Lisa Rinna felt a surprising amount of support after her exit from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
The actress and reality star has been workunbg on the launch of her Rinna Wines line since announcing her departure from the long-running Bravo series with PEOPLE last month. But during a recent chat about the beverages, she took some time to look back on the fan reaction that came after the news broke she wouldn’t be returning for season 13, explaining that she had not anticipated many of the kind things viewers said about her.
“I didn’t expect that, I really didn’t,” shares Rinna, 59. “That is the thing that was unexpected to me the most about everything. I thought people would mostly be like, ‘Thank God we got her fired’ — and some were, don’t get me wrong. But the majority of it was love.”
“Even the way people described my eight years on the show, with words like ‘legend, icon, G.O.A.T.‘ — I said to [my husband, Harry Hamlin], ‘There are things you’d normally only get to hear if you died!’ ” she jokes. “And that’s how it felt — like I died, but I didn’t, and I got to see all the things that people would say about me at my funeral.”
It even helped her reframe some of her more headline-making moments associated with Housewives, like when she was booed while taking the stage at BravoCon 2022.
“You know what, thee were a lot more cheers in that room than there were boos,” she says. “It really was not that many boos, and I hear that now because I can focus on the applause.
“It’s been very nice,” Rinna adds. “It’s always nice when you put your all into a job. I feel like, at the end of the day, I left it all on the floor. I gave a hundred million percent to that job. And I can always look back — and I said this to our producer, I said, ‘I will never regret or feel bad about anything because I did my job. I did exactly what the job entailed.’ So I feel good about that.”
The journey to Rinna Wines was actually inspired by Rinna’s time at a French winery with the RHOBH cast during a 2019 trip to Paris.
Naturally Rinna initially considered doing a rosé, but she was drawn to sparkling wines when she formed a partnership to produce the wines with Prestige Beverage Group, an industry-leading importer and brand innovator of award-winning wines and spirits.