Catching Up With Brynn Whitfield: Boys, Bolognese, and Baby Fever

Interior NYC coat. Theory sweater.

Brynn Whitfield hasn’t been on a date in months. She’s trying not to care about finding love, but she’s curious about how I’m doing it. “I just got ghosted by a skater boy,” I tell her, sitting in her favorite corner booth at New York café Sant Ambroeus. “Why are you talking to someone who skateboards?” she asks, bemused. “I want to date every type of boy there is,” I say. “You don't need to do that type,” she deadpans.

Put a plate of Bolognese between two single women, and it won’t take long for them to start comparing notes. Whitfield’s eyes light up when I ask her to point me in the right direction. Hinge is adorable but a touch too cutesy with the writing prompts. Raya sucks. Back in the day, she liked The League. “I found some hotties on there and I liked that it connected to my LinkedIn because I want a professional,” she says. “I don't need a creative in the music industry or a photographer. No offense.”

She’s tried hitting on guys at Whole Foods. “It doesn’t work…. I blame the lighting.” She’s infiltrated Goldman Sachs outdoor happy hours. She wasn’t above, at one time, chasing attractive men down the street. “If you saw a $100 bill on the ground, would you just let it go?”

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Before *Vanderpump Rules*, before Scandoval, before the (almost) 2 million Instagram followers, she was a master of reinvention. The newest version of Ariana Madix? Stronger, freer, and—yes—richer.

Brynn Whitfield is a woman who knows to strike when the iron’s hot. It must be why the ginger-haired PR consultant not only thrived on Bravo’s revamped version of Real Housewives of New York (RHONY) but has remained booked and busy since its October finale with a skiing trip to Switzerland for Christmas, a Champagne-soaked CB2 collaboration for New Year’s Eve, and a stint in London to freeze her eggs. Onscreen and off, she knows how to embellish, how to flirt, how to play up her femininity only to subvert it, how to disarm you with her thoughtfulness or a joke that leaves no room to wonder whether she’s in on it. Kind of like a latter-day Dolly Parton if she lived in the West Village and hung out at Casa Cipriani.

I’m catching Whitfield on the break between the end of one season and the beginning of taping for another. The RHONY reboot, which featured a familiar format but an entirely new cast, marked the show’s first substantive attempt to evolve after 15 years on air. The most striking change was a shift in focus from the city’s rich women of a certain age to a set of diverse, upwardly mobile 30- and 40-somethings maintaining lifestyles that feel marginally more relatable but just aspirational enough to entertain. In other words, women who better represent the modern New York It girl. A few nights after the season finale aired in October, a blurry night-out snapshot of Whitfield posing next to model Emily Ratajkowski, comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, and divisive but lovable RHONY costar Jessel Taank surfaced on Instagram—a confirmation both of Whitfield's belonging in the Bravolebrity pantheon and her potential to transcend it. Photoshop Hannah Bronfman into this lineup and you’d have my fantasy football draft for the show’s next season.

Watch the reboot closely, though, and you’ll see ghosts of Housewives past. In Whitfield, for instance, you’ll see shades of Sonja Morgan's zany charm and Bethenny Frankel's razor-sharp wit. But Whitfield has a razzle-dazzle all her own. What makes the act so endearing is that you can see she’s working for it. Reddit trolls dunked on her for this very thing—“trying too hard.”

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The *Summer House* star and self-described introvert never expected to spend seven years on reality television. Here, she talks to *Glamour* about how she found her place in the complex Bravo ecosystem, her feelings about her costars, working with her husband, her fertility journey, and why the show's infamous catchphrase still makes her cringe.

Others picked her apart for having the gall to showcase her interests in antique-book collecting and playing chess on the show. One intrepid Redditor even went so far as to dissect every chess move she makes in the season’s fifth episode—which introduces Whitfield’s love of the game by following her to a chess tournament—only to have the investigation confirm she does in fact know how to play rather well. This is Whitfield’s life now: constantly up for debate, analysis, endless riffing. Her strength is her ability to maintain a sense of levity amid the scrutiny.

“It's a very easy gig for me,” she says. “The only stressful part was waiting and hoping that I didn’t say something so stupid or flash my vagina or something. But everything else was just nice and fun.”

Under Whitfield’s effervescence there is a conscientiousness you might miss. She used flashcards to study before hosting Glamour’s Women of the Year red carpet, quizzing herself right down to the wire while she was in hair and makeup. And she applied the same technique to her BravoCon debut, although nothing, really, could have prepared her for the viral moment that ensued when the crimson soles of her Christian Louboutin heels lodged themselves deep in the main stage escalator, bringing the staircase (and the panel taking place in front of it) to a grinding halt. Like the rom-com heroine she is, Whitfield simply hopped out of the shoes and did the interview barefoot.

“Even if I'm hammered, I'm prepared,” she says. “Like, I'm prepared to be drunk this weekend and I'm going to get drunk.”

Antics abound on the reboot. In scenes like this one—wherein Whitfield plays wingwoman to a newly single Jenna Lyons on a lark to the city’s most iconic lesbian bar—the franchise reverts to the unfettered silliness of its early seasons. But it makes a real effort to locate the humanity in each Housewife: their disappointments, marital challenges, physical insecurities, childhood traumas. What Whitfield chose to share about her fractured identity as a biracial woman, and how the wounds of a difficult upbringing left her longing for a traditional family to call her own, felt particularly poignant.

“I think the reboot's different in that regard, right? It's got a touch of Oprah or something in it. We're fighting about fucking cheese. We're also changing people's lives,” she says before pausing to giggle at the melodrama. “No, but it's a real thing. And it's helping people. And that's the only thing that I ever wanted from any of it.”

It’s a good thing Whitfield spent so much of her late 20s and early 30s in therapy, long before Bravo came knocking. Appearing on the show would’ve been “a nightmare” otherwise, she says. For some more than others, it can be hard to swallow what filming reveals.

“There's no edit,” Whitfield says. “It's a mirror…. And it's really hard to watch when you like yourself. You're like, ‘My voice is annoying. Why did I wear that? This is cringey.’ Or like me, I was like, ‘How many dick jokes can you make, Brynn?’ I was like, ‘Oh God, my nieces are going to see this.’ But no, that's me.”

Just ahead of her 38th birthday, Whitfield’s finally facing down a longstanding fear: starting the process of freezing her eggs.

“I'm going to do it in London because I want my kids to have English accents—that's how accents work, right?” she quips.

But the punch line is quickly followed by a more honest admission. Cryopreservation wasn’t exactly part of her plan and the process is no walk in the park, particularly if you’re on the other side of 35. On Instagram, Whitfield has been forthcoming with followers about the hormonal weight gain and bloating she’s experienced in the lead-up to her retrieval surgery.

“I'm constantly playing fertility math in my head and it's just massive, massive anxiety,” she continues. “I'm so scared. But I did the ultrasound again and thank God there's still plenty of follicles. Hopefully, we get in there, we get a lot of soft-boiled, hard-boiled, scrambled, sunny-side-up, all the eggs, shake them out, just shake them out. And then if I have to do a second cycle, I guess I will.”

Unable to resist, she slips in another half-joke: “Stop taking Plan B when you're 32, 33.”

A few months ago Whitfield woke up in the middle of the night, plagued by visions of the future—one that may or may not include a husband and children. For a few minutes, it felt like she was suffocating.

“To me, it was always such a scary thought,” she says. “I wouldn't even let myself think thoughts like, What if I don't get married? That was my anxious thought that I ideally have to squash and be secure or whatever. But all of a sudden, I breathed through it and I was like, What if I don't? What if that's my story? And I had this weird realization: I don't care anymore about dating. I cared for so long and where did that get me?”

She throws in a nervous caveat just in case. “Again, I still want it,” she adds. “It's so funny how I always have to follow it up with ‘I still want it’ because I think the universe is always listening.”

And at the rate her star is rising, it must be. I suppose even God watches Housewives.

Photographer: Andrew Gowen
Styling: Kat Thomas
Makeup: Sophia Vallejos
Hair: Hayley Smith
Photo location: Rosecrans Cafe & Florist

Originally Appeared on Glamour