Tom Sandoval Is the Number One Guy in This Group

In February, Tom Sandoval bombed through Laurel Canyon in his Mercedes E-400 coupe, talking excitedly about the time he asked his hero, Neil deGrasse Tyson, if our evidence of dark matter is solely based on gravitational lensing.

Sandoval, 36, is an unlikely science enthusiast. The star of Bravo's Vanderpump Rules is better known for his elaborate grooming routine—the flatiron, the level 5 hairspray, the forehead shaving—than for his intellectualism, but he's drawn to science because it gives him something to believe in as an alternative to religion. "Something that I love about scientific truths is that they are true—but not fact. They're true until proven otherwise." He pauses and his voice quiets as he considers why he's so drawn to truths that are not necessarily fact: "It keeps people from being so closed-minded."

Tom Sandoval’s universe is ordered by a different set of laws. He is one of the core cast members of Vanderpump Rules, the Bravo reality show set in way gay West Hollywood that centers around the lives of straight—and that’s important—bartenders and servers at Lisa Vanderpump’s SUR Restaurant. (SUR stands for Sexy Unique Restaurant, making it Sexy Unique Restaurant Restaurant, which isn’t important but it is funny.) Sandoval’s storylines are classic reality TV: They have included a messy breakup rife with cheating and lying, and a shirtless fist fight in a Vegas parking lot. His grooming is so legendary it's practically a secondary character.

"He's a peacocker, he's a preener, he is someone who likes to make an entrance," said Tom Schwartz, Sandoval's best friend–cum–VPR costar–cum–business partner. On TV, Sandoval can come across as vapid. Reality shows have a flattening effect—they Shrinky Dink people into characters, playing up the outer edges of the yin and yang of their personalities, focusing on the extremes. And while Sandoval is a real person, with interests and opinions that don’t fit quite so well into the VPR plot-line generator, he is also very definitely a person of extremes.

His showmanship, which is ridiculous and irresistibly watchable in that "Is this guy for real?!" reality TV way, is part of what makes him a compelling star. He's unabashedly vain about his appearance in ways that men typically don't talk about; he doesn't just tan—he has a tanning strategy. (It involves his ankles.) He cries openly and easily. He effusively tells his male friends, "I love you," often through those tears. In an incredible display, he arrived at BravoCon in full drag. He's flashy, and it's a lot of fun to watch. But as the seasons have gone on, eight of them so far, something more significant emerged about Tom Sandoval—he is seemingly unbound by the strictures of masculinity. He calls it being "extra AF." But there's something more zeitgeist-y, less just-for-camera, about his extraness. And as people increasingly question and push against antiquated notions of what it means to be a man—and as the show reckons with its place in 2020, firing four cast members involved in racist incidents—something strange has happened: The cartoonish star of a show about straights behaving badly in a gay playground became a compelling model for a kinder, gentler, more tolerant, and far more aggressively groomed brand of masculinity.

Vanderpump Rules started in 2013, following a straight cast made up of real-life friends and coworkers who were messy in the way friends who date and party and jockey for position within their group can be. Their relationships led to fights; those fights—sometimes physical, sometimes verbal, always meme-able—are legendary, and a big part of the show's appeal. There was the one where Stassi Schroeder cracked Kristen Doute across the face with a wallop of a backhand for sleeping with her ex, Jax Taylor; and the time Katie Maloney, wife of Schwartz, hissed at him, "Let's talk about how your dick doesn't work," while test-driving a Porsche for Vanderpump. And then there was the one in which Taylor—red-faced, sweaty, bulging-eyed—became furious with Sandoval for what Taylor perceived as social usurpery, and attempted to put Sandoval back in his place in the VPR pecking order by declaring, "You're not the number one guy in this group. I'm the number one guy in this group."

But as the show's eight seasons have unfolded, Sandoval has proven himself to be the number one guy in the group. The outfits and the grooming, the sheer ridiculata of his entire existence, are still there, charming and confounding viewers. But Sandoval has evolved. His hyper-turbulent relationship with Doute has been replaced with a mostly stable one with his partner, Ariana Madix. Vanderpump moved him out from behind the bar and into the role of owner when she tapped him and Schwartz to be the faces of TomTom. As he matured, still in this world of West Hollywood bars and parking-lot fights and messy AF friends, he became something like the grown-up of the group.

The gayness of the world in which they worked was always there—a centerpiece of each season is the SUR staff's participation in LA Pride—even though the show has featured virtually no LGBT characters. But in 2020, as the storylines changed from partying in feathered wings on a Pride float to getting married and buying houses, the cast’s increasingly tenuous relationship to their community has felt more and more exploitative.

Among the show’s fanbase, which skews heavily female and gay male, murmurs of discontent with the show's representation, or lack thereof, started building in season six, which featured Billie Lee, a trans woman in a minor role that lasted only two seasons. It reached cacophony levels in the summer of 2019, while the current season was filming, when Buzzfeed reported that Sandoval's co-stars, Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright, planned to have an outspokenly homophobic pastor officiate their for-TV wedding. The cast was noticeably, uncomfortably silent about their friends' choice, with one exception: Tom Sandoval, whose decision to confront Taylor about the pastor led to Sandoval's dismissal from (and eventual reinstatement into) the wedding party.

Sandoval says that he learned from being bullied, and from occasionally bullying others, as a preteen. "I felt like an asshole,” he says. “And I don't like that feeling." When popularity followed his awkward stage, he took on a white knight vibe, becoming “a bully to bullies." And on TV, his white knight vibe has been the catalyst for high drama, especially as the cast learned to navigate being followed by cameras and press.

"I will always try to speak up when I feel like something's not right,” Sandoval says of his instinct to confront his castmates, even as the others stay quiet. "You know, people in the cast..." He pauses. "It's like they're afraid to speak up. I can tell that something's bothering them and I sometimes feel like, okay, I guess I'll have to be the one to say something."

Sandoval’s willingness to be extra—whether it's creating an on-camera scene about the out-and-out hypocrisy of Cartwright and Taylor, or arriving at his 36th birthday party (the theme? Extra AF, duh!) on a pair of sky-high stilts—makes for great television, but it also inspires the men in his life to embrace a freer, more true version of themselves.

"It's benefitted me," Peter Madrigal, the SUR manager and sometimes VPR cast member, said, "because you know, I'm a very masculine guy. But seeing him be the way he is has helped me progress a little bit. I used to just wear black, but now I wear, like, blue pants." Madrigal is dead serious about incorporating blue pants into his wardrobe and into his life—about what being a blue-pants guy would say about him, about the vistas blue pants might open, about the change in internal chemistry that accompanies a shift in self-expression. "Seeing someone else have the courage to be himself gave me the courage to be myself," he says. Like so much else with Sandoval, his peacocking is two things at once: a flagrant display of narcissism, and something close to inspiring.

In some areas, Sandoval has been slower to grow however; he, along with decision-makers like the Bravo brass and Vanderpump herself turned a blind eye to several racist incidents involving the cast. It wasn't until protests broke out across the country, and the cast of VPR dutifully jumped on the black-squares-on-Insta bandwagon to proclaim their support for calls for racial justice and police reform, that these straight, white reality stars faced actual consequences for their off-camera racist behavior.

Schroeder and Doute, both original cast members, were fired last week for repeatedly terrorizing Faith Stowers, a black woman and former SURver featured minimally on the show over the years. In 2017, Taylor also got in on the act, making claims on Twitter that year about Stowers’s criminal history. But Bravo has not fired, or publicly reprimanded, Taylor for his racist abuse of Stowers, nor has the network taken any meaningful action against him and Cartwright for their plan to give a homophobic pastor a national platform by featuring him as the officiant of their televised wedding. Through a rep, Bravo declined to comment on ongoing discussions about the cast; a rep for Sandoval didn't respond to requests for comment on the firing of his castmates.

Sandoval's predisposition to look out for those who have less than he has—less confidence, less money, less access—came into sharp focus when TomTom, the eponymous West Hollywood bar in which Sandoval and Schwartz own a minority stake, was forced to close in March. They’d nixed the idea of setting up a GoFundMe to raise money for TomTom's displaced staff, but an offer from Cameo, the service that lets people book personalized videos from celebrities, felt like the perfect fit; they agreed to match what they raised up to $10,000.

They did 73 Cameos in a day. They exceeded the ten grand fundraising goal almost immediately—and if he scratched an itch to perform while doing so, what of it? "We go above and beyond, we have a whole set-up, I have different color LEDs, a ring light, I have my trumpet, my ukulele, my guitar,” Sandoval says. “We've got jokes: Baby jokes, we have bartender jokes, we have doctor jokes, we have spouse jokes, lawyer jokes—like, how do you get the lawyer out of the tree? You cut the rope." He guffaws and tells another one—the Cameo had been requested on behalf of a lawyer, so he had plenty. "What did the lawyer say to the dog? The prosecution's gonna want you to roll over this one." He learned to play "Don't Worry Be Happy" on the ukulele because, he explains, "people are stressed out." Now, he's using his social media presence to call attention to causes that support racial justice, and he and Madix have joined protests in LA.

In isolation, he's struggling with being cut off from the things that energize him—being around people, planning elaborate costumes and wild parties. He hates Zoom. He's having stress dreams, just like everyone else, but his are "epic, like bestowed upon me is this huge responsibility, I must accomplish this huge journey or this huge goal and it's gonna be a journey of trials and tribulations. There's been a lot of that." His dreams, just like his cameos and his costumes and his hair-styling routine, are extra AF.

In preparation for a follow up interview in April, he had blow dried his hair to talk on the telephone. His flatiron, he said, was heating up. Despite everything, Sandoval was still exactly who he was, dreaming his epic dreams while he's sleeping, and while he's awake. "I had this crazy idea—it's a horrible idea, I know. But how cool would it be if I had the motorcycle sidecar shipped to New York and rode through Times Square?" In the background of the call Madix chimed in: "People are dying."

Sandoval's tone changed, chastened. "These are the ideas I constantly have to talk myself out of,” he said. That was just the cost of doing business as Tom Sandoval. “These are the extra, extra fucking things that go through my mind all the time."

Originally Appeared on GQ