Spoilers ahead! Chelsea Lazkani admits she has regrets over how she handled newbie Bre Tiesi on 'Selling Sunset' season 6.
Spoilers ahead! If you have not yet binged all of Selling Sunset season 6, save this link for later.
Chelsea Lazkani is willing to admit she maybe took things too far with Selling Sunset newbie Bre Tiesi... maybe.
"Coming into the season, I was very aware of who Bre was, and I already had some of my own opinions," she tells ET. "Negative or positive, it doesn't matter. We all are human and we all embody opinions on everything, and everybody, quite frankly -- whether you voice them or not -- is different. So, I chose to voice them, because I realized that not only am I obviously creating a TV show, but this is how I feel."
"It was only when I took a step back when I realized I was hurting somebody's feelings," she adds. "I went from the standpoint of, 'Oh my gosh, we're doing a show. Everyone's talking about it anyway. Like, I see it everywhere. So, I'm just gonna say what I feel...' But no, this is a person with true feelings and you could hurt that person, because the difference between the online trolls and myself is I'm right in front of your face."
Bre joined the Oppenheim Group as a real estate agent at the start of season 6 (much like Chelsea in season 5), bringing with her some personal baggage, at least to some: she welcomed her first child, a son named Legendary, with partner Nick Cannon just weeks before filming began. Legendary is Nick's eighth child out of 12; there are six mothers overall, some of whom -- Bre included -- carry on simultaneous romantic relationships with the entertainer. Those factoids had Chelsea feeling a certain type of way about her new co-worker. She questioned how Nick could possibly devote himself to each child equally and, at one point, invoked her Christian faith as a way to explain her opposition to Bre's life choices.
Things between the women came to a head after Chelsea brought an off-camera moment on camera, telling the other agents of the O Group that Bre was "very surprised and she was very upset" after receiving a news alert on her phone about Nick welcoming his ninth child with model LaNisha Cole. Chelsea claimed Bre had no clue about LaNisha giving birth, but Bre tells ET, that's a lie.
"I'm never going to divulge information to anyone, that's that woman's right to be able to say that this happened or didn't happen," Bre explains, saying she was fully aware of the baby news, but opted to keep her reaction in the moment neutral as to not insert herself into the narrative.
"So, when someone asked me about it? 'I don't know,'" Bre says. "I don't. It's not my place. So, I think that my lack of reaction or confirmation is what she ran with, and it became a completely different thing that helped her narrative and I applaud her for her storyline, but that's not actually accurate in my reality."
Chelsea, however, declares, "I do not lie," and hints that there's even more to Bre's reaction to that news she opted to keep secret.
"I said things that could have hurt somebody by disclosing what I saw and what I heard," she notes. "I didn't accurately represent it? ... I don't know how to lie. There are things that I concealed that I will never share, but I don't want to go back and say, 'Oh, my gosh, this is actually everything...' No, but I don't lie."
It's easy to see, these two haven't found their way to friendship yet (they've already shot season 7, too); Chelsea describes their relationship as strictly that of co-workers.
"I think she wants to kill me, and I want to stay alive for a very long time," she quips. "So, you know, I just think I'll keep my distance from her."
When pressed for why Chelsea believes Bre "wants to kill" her, she laughs. "Because I've heard her say it to people!"
"I mean, I get it, she doesn't like me," Chelsea adds, "and some of the things I said were very hurtful. So, I completely acknowledge that, and I think I'm just trying to take a step back, mind my business -- stop being a nosy b***h -- and realize that, you know, everything is what it seems. And you know, she says she's very happy, so just take it and move on with that. Like, if someone's happy, they're happy. Like, what's the big deal?"
While Bre questions whether Chelsea came in gunning for her, Chelsea says that's not the case. She actually wonders if Bre wanted to create drama with her, pointing to their first dust-up of the season.
"What you guys don't see is in episode one and two, where I brought my friends to the brokers' open, and she then essentially said that I brought those friends to set her up? My friend texted her after that event, asking her if you want to go for a drink, so I was like, 'Oh, you guys are, like, really friends,'" Chelsea recalls.
Bre wasn't happy to see the women, though, hinting at a bad history with them from when they all worked together at a modeling agency.
"Like, my friends genuinely thought they were friends," Chelsea continues. "So to hear her say that, 'Oh, she thought I bought them to set her up.' I'm almost like, is this a trap? Like, are you doing this for camera time? Like, what is it like? Are you are you coming from me? So I'm like a very much like, I was like, reciprocating the energy. So for the moment that happened, I was, OK, it's on. I wasn't gonna say anything. Now, I am. And I don't know. Just the energy from the beginning with her and I was very much off."
Season 6 forced Chelsea to find her footing in the office, and on the show, after losing her partner in crime, Christine Quinn. The OG Selling Sunset star exited the agency and the series after season 5, and has been vocal about her feelings toward the experience, essentially trashing the show and the cast (save for a few of the women, including Chelsea), in interviews ever since.
"You know, some people like Marmite, it's something people put on toast in the U.K.; I bloody hate it, personally," Chelsea offers as an analogy. "I know people that love it. I think Christine is like Marmite, and I think some people will say I'm like Marmite. You either like or you hate her. In the same way people may feel that way about her, I think she feels that way about people. So, she either loves them or she just really vehemently dislikes them and for a lot of the girls on the show, it was like oil and water. ... They don't mix."
Chelsea feels like she mixes with the women, though. She felt "kind of excited" to grow closer with them without Christine around, but admits to "shaking in my bloody boots" as the world now gets to weigh in on everything they filmed last year.
"I mean, it is what it is," she says. "This is the nature of what we do, and the nature of life, is you have highs, you have lows, you have confrontations, you have things that you have to work through, and we're not all going to agree."
"I think a lot of people think that just having a difference of opinion means that I hate the person," she muses. "I don't have hate in my heart for anybody. I don't hate anybody, but I do very much vocalize a lot of the things I think, and I think that rubs people the wrong way a lot of the time; but I hope that when you see me you're like, what you see is what you get, so at least I know she's shooting me straight and I know where Chelsea stands, vs. not knowing where you stand and then always tiptoeing or feeling like, this person could sell me for a bag of rice."
Christine proudly wore the "villain" title when she was part of the ensemble; in her absence, Chelsea says no one wanted to pick it up.
"Everyone was Usain Bolt-ing in there like, 'Oh my god! This is the villain edit!' Running, running, running," she cracks. "I think that the difference this season is you see a lot of characters in different lights, because nobody fills that role so consciously like she did, because she embodied it and she, like, loved it."
The closest anyone comes to Christine is Nicole Young, a longtime O Group agent, but first-time cast member. The comparison comes from her facing off with Christine's most frequent frenemy, Chrishell Stause, which came as a major surprise to Chelsea.
"This is interesting, OK? Because the first time I met Nicole was actually at Chrishell's Friendsgiving, the year prior," she shares. "So I was under the impression they were all, like, good friends. So, I went into this with a very high level of respect for Nicole because this was a friend of not only the other girls, but also of Chrishell's."
"When everything started to unfold on camera, I was very much taken aback," she continues. "But it's weird, because everybody has a different reaction to like, when you feel someone's coming at you or whatever. But I say this all the time, like, if you start some s**t, it's gonna be some s**t, you know? And you can't get mad when s**t blows up in your face."
Things first got heated between the two at a broker's open hosted by Chelsea at a Manhattan Beach listing, where Chrishell flung the f-word and b-word around during a tense back-and-forth with Nicole, after Nicole voiced her frustration over Chrishell receiving credit on the MLS for a house she sold years prior. It all escalated during a Palm Springs girls' trip, during which Chrishell asked Nicole if she was "cracked out," bringing Nicole to tears. The next day, she opted to take a drug test and threatened legal action against her co-star for making the allegation, which she denied.
"Do I agree with all the actions that took place after the fact? Absolutely not," Chelsea offers. "I think there's right and there's wrong, and I'll be the first one to say there are some things I said this season that were wrong, you know? But if you push that little button hard enough, someone's gonna get triggered. We all have our pasts. We all have traumas. We all have things that take us to that next level. And that's what you see."
Chrishell and Nicole's battle doesn't stop with season 6. The sneak peek at season 7 at the end of the finale previews more friction to come, including Nicole threatening to "end" Chrishell.
"I'll just say that reality TV isn't for the faint-hearted, and it takes a very strong chest to be able to not only do it, but continue to do it," Chelsea says. "You're going to sink or you're going to swim, and some people that came in with big balls and BDE -- big d*ck energy -- started sinking, because when the pressure is on, the cracks start to show."
All episode of Selling Sunset are now streaming on Netflix.
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