Juliet Angus already knows her first season of The Real Housewives of London will be remembered for one thing: going toe-to-toe with Amanda Cronin in the show’s most viral trailer moment.
In the tense clip, Cronin drops the now-infamous line: “Go back to Paddington.”
Angus, the sole American on the Hayu Original series, is still amused by what was meant to be a cutting remark about W2.
“Go back to Bayswater and Notting Hill… like, go back to your house by Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens. [I’m] just living the dream,” she tells The Standard.
“...To me, it's so archaic and maybe because Amanda's older, that still means something. But to me that means nothing. I just think it’s hilarious that she was appalled by that.”
Far from taking offence, the Chicago native has insisted the throwaway remark has made “Paddington cool.”
“No, you have no idea,” she laughed. “Everyone's like, ‘What do you mean?’ She's now making Paddington cool, because everyone's like, ‘it is cool.’ I’m getting T-shirts made already, ‘I heart Paddington.’”
On their former-friends dynamic, Angus quipped: “There's a reason the two of us are in here right now,” nodding to her co-star and friend Juliet Mayhew seated beside her during our sit-down interview. And it seems little has changed between filming and the show’s premiere. When asked during Thursday’s premiere event if she could redo anything from the season, Angus replied: “Probably saying Amanda was one of my best friend’s.”
The Housewives franchise has a long tradition of castmates accusing each other of planting stories — from RHOBH’s Dorit Kemsley alleging Lisa Vanderpump leaked “puppy-gate” to RHONY’s Leah McSweeney claiming Heather Thomson stirred coverage of their feud.
So, who should the London cast be wary of? Who might this franchise’s “press puppetmaster” be? Angus doesn’t miss a beat, naming her former pal.
“She loves to insert herself into the press,” she says of Cronin, who has been a tabloid diary regular, first for her high-profile divorce from energy tycoon Mark Daeche in 2019 and later for her romance with Wham!’s Andrew Ridgeley.
Angus even claims Cronin once asked her to speak to the press on her behalf when they were still confidantes. “She called me and said, 'Can you answer the Daily Mail?' They called her because they knew that she would, do y'know what I mean, that she'd reply and so I remember her calling me, like, 'will you talk to them already?'
“And I said, ‘No, I don't talk to, you know, I don't want to talk to them.’ Yeah, she loves to insert herself into the press.”
Angus’s straight-talking remarks are just a glimpse of the drama to come when the series launches Monday, 18 August on Hayu.
Viewers will also meet Karen Loderick-Peace, Nessie Welschinger and Panthea Parker, who join the cast in offering an inside look at the lavish - and often explosive lives of London’s elite.
The Real Housewives of London airs Monday, August 18 on Hayu
