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.”
