According to Lisa Barlow, she was the first person who was approached to join The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. "Yeah, it started with me," she told Entertainment Tonight.
"I do so much with the Sundance Film Festival, and I had a lot of good friends that work in production, and I was introduced through a mutual friend to the production company," Lisa explained. "I was literally getting a blowout when the call came in and I was, like, on one. We had the best conversation -- it lasted over an hour and a half -- and they're like, we have to do something in Salt Lake. So I was like, cool, what are we gonna do? And it started … The Real Housewives of Salt Lake."
In the beginning, the women claim that they didn't even know they were signing up for Real Housewives.
"I thought they were doing a show about businesswomen," Jen, who runs multiple marketing companies, confesses. "I really thought it was gonna be, like, a Southern Charm-type thing."
Those ladies then helped expand the search for the remaining cast members, Heather’s second cousin, Whitney Rose, and Mary Cosby. A friend of Lisa's recommended Mary to producers. Little did they know what kind of character they had on their hands.
"Mary's the pot-stirrer in her own way, just because it's like, hello? Earth to Mary," Jen said. "'This is what you said yesterday.' You know what I mean?"
On of the main topics on the show will be religion as Gay is figuring out life after the Church. The self-proclaimed "good Mormon gone bad" parted ways with the religion with her recent divorce.
"I'm walking away in the show, this is the process," she told Entertainment Tonight. "I'm lighting my entire life on fire, and it is hard. … It's devastating because it felt like the option got ripped out from me, because so much about Mormonism is based on marriage and the family, and when that imploded, like, it didn't feel like I really had an option. I didn't know a lot of single Mormon moms that were successful. They either got remarried immediately or just were struggling, and I didn't really have anyone to pattern my life after. So it was, for me, it was very unsettling, and it's been really difficult."
"I didn't choose to be Mormon -- I wouldn't ever have chosen to be Mormon -- but I was born into it and I wanted to do it right," Heather notes. "As much as I would love to just, like, have one foot in the Mormon door and live my life, I feel it just doesn't work for me. There's too many issues that are absolutely incongruent with how I believe and how I wanna live."
"We all have our own journey with it," Jen added. She, too, was born into the Church, but opted to leave and convert to become Muslim, her husband’s religion, after learning about the Church’s history of excluding Black people.
"I'm kinda like, listen, it didn't work out for me and there's no way for me to make it work out, so I'm going to set the whole thing on fire and live how I felt when I was born," Heather shared.
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