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Jeana Keough Opens Up About Doing The Voiceover For The Opening Of ‘RHOC’ Season 15 Premiere!


Jeana Keough opens up about how it was to lend her voice to the Real Housewives of Orange County season 15 premiere's cold open.

Keough's voiceover began, "They say the seasons don't change around here, but that's not quite true." 

"There's the winter of friendships past, the spring of new beginnings, the blistering summer of romances ablaze and the autumn harvest of reaping what we've sown," she continued, as iconic clips from the series' first 14 seasons play out onscreen like Lauri Peterson saying, "This is going to get ugly," to Vicki Gunvalson shouting about a "little family van," Jo De La Rosa getting dolled up for Slade Smiley, Lynne Curtin crying and Tamra Judge shouting "That's my opinion."

"But take it from me: each season in Orange Country is unlike the last, and the season’s don’t just turn," Keough says at the end of the intro. "They change us forever, too."

Jeana and Erica Forstadt, Vice President of Current Production at Bravo, reveal how this came about.

"It's season 15 this year and we wanted to do something special for our cold open," Forstadt told Entertainment Tonight. "The women's lives have changed so much from the last year to this year. They’re all in new relationships, a lot of them had moved and we wanted to create a cold open that would help tell that story and because it’s season 15, we wanted to reward our longtime viewers and give them kind of an Easter egg."

Producers decided to do a Desperate Housewives-style voiceover ala, Mary Alice Young. They believe it would be a perfect "wink" to the show's start -- and the perfect "water cooler moment" to start a new year.

"It's a voice that’s familiar but not completely obvious," Forstadt noted, "and you still kinda have to guess who it is, but obviously for our dedicated, longtime viewers people will tend to know and understand that it’s Jeana Keough."

Keough says she got a text from the head of the production company behind the show, Evolution Media’s Douglas Ross, a few weeks ago about the opportunity.

"I've always felt very motherly about the show, you know that," the 65-year-old tells ET. "Whenever they invite me, I show up, and I always do things that they ask me to do. … It was really fun and I thought of it, it could be flattery or they could’ve asked 10 other girls and they said, 'No.' So, I always just take it with a grain of salt."

Producers provided Jeana with the copy, which she thought was "really interesting," noting that the show "does change you forever," as the closing line states.

Forstadt told Entertainment Tonight why Vicki Gunvalson, who starred in fourteen seasons of RHOC, was not chosen to do the voiceover. Forstadt said it wasn't the network’s intention by any means, choosing Keough for the voiceover role seems to be a nod, at least subconsciously, to who's the real "OG of the OC."

Keough revealed that she was, truly, the first person "cast" on the show, and hopes Gunvalson takes no offense to her getting the narrator gig.

"[Creator] Scott Dunlop wrote about me, his crazy neighbor," she recalls of the show's start. "And then when he went to Bravo, they’re like, 'Yeah, that's OK. But go and get four or five more families.' So, I don't care. People can claim what they want. I knew what I knew. Scott had tried to write this show for I bet 10 years since he met me. He’s like, ‘Oh my god. You’re like Ozzy Osbourne without the drugs.'"

Photo Credit: Bravo/NBCUniversal