For years we’ve watched The Valley star and Vanderpump Rules alum (both streaming on Hayu in Canada), Jax Taylor, show us the up, down and controversial moments in his life. But a recent trip to Canada was seemingly a great respite for the reality TV star.
“I just love it here,” Taylor told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. “I live in L.A., it’s just not a nice place. Everybody’s out to get you. I’m not happy there, to be honest with you. I’m completely miserable there.”
“I don’t know if that’s taken a toll on a lot of my things in my life, but just coming here, it’s just refreshing. Everybody’s just so happy and the food is so good, and the buildings and the nightlife.”
‘I’ve got to be honest, I love filming with Kristen’
So far in his new series, The Valley, Taylor and his wife Brittany Cartwright (currently separated), take us into the suburb parent life, also reuniting with fellow ex-Vanderpump Rules star Kristen Doute, and her boyfriend Luke Broderick. On reality TV for the first time are fellow The Valley stars Danny Booko and his wife Nia, Jason and Janet Caperna, Jesse Lally and his wife Michelle, Jasmine Goode and Zack Wickham.
Having a Vanderpump Rules reunion with Doute, Taylor said the opportunity to film reality TV with her again “brought back a lot of memories.”
“I’ve got to be honest, I love filming with Kristen,” Taylor said. “She’s just good. She’s quick. She’s witty. She can dance around certain subjects when she gets backed into a corner, she knows how to get out of it.”
“She’s just really good TV and that’s who she really is. … I go through my ups and downs with her. … But I think she’s just an amazing person. I think she’s really good at what she does and I’m happy how far she’s come in life. She’s done really, really well. … She’s a great little aunt to Cruz. She’s a great friend to Brittany. She’s just a good person.”
In this case, “really good TV” comes with its fair share of drama. Most recently with Doute getting into heated arguments with the Lallys.
But to start the season, our first snippet of drama was when we saw Taylor not be so interested in including Doute’s boyfriend in the group. For Taylor, he stressed that it wasn’t about Broderick’s personality or not liking him, it was more about a pattern of deciding to “invest” time in Doute’s boyfriends, only for the couple to eventually have a “tumultuous” split.
“I know all of Kristen’s boyfriends, … I’m friends with all of them, she is kind of a serial dater,” Taylor said. “What happens is, Kristen kind of pushes her boyfriends onto me, she kind of gives them to me and says, ‘Jax introduce him to all the guys,’ because I’m kind of like the leader of my crew.”
“For the first three, four boyfriends I was fine, but after you get to like five or six boyfriends, I meet these people, I hang out with them, become friends, and then she has these tumultuous breakups and then we’re not allowed to see these guys anymore.”
Taylor particularly raised some eyebrows on The Valley when he was seemingly critical about Doute’s desire to have a child with Broderick. But from his perspective, his comments came from a place of wanting the best for Doute, including questions about whether her boyfriend will officially move to Los Angeles, with his work based in Colorado.
“I think every woman should be able to have a baby,” Taylor said.
“Having a baby is tough. It’s not easy. … I just wanted to make sure that she was at an adequate place mentally, physically, emotionally, and that the guy that she’s with is living in the same state. Because he was kind of like, ‘Well I’m going to go back and forth from Colorado.’ You’re not going to leave my friend alone, pregnant, in an apartment with dogs. It just, to me, it didn’t seem like a good idea, but she reassured us it’s going to be OK.”
‘I always said I was going to be an open book’
While Vanderpump Rules started as a group of restaurant employees taking us into their friendship, going out at night after work, drinking and getting into arguments, a significant part of The Valley is about how the couples with children on the show manage their parenting responsibilities.
For Taylor and Cartwright, that included giving the audience a glimpse into the speech therapy they started for their son Cruz (now three years old), after explaining that their son “stopped talking almost all together.”
“When I started reality TV, I always said I was going to be an open book, the good and the bad,” Taylor said. “And I think if I can help other parents that are watching this and seeing, oh my gosh, his son is going through this too. Let’s see what they’re doing, what they’re going through. What kind of help they’re getting him.'”
“I just want to help other people. … We were on a teeter-totter if we were going to talk about or not. And I thought, you know what, let’s do it. … There are people out there watching this that are going through the same thing and I want us to all stick together. Maybe people can help each other out.”
Looking forward to the rest of the season, Taylor teased that towards the end he expects his separation from Cartwright to be brought into the mix.
“We definitely picked cameras back up again, so I’m not sure where they’re going to put that,” Taylor said, adding that there are some “tough times” to come on The Valley.
