Credit: Bravo, Shutterstock/Kathy Hutchins
Kyle Richards opened up about her future with Mauricio Umansky and why they haven’t filed for divorce on a podcast on Monday.
As she also spoke of women coming onto The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with an agenda, reacted to entitled fans expecting her to share everything on the show, and suggested that certain co-stars act like characters of themselves, Kyle, 57, gushed over her late mother, Kathleen Richards, and admitted that she and Mau, 55, won’t always be “in this gray area.”
“There has been more talk about that as of recently, I will say … the longer things go on like this, it seems harder, you know, to think about how do you come back from this,” she explained on the March 30 episode of Dear Media‘s The Bossticks. “I think both of us, it’s just hard to accept or acknowledge because it’s such a big part of our identities, you know, being married so long, but we’ve kept it so normal with our family.”
Kyle and Mau have also refrained from making their separation legal.
“We’re not legally separated, but we just don’t live together,” she revealed. “We haven’t done any paperwork … Listen — you don’t love someone that long and have that kind of relationship with them and just … disappear … We built this beautiful life together, and this beautiful family, and I have a lot of respect for him, and I have a lot of love for him. So there’s just been no reason to fight.”
“We haven’t had somebody, a third party pushing us to separate or file. So we’ve just been doing it on our own terms, in our own time,” she added.
Moving on to RHOBH, Kyle admitted to being able to “see right through” cast members’ agendas.
“It is painful for me to sit through. I will never hit below the belt. The things I could say that are going through my mind sometimes — which I’m sure people wish I would say — but I’m not there to hurt anybody or ruin their businesses or their marriages or anything like that. But I’m like … give me a break,” she noted.
Another topic that has become an annoyance is the entitlement of certain fans.
“They’re amazing, the fans are very passionate, they’re like sports fans — but sometimes it’s like, my God, they really feel that you owe them everything. They’ll send me a screenshot and say, ‘Oh, I saw you had this shampoo in your shower…’ But do you want to see me going to the bathroom, showering, having sex too? Like, where do we draw the line?” Kyle wondered.
Then, asked why she’s been able to retain such a large fanbase, Kyle mentioned that she was the longest-running consecutive housewife in the history of the franchise.
“I’ve never left, and I’ve never been put on pause or fired. [Fifteen] years straight, no breaks, no pause. I’ve never called in sick. I’ve never canceled an interview. I’ve never not shown up,” she declared. “A lot of comedians who, like, their shtick is to make fun of us or impersonate us, they will always say to me, ‘You’re so difficult to do because you’re actually a real person.’”
As for others, Kyle said that while she wasn’t trying to “shade anybody,” some cast members do more acting.
“It’s also what makes them great TV — like, they’re characters,” she reasoned.
Also during the interview, Kyle described her mother as “really strong, really tough, Aries, Irish — fire across the board.”
“She was a single mom. She and my father were separated when I was like three years old or something, and she had a lot of pressure on her with her daughters. She had to be tough, and she didn’t want us to ever be scared; she wanted us to be independent,” she revealed. “So she was trying to be a good role model to us and in doing that, she was extra, extra tough — which I don’t know if it really helped.”
According to Kyle, her mom was really funny and pushed her into an acting career at a young age.
“I’m actually really grateful she did because my mom studied at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and then she was also a very young mom, and then, you know, she was wheeling [Kathy Hilton] in a stroller through New York City — that’s where they all are from, and people were stopping on the street. ‘She’s so beautiful. She’s so beautiful, she should be modeling,’ so my mom put Kathy in modeling, and then it became commercials, and then [Kim Richards] came along, and then it was the same with Kim, and then Kim did a carpet commercial crawling on the carpet at six months old,” she shared. “So my mom was kind of living vicariously through her kids and moved everyone to Hollywood.”
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 15 airs Thursdays at 8/7c on Bravo.