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Tamra Judge wasn’t doing the best when filming began on the 19th season of The Real Housewives of Orange County earlier this year.
While looking back at the challenges she faced amid production, including Teddi Mellencamp‘s brain and lung cancer diagnosis, Tamra, 57, opened up about her drama with Shannon Beador, 61, shaded Gretchen Rossi, 46, and her dated hair, and suggested that either Jennifer Pedranti, 48, and Ryan Boyajian, 48, was getting cold feet ahead of their upcoming wedding.
“For a while, I was like, this is nonsense. [The show’] making me depressed. I had a really hard time when Teddi got diagnosed, and then it just really put me in a tailspin, so this season, in general, was very, very hard for me to film,” Tamra recalled on the July 10 episode of New York Live.
Although Tamra and Shannon hugged it out at the season 18 reunion last year, their good times didn’t last through season 19.
“We’ve been friends for 10 years. And some stuff went down on both sides. It wasn’t just me. I’m very upfront about it, but she holds a grudge. I don’t. She will hold a grudge forever,” Tamra detailed. “It was this love-hate friendship. I was super nice to her all season long, but she tried everything to hate me and get everybody else to hate me.”
“She’s exhausting,” she added.
During filming, Tamra and her castmates underwent lie detector tests. And, while Tamra was “super excited” to do so, she noted that others were “a little scared.”
“Shannon and Gretchen. They were sweating bullets,” she recalled. “[But] we got some answers.”
Gretchen returned to the show for season 19 after leaving in 2018 after season eight.
“Who? I don’t remember her,” Tamra replied after her name was mentioned.
While Tamra and Gretchen weren’t on good terms when Gretchen left the show years ago, Tamra insisted that she tried to start out in a better place.
“My opening line to her was, literally, ‘Let me reintroduce myself to you and I hope that we can move forward and not dwell on the past.’ But this girl, she’s so stuck in the past,” she shared, shadily adding, “Just look at her hair.”
Moving on to Jennifer and Ryan, Tamra clarified that she was not hoping for an invitation to the couple’s nuptials before suggesting there was trouble in paradise.
“Do you think that I wanted to be invited to that wedding? … And where’s the wedding? You’ll have to wait and see,” she teased. “You have to listen to the lie detector test, see who’s a little nervous about moving forward.”
After noting that their cast trips were a “fun time,” signaling visits to Amsterdam and New Orleans, Tamra said she was struggling with the concept of being an empty nester as her youngest child, Sophia Barney, 19, considered what college she would attend.
“She’s looking at colleges, and she’s getting ready to go. She’s making those steps to leave, and she’s my last one. It’s horrible … I want her to stay with me forever. But I want her to grow,” she explained.
Tamra is also focused on self-growth and has remained in therapy since filming season 19.
“I’m still going to therapy. I’ve never in my 57 years of life gone consistently to figure out — cuz it’s hard digging up old things and bringing it… When everyone’s like, ‘You shouldn’t act like that, you shouldn’t yell and scream when you get mad,’ I’m like, ‘okay, let me figure out what the root of the problem is.’ They dig up so much, and it was difficult,” she shared.
The Real Housewives of Orange County season 19 airs Thursdays at 9/8c on Bravo.
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