The Art Of Being Lisa Rinna

Most celebrities want to meet for an interview in a plush booth with a panoramic view at the Polo Lounge — a legacy flex. Or they opt for the exclusive San Vicente Bungalows, where snapping a photo will get you ejected at breakneck speed. Not Lisa Rinna. On a recent afternoon, I find myself waiting for the multi-hyphenate at a low-key deli perched above Bel Air. “Loaded potato skins” are on the laminated menu.

“I made both of my girls work here when they turned 15,” says Rinna, as she scooches into a black vinyl banquette. She’s talking about her daughters with husband Harry Hamlin: singer Delilah Belle, now 28, and 25-year-old runway model Amelia Gray. It’s hard to imagine the glamorous sisters slinging plates of eggs with corned beef hash. “Oh, they were so mad at me. None of their friends had jobs. I was the worst mother ever,” Rinna says with a delighted cackle. “And I was like, ‘Sorry. Not sorry.’”

Talk about a classic Rinna move: take a controversial stance and never back down. It’s been part of her playbook for the past 40-plus years in Hollywood as an actor, soap opera regular, talk-show host, and reality-TV star. Memes that prove she’s no pushover abound. For instance, when a snooty French fashion journalist questioned her avant-garde look at a 2025 Balenciaga show in Paris, she leveled him with a steely stare and quipped, “It’s couture, honey. Look at the tag.” During her eight seasons on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Rinna never shied away from speaking her truth either. “It’s so fun being an observer of this petty bullsh*t” might be one of her most iconic — and cutting — lines ever.

It's no wonder her juicy tell-all memoir, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, instantly landed her on the New York Times bestseller list this past February and likely drop-kicked her off a few invite lists. (In the book, she spills enough tea about Star Jones, Denise Richards, and Lisa Vanderpump to ruin a tablecloth.) But today, we’re putting the focus on her. Rinna is exhausted, just off a whirlwind couple of weeks that included turning heads at the Emmys in a Lever Couture dress with a racy side-slit to her hipbone and storming the front rows at Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors at New York Fashion Week, wearing outfits worthy of rubbernecking, of course.

“It’s been nonstop. It took me down. I need sleep,” she says, though you wouldn’t guess it. Dressed in a cool Blondie T-shirt with a casual Bleusalt cardigan and Hailey Bieber’s jeans for Gap, Rinna nails incognito. Well, almost. Even a cute Prada bucket hat can’t obscure her wide-set hazel eyes, sky-high cheekbones, and the signature pout that accentuates her profile. A few nearby diners sneak peeks our way. Maybe they recognize her as an ex-Housewife or as the banished contestant on Season 4 of the competition series The Traitors. Either way, she doesn’t seem to notice. “Look, if I walked in here all dressed up with the hair and the makeup, then I’m ‘Lisa F*cking Rinna,’ and it’s a whole other thing,” she says, rolling her eyes at herself playfully.

“Reinvention is innate to me because I like to create. I’m almost like a performance artist.”

Indeed, at 63, Rinna has tapped into her big-cat energy. She wears outlandish wigs, dances in her underwear on social media, and gets as political as Jane Fonda on occasion. “At this point in my life and at my age, I don’t feel uncomfortable about anything, to be honest,” she tells me. And like any feline, she’s got more than a few lives under her Gucci belt. Rinna got her professional start acting on Days of Our Lives and Melrose Place in the ’90s after growing up in Medford, Oregon. “I was watching Carol Burnett and Cher on TV as a little girl,” she says. “They were so funny. They were my icons.” She married actor Hamlin (L.A. Law and later Mad Men) in 1997 and they had two daughters by the early aughts.

But when Rinna turned 40 and Hollywood acting jobs started to dry up, she didn’t panic. She pivoted. “Harry said to me, ‘Your photographs are in all these fashion magazines for your style. Can’t we monetize that somehow?’” In 2003, the couple opened a chic clothing boutique called Belle Gray — a mashup of their daughters’ middle names — which spawned another shop two years later. It’s just one of the many ways Rinna has reinvented herself over the past four decades. In the most recent 20 years alone, she has become a QVC personality with her own eponymous clothing line, a beauty entrepreneur with (what else?) lip kits and lipsticks on Amazon, and a model for top designers, including a Marc Jacobs campaign when she turned 60.

“I think reinvention is innate to me because I like to create. I’m almost like a performance artist,” she says with a shrug. “And I didn’t think I would be so excited about life in my early 60s. My mom always said she felt 25, even when she was 90.” How old does she feel? “I guess I feel 30 or 35. Not old.”

She name-checks her favorite old Hollywood movie stars: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford. “Man, they had a rough time after 40,” Rinna says. “But now, you have women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s winning the Emmys. Look at Salma Hayek and Nicole Kidman. It’s a whole new world!” Rinna credits her own cultural longevity with her curiosity and ability to evolve. She’s also up for virtually anything. Not long after Rinna exited RHOBH in 2023, her publicist got a call from the French fashion design house Kenzo to invite Rinna to an upcoming runway show in Paris.

“She asked me how I felt about it. I said, ‘I feel great!’” she recalls. “I mean, this wasn’t on my bucket list, but they put me up in the George V and dressed me. I was pinching myself.”

“People assume I’m high maintenance until I show up at fittings and fashion shows alone. They expect an entourage, but I like to fly solo.”

That stint led to more front row appearances in Paris that season, and a fashion star was born. (Still, Rinna reminds me she was already wearing Alaia and Tom Ford for Gucci in the ’90s: “I started reading Vogue at 16.”) The splashy attention from designers couldn’t have come at a better time. Rinna’s breakup with the Bravo franchise inarguably ended like a car bomb. Lisa Vanderpump tweeted “Ding dong” when Rinna announced her resignation. “I am tough, but the last couple of years were brutal,” she says, admitting the cruel comments on her social media and negative public sentiment nearly undid her. She cried a lot. Turned to her loyal circle of L.A. girlfriends. Found a therapist who could help her wade through the backlash.

“They were so mean. Said my husband was gay. My family got death threats. I thought people would never be nice to me again.” She purses her famous lips and maintains, “I was just doing my job.” Meaning, she saw her participation on RHOBH as an acting role. Reality shows revolve around drama, and she served it up with a side of sass. Rinna played it almost like a scripted soap opera.

Offscreen, the real Lisa Rinna is actually pretty chill and self-aware. More down-home than diva. “People assume I’m high maintenance until I show up at fittings and fashion shows alone. They expect an entourage, but I like to fly solo. It’s just easier,” she says. Another misconception? She sighs. “They think I’m a b*tch because of my persona as a woman who took no sh*t on Housewives. I’m fine with it because I was more of a people-pleaser growing up. Sometimes, I can’t believe how strong I am now.”

In her book, Rinna reveals a little-known terrifying fact that still profoundly informs her perspective. A few years before Rinna was born, her late mother, Lois DeAndrade, was brutally attacked by a co-worker who would go on to become a serial killer. DeAndrade was lucky to survive. “I inherited a level of fear that wasn’t mine,” she says. “I was taught not to trust anyone and to never be vulnerable. I’m working on that now. I love the evolution of myself as a human.”

She says that commitment to personal growth has also kept her and Hamlin together for almost 30 years — “If we need to do work, we go to therapy” — which is rare in a town where celebrity marriages expire faster than a carton of milk. “We raised our kids, and now, we’re back to being a couple. We’re always evolving separately and together. He might be at a nuclear physics conference because he loves that sort of thing, while I might be in Paris at the fashion shows. Still, we get a kick out of what each other does.”

The two have been known to coordinate their outfits on the red carpet. It’s a risky style ploy: Remember Britney and Justin’s dueling denim at the American Music Awards back in the day? But Rinna doesn’t worry about the wrath of critics though. “For the Emmys, I really wanted us both to wear the same exact matching ERL tuxedos, but they couldn’t make them in time,” she says. “That was my vision.”

“I didn’t think I would be so excited about life in my early 60s. My mom always said she felt 25, even when she was 90.”

Clearly, Rinna is a visionary with no fear when it comes to fashion. Like an ultra-pop version of postmodern artist Cindy Sherman’s portraits, she courts risk, toying with identity, gender politics, and beauty standards through her personal style. Her dramatic 2024 entrance at a Balenciaga show in a head-to-toe panther-black puffer read like a straight-jacket for a dangerous woman. At this year’s AmfAR Gala outside Cannes, she showed up in a rainbow-beaded Kevin Germanier fitted gown with a bleached blond bouffant worthy of a Hitchcock heroine.

“For me, fashion is fun and creative,” says Rinna, who works with L.A. stylist Daniela Viviana Romero. “I find joy in picking a look, playing a character. Who am I going to be today? That’s how I see it.”

When I ask Rinna about her next professional iteration, she smiles coyly and uses the term “full circle.” She’s revisiting her first love: acting. “I can’t be too specific until it’s announced, but we’re going back to Broadway,” she says, referring to her and Hamlin’s debut nearly 20 years ago as Roxie Hart and Billy Flynn in Chicago. (A week later, the news hits: the couple will join Andrew Rannells and Tituss Burgess in a staged Broadway production, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, from November through early January.)

“I love theater. I love a live audience. Every night, it’s a new challenge,” she tells me as she takes a final sip of her green tea. When Rinna stands up to leave, I ask her if she wants to set the record straight on any hearsay or rumors about her before she heads home. “Anything?” she asks. I nod. “Hmmm. You know what? I’m finally at a place where I don’t need to do that.”