Marysol Patton is back on 'The Real Housewives of Miami' and explaining why fans should 'brace for impact' as season 4 wraps up.
Marysol Patton might not hold a mojito in The Real Housewives of Miami's opening credits sequence, but that's OK with her -- as long as the check clears!
"I'm like, 'Just give me the paycheck! I brought my own mojito. Give me the check!'" the RHOM OG cracks to ET, Zooming in from her Florida home. Marysol returned to the franchise for its revival on Peacock, but this time as a "friend of" (which was also her status in season 3) -- though that moniker doesn't quite mean what it used to. While "friend of" cast members previously operated mostly as side characters, for lack of a better term, Marysol and Adriana de Moura, her fellow original Housewife and season 4 "friend of," are very much in the mix, driving story in nearly every episode.
"Personally, for me, [the original run] was a very stressful thing to do, to manage my work, make sure my mom had hair and makeup, was on, run my company, go film -- it was just too much for me," Marysol says of the changes she experienced during the show's eight-year hiatus. "Now, it's like, 'Yay! I can go film! I have something to do today.' ... I have a lot of fun doing it."
Since RHOM wrapped its final season on Bravo, Marysol retired from her work in PR, and her beloved mother, breakout star "Mama Elsa" Patton, died at the age of 84 in 2019. Elsa's spirit still appears to be alive and well, as Marysol seemingly channels her late mother with quirky quips and biting commentary in her confessionals.
"[During season 1 through 3], I had an important business I was running, and I couldn't exactly be the crazy me that everybody else knows," she admits. "Lisa [Hochstein] tells me all the time, 'I'm so glad you're being the person I know, but on camera,' and I said, 'Well, what have I got to lose now?' I don't work anymore. Who cares? I can just be me. It doesn't matter. What are you going to say? 'You drank too much. You were silly. You were ridiculous.' Who cares? I'm not hurting anybody."
Marysol had actually given up hope the show would come back after being put "on pause" indefinitely back in 2013, but she thinks her mom would've gotten a kick out of its comeback.
"I think she would've thought it was great, and would probably still be saying, 'Andy [Cohen], I want to be a Housewife,'" she guesses, going in and out of a spot-on impersonation of her mother's thick Cuban accent. "He used to say things to her like, 'Well, what do you mean, you want to be a Housewife?' She's like, 'Yeah. Why can't it be called Elsa and Her Friends?' That's what she wanted it to be, Elsa and Her Friends. 'I'm the Housewife, and everyone else is just my friend around me.'"
With Elsa unable to return, and longtime stars Lea Black, Joanna Krupa, Ana Quincoces and others not returning for RHOM's revival, new 'Wives came in to fill out the cast and bring the show into a new decade: There's Russian beauty queen Julia Lemigova, anesthesiologist Dr. Nicole Martin, party planner Guerdy Abraia and model Kiki Barth.
"Guerdy and Nicole, I had never met," Marysol admits. "Nor Kiki. I hadn't even ever even heard of them, but they've all been lovely girls, and I think it worked. Obviously, somebody did something right."
Marysol soon heard a lot about Nicole, though. The two are currently in a bit of a she said, she said battle, after Marysol (somewhat out of the blue) accused Nicole of talking trash about the other women -- namely Lisa, Larsa Pippen and (Marysol's bestie) Alexia Echevarria -- behind their backs. The alleged incidents occurred off camera, however, leaving room for interpretation as to what's the truth.
"I heard about three different occasions of the same kind of commentary, different from people," Marysol reveals.
"I had known about it before we started filming, and I thought, 'Well, she doesn't like these girls. She's not going to like them on camera...' and then I saw that she was very close with them and being really nice, and I thought, 'That's a red flag,'" she goes on to explain. "I didn't know if it would ever come out, because you can't just blurt things out for no reason. It doesn't make any sense. So, 75 percent of the way through filming, we go to the Hamptons and then she just loses it on Alexia [over room assignments]. And I was like, do you know what? If you're going to gang up with Lisa against my best friend -- and I already warned Lisa about the things you've said -- maybe everyone should know what you said, and I decided to just do it that night."
"I didn't know when it was going to come out, or if it would ever come out, it just kind of seemed like, 'This isn't legit right now for me,'" she adds. "Sometimes you have to clear the air for everyone to move forward and then decide how you're going to be friends with someone, or at all, or love them and move forward. It cleared the air."
Nicole describes the moment -- which unfolded during an all-cast dinner -- as a "bullying attack," a label Marysol isn't accepting.
"I think that if you're saying those things, maybe you're the bully," she fires back. "I just repeated what she said. That's all."
"These girls now have been my friends for 10 years, and I will always protect and defend my friends, to a fault, until they completely screw me over -- and trust me, it's happened to me plenty in 10 years," Marysol adds, explaining why she's more in the mix in season 4 than she was during seasons 1 through 3.
"I had to remove a lot of people from my life that obviously just weren't any good for me, and not helping me be the better me," she continues. "I went through a lot of loss, and I don't have time for B.S. anymore. I'm here to live a really good day, be happy, make sure everybody else does around me. I'm not here to torture anybody, that's for sure. And I'm not trying to be an a**. Maybe I was a bit of a jerk, but I'm not an a**."
There's more drama where that came from, though; as first teased in the trailer for season 4, things get heated between Adriana and Larsa at a cast trip to the Versace Mansion, where Adriana proclaims, "You left this group of women, come back with a butt as big as Kim Kardashian's, trying to become the Kim Kardashian, which you're never gonna be!"
"If everyone thought the Hamptons was a little much, wait until you sit through that dinner and the breakfast the next day," Marysol teases. "I didn't know what to say. I didn't know where to look. It was a lot. It was big."
"I'm kind of bracing for impact," she says of what's still to come this season. "I mean, I was there. I heard I was there. I try not to remember too much. I don't know if it's a self protecting type of a mechanism, but Alexia will be like, 'Do you remember when they said that?' I'm like, 'No, I don't remember...' She's like, 'How can you not remember?!' I'm like, 'I don't know...' I don't know if I blocked it out, but if you say that happened, I have to believe you. I was there. So, I get to re-watch it like it's a whole new thing."
And after the final episodes premiere, then comes reunion. The women already filmed the all-cast sit-down special last month.
"A whole day that's a blur," Marysol says. "I had to use the ladies' room so much. It was awful. I missed quite a bit of it. I think all the ladies spoke very eloquently. They did. I was surprised. It's hard. There're some breakdowns. There are things that I never knew about that I hear that were really hard to hear and take, emotional things, emotional breakdowns."
"I was freezing and I had to use the bathroom the whole time," she reiterates with a laugh. "That was my experience, but I had a metal dress on, and it was below 19 [degrees] outside, so it was freezing, and this metal was laying against my flesh, and I was ice cold. And I had this 32 oz. bedazzled cup, and I couldn't sit still! I created my own nightmare for myself, but reunions are always difficult. It's the worst filming day ever, because you just don't know what's coming, or it's just such a rough day. And it's an emotional -- a very emotional -- day. A draining day."
That bedazzled cup Marysol mentions has become sort of a trademark for her in season 4. She's regularly seen sipping from the tumbler during her confessional interviews. As for the cup's contents, Marysol says it's usually filled with Tito's Vodka and lemonade, which she refers to as a "cockie" or, even more crudely, "cock" -- both short for "cocktail."
"I shared on my side of the [reunion] sofa," she confesses. "I want everyone hydrated."
As for where the show goes after reunion, Marysol is hopeful she and the ladies will be back for a season 5 -- well, at least some of the ladies.
"If it did so well, why wouldn't they give it a second shot, obviously? And as far as, who would come back or not, I have no idea," she says. "I mean, I guess whoever the best performers, the favorites were. This is like Olympic trials. Only the best get to come back. ... I'm still here! What do they say about cockroaches?"
The Real Housewives of Miami streams on Peacock, with new episodes debuting on Thursdays.
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