This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack. Subscribe here to read more like it!
As Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Angie Katsanevas descends the staircase at her flagship Lunatic Fringe salon, the orchestra strikes up: blow dryers blasting their shrill hum, wash basins projecting the splash from their faucets, the static sound of combs teasing hair, and the cacophonous symphony of gossip rising from every chair and station.
Katsanevas—or Angie K., as she’s known to Bravo fans—waves as she takes my arm and teeters down the steps in her sky-high heels.
One woman, hair sopping wet and cloak still over her shoulders, darts over to introduce herself. A man I’m told is one of the first stylists she hired when the salon launched three decades ago delivers a business update. Clients, some of whom predated Katsanevas’ fame and others who were there precisely to sneak a selfie with the star, all beam at her.
This is reality TV’s version of Hello, Dolly!. Katsanevas has returned to the business that is its own supporting character on RHOSLC and subject of some of its most viral moments, smiling and nodding at the patrons and employees who are the bustling fruits of her labor.
Katsanevas is also the guest on a new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast. Watch the full episode here, or watch below.
It’s been years since the maestro-of-memes Real Housewife has been behind the chair. Though, with the jet-black waterfall cascading down her back without a strand out of place, she is still revered as an expert—and, now, a brand partner with styling-product company Kérastase. And, of course, she loves doling out hair advice.
She’s several times now, over the multiple occasions we’ve spent time together, talked me out of dyeing my grays—“You’re a silver fox with a baby face!”—and has a dream of giving Andy Cohen a haircut during his Watch What Happens Live talk show. “Though I have to say, I’m loving his long hair right now.”
Then there’s one of her most iconic Real Housewives lines, a quip that leaped from the Bravoverse directly into the mainstream’s internet culture lexicon: when she insulted castmate Britani Bateman by saying she has “high-body-count hair.”
When I quite gayly mentioned the Helly, Dolly! vibes of the scene I had just witnessed, Katsanevas was oblivious to the reference but adored the quite accurate connotation: “When someone says, ‘Well, what do you do for the salon now?’ I joke that I’m the Walmart greeter.”
We proceeded down another staircase to a quieter room, one that, no one thinks to prepare me for, features a centerpiece wall of wigs. “Oh, isn’t this hilarious,” Katasnevas laughed, noticing my startled stare.
I was in Salt Lake City to interview the Real Housewives at the places where they live and work (and drink and fight).
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, now airing its seventh season, has exploded in popularity. Celebrities frequently name it their favorite show and DM with the cast members. It’s been nominated for Critics Choice Awards. John Oliver is passionate that it deserves Emmys for both Best Comedy and Best Drama. The stars were featured on the cover of Us Weekly.
Katsanevas’ run on the show is remarkable. She’s the Little Greek Girl That Could: an admittedly tiny person who mentions that she’s Greek at least once a minute, who fans never believed would become the backbone of RHOSLC—and now is one of the most popular reality stars on TV.
She was nearly bullied off the show when she joined as a new cast member mid-run, but stood her ground, delivered relentless quotable insults that were instantly memed, wore glasses the size of a car windshield (also memed), and asserted her way to the all-important “center snowflake” status.
Already, just episodes in, Season 7 is the most emotional season of the show yet. So Katasanevas and I had much to talk about—and this was the perfect location to do it.
Lunatic Fringe is, after all, the mothership Katsanevas was referring to when she blasted fast-food-obsessed RHOSLC adversary Lisa Barlow, screaming, “You do French fries, I do franchises.” She cackled when I brought up the line: “I think I have a T-shirt here that says that somewhere.”
If These Wigs Could Talk…
The walls of Lunatic Fringe aren’t just lined with fake hair, but with fond memories.
The business “was our first baby, even before our daughter,” she said. She and her husband, Shawn Trujillo, opened the salon in 1999, the same year they got married. The business moved into the building we’re in now 15 years ago. It was once Felt-Buchorn, a historic Salt Lake City luxury shop where the couple registered for their fine china and wedding gifts all those years before.
On our way down to the wig den, we passed a conference room where Trujillo was conducting business about the Lunatic Fringe franchises. He came out to shake my hand, impressively ignoring my confused face during the interaction: Aren’t Angie K. and Shawn…broken up?
In July, Page Six reported that the couple was separating and were no longer together romantically. This came after several seasons of Katsanevas defending their marriage against rumors that Shawn was a closet homosexual who engaged in “circle jerks” with other men.
Katsanevas and I talked in the past about the admirable way Shawn handled the rumors: resisting the macho impulse to be offended by accusations of being gay, but instead upset at the insinuation he was unfaithful to his wife.
It was surprising, then, to read about their separation. And more surprising, I admitted to her, to run into Trujillo at Lunatic Fringe and see them so friendly.
“It’s 30 years of marriage. People go through ups and downs, and I share all this on the show,” she said. “I hate to be the whole, ‘Hey, you’re gonna have to wait and watch.’ Because if you and I were to sit for coffee without a recorder…”
We did do just that later that day, only over dinner and beverages much harder than coffee, where Katsanevas was extremely candid about her separation, how it’s affecting her family, and what her future might look like with Trujillo as a business partner, but not a romantic one.
But Katsanevas doesn’t need liquid courage to spill her own tea. Suffice it to say, much of what we talked about will be seen on the show.
When she first decided to join RHOSLC, she and her family made a pact: If she was going to do this, they’d all have to be at peace with the fact that their lives, their relationship, and their business would be dissected and gossiped about. And, over the last five years, just about everything has been fodder for the campfire at the rumor mill, from money laundering and mafia allegations to Trujillo’s sexuality.
Still, even with that understanding when signing up for a show like this, it is surreal when it’s your marriage ending that you now have to talk about on camera.
“I could have been like to Shawn, ‘Hey, let’s just smile through it. You can open my door, you can hold my hand, you can get my coffee.’ But I am committed to being honest, being real, being vulnerable, and sharing the truth,” she said.
Going through this on reality television “is the hardest thing, but strangely it makes you say things out loud that are going on in your personal life, putting a mirror in front of you and making you accept it,” she said. “Things may not be the same as they once were, so how do you move forward? I love the show for that. It’s really, truly making me reflect and be honest not only with the audience, but with myself.”
Angie K. Gets Unfiltered
Honesty was always going to be integral in Katasanevas’ reality-TV journey. What she didn’t expect was that humor would be just as much a part of it…or that the jokes she’d make would get her into so much hot water.
Her best one-liners often come in heated moments of booze-filled dinners, and sometimes at the expense of castmates’ appearances: telling Barlow, “I’m going to come over there and pull your ears further back than they’ve been pulled by your f—ing facelift,” or calling Meredith Marks, “You look like a trampoline with eyes.”
These comments, one can imagine, pour gasoline on already incendiary arguments. They also crack the Bravo audience up.
When she was younger, Katsanevas’ friends would tell her she was witty, though she didn’t know what that word meant: “We didn’t have Google back then.” But as she’s gotten more comfortable being on the show, she’s, yes, learned the definition, but also discovered that it’s true. More, that it’s second nature for her to spit out these gems.
“You do just start to say what you’re thinking,” she said. “It may get me in trouble this season, because stuff just flies out of my mouth.”
Her humor also has helped her navigate cast politics and figure out where she belongs among the other Housewives.
“You know who gets your humor, and those are the people who are always more fun to film with,” she said. “Some people are a little more serious in a scene. I always say, ‘Look, I’d rather say the crazy things I say than hire detectives and dig up dirt on people’s businesses or marriages.’ So, be mad at me for saying, ‘You look like you’ve been in a wind tunnel,’ or ‘You look like a trampoline with eyes.’ I would rather be on a show with someone like that than someone who’s dark and dangerous.”
From Friends to Enemies to Frenemies to Family
Humor and levity, however, were not exactly the first things on the RHOSLC cast’s minds when production began on Season 7.
Days after cameras went up, cast member Mary Cosby’s son, Robert Jr., died of an apparent overdose at age 23.
“The night Mary called me, I was sitting in my daughter’s room on the side of her bed,” Katsanevas said. “I looked at my daughter, and I had my hand on her knee, and I just wept because I couldn’t imagine the loss that Mary was dealing with.”
The entire cast rallied around Cosby, and in the emotional Season 7 premiere, Cosby thanked them, saying they acted more like family to her than her own family did during the weeks after Robert Jr.’s passing and his homegoing ceremony.
“I lost my mom at 8, and ever since that happened, whenever someone loses someone or when I lose someone, it re-injures those wounds,” Katsanevas said. “Every time I’d go to a funeral, I would just break down looking at the family and the grief and the heartbreak. I watched my mom’s mom deal with her heartbreak and watched her experience the loss of her daughter, my mom. I know the feeling. I watched. It was sad, and it was hard. We just forgot about everything in that moment, and just wanted to be there for Mary.”
Katsanevas hosted the first gathering of the cast at her house once filming picked up again on the season. Several of them weren’t even on speaking terms at that point. Yet they put that aside to talk about their grief and how to support Cosby: “When I opened the door, I was just moved to tears. Whatever we had between us, whatever we had in the past, it was not even relevant.”
At Cosby’s insistence, the “show went on,” so to speak. She took the lead in encouraging the cast to film again, be themselves again, and resolve relationships—even if that meant leaning into the discord and the hatred on the path to getting there. Get dirty if that’s what it will take to get clean again.
“I’m not gonna lie, it was a heavy first couple of weeks,” Katsanevas said. “Although it wasn’t me losing a family member, it was Mary. Mary is family to me, which made her son family to me. And when she experienced that loss, I was having a hard time getting back to feeling like myself. We’re supposed to be having fun. I’m supposed to be funny Angie K. It was a little bit of a struggle for a few weeks to get into the mindset of, like, we gotta pick back up and film this show.”
If you’ve been watching Season 7 so far, the women are delivering on Cosby’s wish to get back to business as usual.
In addition to RHOSLC currently airing, many cast members have appeared on The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Roaring 20th, celebrating two decades of the venerable Bravo franchise. During the filming of the upcoming season finale, Real Housewives of New York City fan favorite Carole Radziwill, well, fangirled over Angie K.
“It’s a pretty special place to be at this age,” Katsanevas said. “We’re middle-aged women, and we’re doing great things. Our stories continue to go on, and we’re entertaining people. After this experience, I want to entertain people my whole life.”
