Jessel Taank arrives at the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas wearing an electric blue asymmetrical Givenchy dress. It’s noon on the final day of BravoCon and she’s by herself, striding into the convention center with confidence, a glorious fall of dark hair, and a big smile on a bright-red lip. Like so many on Bravo, she’s both prettier and smaller in person than she is on whatever screen you watch her show on. With designer duds (but no logos) and full glam, she’s in the official reality-star battle armor for her first event, a Bravopalooza where attendees have paid $250 to breathe the same extra-oxygenated air as one of their favorite reality-TV stars. Taank is immediately swarmed by Bravo’s two key demographics: middle-aged white women and gay men. “Where’s Pavit?” nearly everyone asks.
Thirty minutes and 50 selfies later, the Housewife caves. “Everyone’s asking for you; you should come,” she tells her husband over the phone, excited to give the people what they want but also maybe a little bit peeved that her presence is not enough. “No, that’s not it. Today’s outfit is the corduroy jacket that I bought you.” Ten minutes later, he sends a selfie from the hotel bathroom wearing a brick-red corduroy jacket. “The way I talk to Pavit, I’m kind of a bitch sometimes,” she tells me. Taank has agreed to let me follow her around for a four-hour stretch as she fulfills the duties that come with newfound reality-TV fame. “I’m in publicist mode. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, it just means that I have a lot going on and I need to organize my shit.”
Taank’s bitchier side emerged quickly on The Real Housewives of New York City, which started its 14th season in July with an entirely new cast. In the second episode, while on a girls’ trip to castmate Erin Dana Lichy’s Hamptons house, Taank threw a fit when fellow Housewife and fashion icon Jenna Lyons gifted her a green slip she found unsightly. “I look like a fucking Christmas tree,” she shouted, stomping through Lichy’s mansion like one of her twin toddlers throwing a tantrum. Her co-stars were not impressed, and since Lyons — the anti-reality star through and through — wouldn’t express her disappointment, the rest of the cast took it upon themselves to do so. After all, in the calculus of great Housewivery, if everyone is coming for Jessel, no one is coming for you.
Taank seemed all but destined to take up the reboot’s villain mantle, a responsibility borne by Ramona Singer and Aviva Drescher before her. “I was getting a lot of backlash,” she says, reclining in the BravoCon talent lounge between visits from Heather Gay (who lightheartedly scolded Taank for calling her the “messiest Housewife” on the red carpet the day before) and an emissary from OG New York Housewife Sonja Morgan looking to make introductions. “A lot of people did not like me. And it was very much a Shit, what did I do? moment,” Taank says. “I was like, ‘Am I made for this? This is maybe not my path.’”
And then Tribeca happened. During an onscreen coffee meeting with Lichy, she referred to Tribeca — one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country — as “up-and-coming.” The moment immediately entered the Bravo Halls of Fame, not only because of how wrong Taank was but because of how sure she was in her error. One could choose to read her as lacking self-awareness and guile … or one could see in her delusional real-estate claims a sense of calculated obliviousness. Was she merely an arriviste just in from Dallas who didn’t know any better? Or did she want her audience to think she knew something no one else did? All the best practitioners of the reality-television arts and sciences know it’s better to be an enigma (wrapped in a riddle and cash, as Erika Jayne says) than to let yourself be so swiftly vilified.
“Evan Ross Katz had posted the TriBeCa thing, and he said something like, ‘I’m watching for Jessel Taank,’” recalls Taank. “The gays were my first community of fans. That’s how Beyoncé started, that’s how Lady Gaga started. Not that I’m comparing, but I am.”
And even Beyoncé needs her Jay-Z. The Real Housewives franchise was built on the delightful prospect of internecine warfare — of watching rich women throw wine at one another for the slightest perceived infraction. But the franchise has endured thanks to its ability to chart as much upswing as it does downfall. Romance has been at the heart of the endeavor since Vicki Gunvalson’s love tank first came up empty. Right now it’s in short supply: Robyn Dixon and her high-school sweetheart are embroiled in a cheating scandal on Potomac; Scandoval gripped the nation as several of the foundational couples on Vanderpump Rules met disastrous ends; and perhaps worst of all, Kyle Richards and Mauricio Umansky’s potential breakup is the basis for the current season of Beverly Hills. Taank managed to not only avoid the total villain edit but to also position herself as Bravo’s great hope for real love.
When Randhawa finally arrives — with an escort from Bravo PR because he tried to walk through the convention floor and got absolutely mobbed — the pair descend into the VIP room and the fans erupt. “The king and queen!” someone yells. “Oh my god. I’m having a panic attack. I have to get a pic,” says another. “Pavit! We love you. Bahn Mi!” yells a third, referencing Randhawa’s solo trip to Vietnam, during which he ate several bahn mi, turned around, and came home. This trip became a point of contention when Lichy and castmate Sai De Silva insinuated Randhawa might be up to extramarital escapades abroad. His video recap of the trip, in which he pokes fun at Lichy and De Silva (“I’m going to eat as much as I can — yes, I’m talking about food people, there’s nothing else going on!”), currently has 30,000 likes on Instagram. Another fan in the VIP room made him a friendship bracelet with beads spelling out “Pavit’s Bahn Mi.”
Randhawa immediately slides the bracelet onto his wrist. “It’s just the same old me so far,” he says when asked whether the generous fans inflate his ego as his Vietnam trip inflated his frequent-flier status. He admits he gets a lot of attention in New York. His obvious forefather is Simon Van Kempen, Alex McCord’s husband, who similarly appeared more frequently than other spouses in RHONY seasons one through four. But Simon never quite captured the hearts of fans — and these days is remembered more for his ugly red leather pants on the cover of his failed dance single “I Am Real” than any contributions on the show. Randhawa fares better. Onscreen, he is usually tucked at home with Taank, where she’s yelling at him for leaving fingerprints on their glass table or rolling her eyes at his reluctance to send their kids to a preschool simply because it served an “elevated” charcuterie board during open house. But while some viewers see him as henpecked, many have observed a unique symbiosis between Taank and Randhawa — an understanding that comes only from the truly well-matched.
Which isn’t to say Randhawa hasn’t made mistakes. This season, he derisively described De Silva as “bipolar,” but after his wife, Lyons, and co-star Brynn Whitfield called him out on his poor choice of words, he immediately apologized. Unlike so many Househusbands who fall into the categories of cheater, crook, or garden-variety brute, he knows when to shut up and say sorry. When Taank, in the middle of recording a video for BravoCon sponsor TikTok, demands, “Pavit, take pictures. And good ones,” he does just that.
“It wasn’t the greatest, obviously,” the softspoken Randhawa says of Jessel’s first few episodes in the hot seat. He adds that he’s big on social media — Twitter, Instagram, even Reddit, where the real Bravo crazies hide — and the reactions there made it even worse. He shielded his wife from the worst of it, as any good partner would. These days, he’s running a lot less defense for Team Jessel. “Jessel Taank deserves a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame! Know that,” one fan who can only be described as a fashion twink yells in my face as he exits their photo line with the ultimate BravoCon prize stashed in his phone. (The snap after “know that” is implied.) This fan would surely agree with the spread in Rolling Stone that ran with the headline “The Real Housewives of New York Is the Jessel Taank Show.” A flattering pronouncement, to be sure, but had it caused any ripples with the rest of the cast? “I would imagine they were all very happy for me, but there’s probably a little bit of something. I don’t know what that emotion is or how to put it into words, ” she says, describing jealousy. She notes that Whitfield and Ubah Hassan are her “girls,” and as for her relationships with Lichy and De Silva, “no one is going to come for me next year,” she says. It’s the type of inscrutable retort that emphasizes how she’s learning to skirt the line of villainy without toppling across it.
“I think I was a little too vulnerable, a little too open, a little too honest,” she says of her first moments on the show. “I didn’t understand at the time the repercussions.”
With the final obligation of the day wrapped, we head for Jessel’s lingerie, displayed prominently at BravoCon’s Housewives Museum. Randhawa wants to get a picture of Taank with the slip because he knows her fans will eat it up. She asks if it’s really worth navigating the crush of fans, and he assures her it is; she says nothing, but an agreement is met. I’ve seen this a few times over the course of the afternoon. Backstage in the talent lounge, she asks whether a small portion is all he’s eating, and he responds, “First course.” They drop it. While he’s perusing the buffet, she books them both on Below Deck icon Captain Lee’s podcast, assuring me he’ll be overjoyed. When she informs him and a smile beams across his face, she turns to me and says, “Told you!” They’re so in tune, so in sync, that not only do they have a shorthand, but they seem to be building toward the same thing, the same goal. Is it reality fame? World domination? More and better sandwiches? If they talk about it, it’s only telepathically.
Once the pictures are taken and we’re back in the fluorescent-lighted innards of the convention center, I ask Randhawa how he feels about the weekend’s festivities, during which he and his wife were treated like members of BTS. “It’s not who I am. I’m just a man of the people,” he says, trying to hide a sly smile. “But I love it.”
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