Ariana Madix’s past and present are represented by two images involving her ass. The first was captured on Vanderpump Rules, the Bravo reality show where Madix was a cast member for 10 seasons. In the clip , filmed at her 36th birthday party, Madix careens through a bar and lands directly onto her left cheek without attempting to break her fall; her hand is busy holding up her cocktail, which stays miraculously intact.
“My best work is when I was drinking, because I was less inhibited and less scared,” Madix says five years later at the Mandarin Oriental lounge in New York, teeny in an oversized Off White jersey and jeans she cut off because they were too long. She’s quick to list more of her greatest hits: making snow angels on the floor, blacking out at the club, dancing with someone dressed as a gorilla .
“Everyone’s like, ‘We love Drunk Ariana,’” she says. “I’m a great time.”
But eventually, last call comes for us all. “That isn’t something that you can keep doing and doing and doing into perpetuity,” says Madix. “At some point it becomes something, at least for me personally, I have to reel in and figure out.”
We are here, enjoying two glasses of Champagne a fan sent over as homage (everything in moderation), to discuss her other formative butt imagery: the slowed-down struts Madix performs as host of Love Island USA, the reality dating series that, during Madix’s first season, became the most-watched streaming original series in America. Season seven, which aired in 2025, had more than twice that already-high viewership .
This year’s season eight beat those numbers by two billion minutes. And now, for her work slinking through heart-shaped arches to deliver (usually unsettling) information and turning to camera to deliver a “shh” finger to the audience, Madix has earned her first Emmy nomination for outstanding reality host.
The ceremony is in just a few weeks; two days before that, Madix will have returned to Broadway to star as Connie Francis in Just in Time, a musical about the life of singer Bobby Darin.
If the VPR birthday fall represents a critical time in Madix’s life—a period where she had a triumphant but barely-there grasp on an out-of-control situation—her Villa entrances embody this new moment. When there’s a slow-mo close-up of her body—one she trains year-round to deploy on her own terms—it’s because she suggested it.
“That’s up to me, actually,” she says. “It’s an option that I can exercise if I feel like it.” Now, Madix is producing herself.