The Vanderpump Rules cast put the ups and downs of their personal lives on television, but Scheana Shay admitted to faking at least one scene. Though Shay insisted that the show is mostly real, she said she once fabricated a fight. Here’s the moment Shay and her castmates cooked up in advance, and why they thought it was necessary.

The ‘Vanderpump Rules’ cast fought over Scheana Shay’s engagement

In the Vanderpump Rules season 9 finale, tempers boiled over at Rachel Leviss and James Kennedy’s engagement weekend. While the couple celebrated their decision to get married, Shay and her partner, Brock Davies, told the cast that not only were they engaged, but they planned to get married that weekend. This didn’t go over well.

“You were just going to get married where I was having my engagement party without me being there? Dude, so much wrong with that,” Kennedy told Davies. “So disrespectful. You should work on knowing your place a little bit more.”

Lala Kent told Shay that revealing the engagement was “tacky as f***.” Leviss also told Shay that she disliked being the last to know about the engagement. As the episode aired, Shay tweeted that “the reaction from my friends was beyond disappointing” (per Us Weekly).

Shay and Davies ultimately did not go through with plans to get married that weekend.

Scheana Shay said the ‘Vanderpump Rules’ cast fabricated the fight

Shay is now revealing that her friends were not really as frustrated as they seemed onscreen. She said that she and Kent planned the fight as a way to add drama to the season.

“We absolutely scripted that finale,” she said. “[Lala and I] pulled Ariana and Katie aside, and we’re like, ‘OK, we’re going to show up and do our job, but we’re not going to tell production that we’re going to fake a fight. … Production won’t know we did that until this comes out.’”

Though she may have admitted to a little dishonesty, she claimed this was the only time they did this. They didn’t think season nine, the show’s first after the outbreak of COVID-19, had enough intrigue.

“That was a one-off and the only time we faked something,” she said. “It was desperation over wanting to save our jobs and get another season.”

Other cast members described the show as very real

Other cast members have backed up Shay’s assertion that most of what viewers see is real. Katie Maloney attributed this to the fact that the cast knew each other long before filming started. While she didn’t think the show gave the whole picture, the interactions really happened.

“It’s pretty not-scripted; you see our relationships are real,” she told Galore Magazine. “We all have our history. There are plenty of shows out there that are kind of cast in ways where people don’t have any kind of history prior. But it’s also hard when making a show as they can’t show everything and they don’t show everything that’s positive, but they definitely show everything that’s negative, and that can paint people in certain lights that aren’t true to form, but it still is real.”

While Jax Taylor claimed he got sick of the show’s scripted nature after he was fired, he originally said everything was real.