When it was announced earlier this year that Jill Zarin would be joining the Season 2 cast of Peacock’s The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, Housewives fans everywhere rejoiced. It would be a long-awaited homecoming for Zarin, who was fired from The Real Housewives of New York City in 2011 after an iconic four-season run—and a chance for Zarin to prove she’s no reality TV villain.
Vicki Gunvalson, Zarin’s Ultimate Girls Trip co-star, often gets all the credit for being the original Real Housewife—“the OG of the OC,” as she has been dubbed by fans. Indeed, Gunvalson was a founding cast member in the first Housewives series ever, The Real Housewives of Orange County, and went on to boast a lengthy 14-season tenure. But it was Zarin and the apple-toting ladies of The Real Housewives of New York City who played a major role in shaping the franchise into the high-camp, high-drama, highly addictive reality TV phenomenon that it is today.
Despite the fact that it’s been over a decade since Zarin was last on RHONY, she had no problem getting back into the swing of things for Ultimate Girls Trip.
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“You know what’s funny? It doesn’t feel like I ever left,” she recently told The Daily Beast. “I know that sounds strange, but I was back at Bravo [recently] and NBC is still the same lobby. Some of the faces changed, but it feels like I was just there yesterday.”
Zarin made a point to clarify that even though she hasn’t been on Housewives in recent years, she has been staying booked and busy, thank you very much. “It’s not like I haven’t done anything in 10 years,” she said. “I’ve done press for my own brands, for my candles, and my rugs, so I’ve done a little bit. And I’ve done a couple of TV shows, acting stuff. But it’s not the same as being on your own show.”
On Ultimate Girls Trip, Housewives from different cities in the franchise come together for a week-long vacation that gives reality TV obsessives a crossover event on par with Avengers: Infinity War. It’s more for established fans than casual viewers; you really need to know each of the women and the roles they play in their respective casts to get the full, exciting effect of seeing who gets along and, more importantly, who doesn’t.
The first season of Ultimate Girls Trip premiered on Peacock last fall and saw Bravolebrities like Kyle Richards from Beverly Hills, Teresa Giudice from New Jersey, and Luann de Lesseps from New York all sharing a villa in Turks and Caicos.
Along with Zarin and Gunvalson, the second season features Dorinda Medley from New York, Tamra Judge from Orange County, Taylor Armstrong and Brandi Glanville from Beverly Hills, and Phaedra Parks and Eva Marcille from Atlanta. It has more of a summer camp feel than its predecessor—you know, if summer camp involved group consultations with a psychic and heated games of inflatable penis ring toss.
Instead of a tropical island paradise, they filmed Season 2 at Medley’s sprawling Berkshires home, Blue Stone Manor. The setting alone is an Easter egg for fans who have watched many an explosive fight between the ladies of New York City unfold within Blue Stone Manor’s dead fish-adorned walls or have maybe even contemplated buying a “Make It Nice” mug on Etsy.
According to Zarin, filming Ultimate Girls Trip felt like, well, a vacation compared to shooting an entire season of RHONY, since you get to pack up and leave the drama behind at the end of the week.
“It’s a lot longer when you’re on a full season of Housewives and you have to do the reunion,” she explained. “And it’s just a lot harder because these girls [on RHONY] you’re friends with, or you live near, or you socialize with and you know you’re going to see them again and you know you’re going to film with them again. With this case, it’s like we left it all there.”
Her one complaint about the experience? “I was hungry,” Zarin said without skipping a beat. “There was no food. I was starving.” This behind-the-scenes confession will surely surprise viewers, since it seems like eating was one of the only things to do at Blue Stone Manor, besides getting drunk and arguing about vaccine misinformation. “I’m not blaming Dorinda per se, but you know, it was her house,” Zarin added, throwing a subtle dose of shade, as any good Real Housewife would.
It’s a running joke throughout the season that Zarin is always in saleswoman mode, regaling her castmates with unsolicited advice about how Amazon delivers rolling racks overnight or pitching them products from Jill & Ally, the apparel and accessories brand she started with her daughter during the pandemic. “She is like a walking QVC,” Medley says of Zarin in one episode of Ultimate Girls Trip. Throughout our interview, she lived up to her reputation, seamlessly and unabashedly plugging Jill & Ally whenever the opportunity arose.
“No apologies,” Zarin said when I pointed this out in connection to the QVC joke. “You know, we all work. We all have to make a living. I love working with my daughter. I want to support her and her dream and, you know, whatever I can do to fulfill that dream, I’m going to do. And if it means being on a reality show and doing it that way, so be it.”
Zarin’s candor and her willingness to be completely herself—even if that means sometimes being the butt of the joke—is what made her a fan-favorite Housewife in the early days of The Real Housewives of New York City. Things began to go south for her during season three of RHONY, however, when her friendship with Bethenny Frankel, once the most fun aspect of the show, began to fall apart. Toward the end of her time on the show, her genuinely heartbreaking falling-out with Frankel turned Zarin into the most polarizing member of the cast. Some people even called her the villain of the show, and she was fired after the fourth season.
“I don’t think I was a villain. I think I was the victim, if you ask me,” she said of her final seasons on RHONY. “I mean, I think I was kind of a cornered rat and I reacted the way I reacted because I was cornered. When somebody comes after you, you have to defend yourself. But a villain is someone who pre-thinks doing mean, bad things. That is so not me, and anyone who thinks that of me didn’t watch the show for the first few years.”
She continued, “I just think I had a rough Season 3 for a lot of reasons. And by the way, in hindsight, if you look at the show, every Housewife on every show that has been on long enough has had a bad season. Because humans are not perfect. We’re not meant to be perfect. We’re perfectly imperfect. But do I think I’ve learned and grown? Yes, I do.”
So whether you love Jill Zarin or love to hate her, she was and remains an undeniably iconic figure in the Bravo universe. And it’s a role she’s grateful to play.
“Being a Bravolebrity, you’re part of a family. A very dysfunctional family,” she told The Daily Beast. “Yet you’re still related. You don’t always love your relatives, but you’re still relatives.”
