‘RHOBH’: Joyce Giraud Reveals She Wasn’t Friends With Any of the Cast Before Joining the Show
Former The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Joyce Girard admits she wasn’t brought onto the show by a friend and actually knew no one well before she was cast.
The typical casting formula is for a current cast member to introduce a friend as someone new. “It takes a village,” Ryan Flynn shared Bravo’s The Daily Dish podcast. “It is definitely not a one-person decision. Every season always starts with who wants to come back? Who maybe doesn’t want to come back? What do we feel like in terms of what might be missing [from] the dynamic within the group? And then we always start with the women, sort of the core group that we think is coming back.”
“It’s always like, ‘Who do you know that we should know?’ Because it’s always best to have a real-life connection and to have that history. And I think we definitely see that on The Real Housewives of New York City. Like it always felt like Dorinda [Medley] was there, because in a way she always was. It always felt like if you just turned the camera a couple of feet one way or the other, Dorinda has always been there. And so that’s why I think her inclusion has been so successful. It’s just so natural.”
Joyce Giraud says she wasn’t friends with any current cast members
Giraud says her connection to the show was through a connection to Taylor Armstrong’s husband. “I was actually friends with Taylor’s husband, may he rest in peace,” she shared on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast. Armstrong’s husband Russell died in 2011.
“I remember we were at a mutual friend’s dinner party at their home in Beverly Hills and he was there and he was asking my husband for some advice. He was like, ‘What do you think about realities? What do you think about this? Because there’s this new reality show that they’re offering Taylor. So what do you think?'”
When the Beverly Hills series began, Giraud says she didn’t watch the show but would see some of the cast at parties. However, she wasn’t actually connected to any of the women. “But I would always see at Mohammad’s [Hadid] house, I would always see Lisa [Vanderpump] from time to time because they were super close. But we were never friends. We were introduced, like ‘Hi nice to meet you’ but we weren’t friends or anything.”
“So I wasn’t really friends with any of the girls when I went into it. I didn’t really know any of them at all,” she adds. Armstrong was no longer on the show when Giraud joined the cast.
She built a close friendship with Lisa Vanderpump
Although she didn’t have a connection when she joined the show, Giraud made at least one good friend before she left. “I’m really good friends with Lisa [Vanderpump],” Giraud shares. “I love her so much. We’ve been texting right now in this corona crisis. And you know, I even told her the other day because we’ve been so busy, I’ve been traveling so much and she’s been so busy with Vegas and stuff.”
“We do see each other, but I haven’t seen her,” she says. “I would say like in, I don’t know, like two months, I haven’t seen, we texts of course, but we haven’t seen each other like in two months we were just texting yesterday and I said, Oh my God, babe, I’m so mad that we didn’t see each other more when we could. I love you. And I sent Ken a kiss. And when this is over, I promise you, I’m going to make more time as are you.”
