says of the cast returning for the first time since Tom Sandoval and Rachel “Raquel” Leviss’s cheating scandal was played out in the season 10 finale and tensions piqued during the three-part reunion. “We’ve never had a divide like this in the group that you literally cannot repair.”
Kent says she’s “in such a healing place” that the actual filming process is “a little bit of a mind fog.”
“I don’t remember much about the season,” she shares, adding, “I was just very in my own zone this season, which is very different from last year. I was ripping everyone’s heads off.”
In the wake of Scandoval — which originated with Sandoval, 41, and his girlfriend of nine years Ariana Madix’s March breakup and intensified with the later revelation of his months-long affair with her close friend — the entire VPR cast has been in disarray.
On Sandoval’s new podcast, Everybody Loves Tom, the Bravo star revealed that the discovery of his affair with his co-star, and the ensuing onslaught of backlash, pushed him to contemplate suicide.
He reflected on meeting Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington a few days before he died by suicide in 2017 as he revealed he could finally understand how a person could make such a choice.
“He seemed happy, or, I don’t know, he was just animated, energetic on the phone. I saw him. I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Chester.’ Literally, days later, he died,” Sandoval said on the podcast’s premiere episode. “I could never understand why, but when you get into that headspace, it’s like a domino effect. Your world starts collapsing on itself and you cannot see outside of your feelings. Your peripheral goes away. Your sense of like, thinking about the future, like your ability to snap out of it goes away. And there were some times where I was, you know, felt very, very close.”
Kent told on Saturday that she hasn’t listened to her costar’s podcast yet, but that she thinks “it’s great” that he’s started one.
The podcast also saw Sandoval address how his infidelity towards Madix, 38, taught him some valuable life lessons.
“It has been such a learning experience, you know, with going through everything and with what I did and taking time to actually see the repercussions of my actions,” he said. “And, you know, when you’re in a scenario like that and you’re so emotionally wrapped up in your feelings, you don’t think logically and you’re just f — -ing selfish.”
While the scandal pushed Leviss, 29, to pull back from filming VPR, Sandoval chose to return for the newest season. He and Leviss split following the controversy, and on the podcast episode, he revealed that he hasn’t spoken to her since the end of June.
While he revealed just how deeply the backlash had affected him, he also shared that when Leviss was in a treatment facility in the spring — she voluntarily sought out “mental health and trauma therapy,” her rep confirmed, following the affair — he found himself quite lonely as she was difficult to get in touch with.
“I was like at her beck and call in a sense because you couldn’t have your phone in there. No access to anything. And so I had to wait for her call, which can only happen maybe twice, once a day,” he said on the podcast.
Breaking her silence in August, Leviss, 29, told Bethenny Frankel that she is “disappointed” in herself when she looks back on her actions.
She revealed she “would do everything differently” if she could, and that she has “a lot” of regrets.
“That is not the person that I want to be. I wasn’t happy. I was really hurting.”
Levis also shared that she opted not to return to season 11 of VPR despite the fact that she considered it.
A source later confirmed to Entertainment Tonight that she was instead going to remain “focused on her mental health journey.”
As for Kent, she expressed regret over her and her costars’ attack of Leviss during the VPR season 10 reunion, after which Leviss checked into the mental health facility
“In the moment during the reunion, after I left, I felt dirty,” she told TMZ. “After watching last night when [Leviss] had finally had the breakdown — just as a human, because for me, it’s a reality TV show — I feel like we’re all, kind of, playing the same game, but when I watched that, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re maybe dealing with someone who maybe shouldn’t be on this type of platform.’”
Kent added of Leviss’ breakdown, “I did sit there and go, ‘Oh s — -, she needs some real help,’ and I’m hoping she got it.”
Vanderpump Rules can be streamed in full on Peacock.
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