Shep Rose and Cameran Eubanks on The “Tough” Season 6 of ‘Southern Charm’: “There’s a Lot of S**t That Goes Down”

“What’s the date on this?” Cameran Eubanks asks her pal Shep Rose as she grabs a bag of shredded cheese from his hand, just after he’s poked his nose in to smell it and before he makes the mistake of sprinkling it on his Chick-fil-A lunch. “I don’t know, it’s really bad,” he admits. “January 29th! 2018!” she exclaims. “Oh, a long time ago,” Rose replies. “That is disgusting,” Eubanks tells him. “I would throw that in the trash or you’re going to have diarrhea.”

I’m seated in Rose’s living room as he and Eubanks begin to chow down on their Chick-fil-A (a grilled chicken sandwich with cheese and ketchup for him, a number three meal of chicken nuggets with Polynesian sauce and a chocolate chip cookie for her) exactly two weeks before Season 6 of Southern Charm begins on Bravo, a reality show they’ve been cast members on since the very beginning. Over the course of the time I spend with them on the sunny Charleston afternoon, it’s clear that they’ve both got the personalities and a friendship made for reality TV (Eubanks previously appeared on MTV’s The Real World). “Oh my god, what else is in your fridge?” she asks in a tone that suggests equal parts horror and wonder. “I come over here, I’m so thirsty and I open the fridge and there’s never anything to drink in this house. He gives me a cup of water from the sink,” she says.

“There’s beer in there,” Rose offers. “I don’t keep track of things, I don’t cook. I’m not a good host. I mean, I’m a good host personally but I don’t have the things that you might need. So don’t come over here unless you bring your own,” he warns, ever the bachelor that Southern Charm, and his 2017 spinoff, RelationShep, has depicted.

That will only continue in the new season of the show as well, though he does pick up a new set of responsibilities along the way. For Eubanks, Season 6 is about her “trying to balance being a new mom and trying to stay in the real estate game.” Along with her camera-shy husband, Jason, she’s also prepping for an additional responsibility as her family agreed to take in the neighbors’ dog, Elvis, when the original owners move to another state. “It [would be] very hard emotionally for Elvis to be separated from Jason because I mean, it’s a deep love.” But in the meantime, you will be able to catch a glimpse of her daughter Palmer who is 18 months now, on the new season. “She was on camera very little and we didn’t show her face,” which is what Eubanks explains made her husband cool with that decision. Plus, viewers paying extra close attention might even spot her spouse later this season, a moment that is sure to excite fans. Rose, a little less so. “By the way, you can go to her Instagram feed and he’s all over the place,” he said, unimpressed by viewers’ curiosity about Eubanks’ significant other. “People are nutty but as long as they like our show I won’t give them a hard time,” he reasoned.

The same cannot be said of the way Rose jests his fellow cast members, and one in particular. “Craig is terrible at Instagram,” he says when the topic of social media comes up. “Craig’s the worst Instagrammer out of all of us,” Eubanks confirms of Conover, before Rose launches into a story to illustrate his statement. “I was in the Bahamas, eating a lovely lunch with some friends. Caroline Wozniacki and Serena Williams come in with this big group of girls and sit right adjacent to us. They’re having a good time, we’re having a good time and about 45 minutes in, I’m like, I’d love to say hello but I’m not going to. But Craig’s personal assistant (another new development this season!) was like, ‘It’s not hard to meet a girl, just send them a drink.’ So I bought the whole table a celebratory shot because I could tell that Caroline was getting married. And I asked, ‘Can we all take a picture when we’re taking the shot?'” The group happily obliged, but not everyone was thrilled. “Craig goes, ‘I can’t believe you did that.’ Like I crossed some major line.” Rose took the opportunity to explain to Conover that “Engaging with other people on the internet, that’s good for the collective, you understand that? He just doesn’t understand that. He was embarrassed and angry that I breached some code of honor. I was like, ‘Dude you need to put your life out there, you’ll have more followers, more doors are open to you, it’s definitely a good thing.’ But he’s reticent to do it. I don’t know why. Probably because his captions are so embarrassingly stupid.”

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Celebrating Elvis’s Sweet 16th Birthday (112 in dog years.) This is Elvis’s rightful owner, Chase who is home on post deployment leave from the Army…and thank you @pataltschul for the bib with Elvis’s mug on it to celebrate the grand occasion. #LongLiveTheKing 🕺

A post shared by Cameran Eubanks (@camwimberly1) on Apr 2, 2019 at 4:11pm PDT

That might sound harsh, but Rose assures me there is a basic code of ethics amongst this group of friends when it comes to the words spilling out of their mouths, especially when the cameras are present. “We all care about each other and we might privately dish dirt, but at the end of the day, we would stop everything and help everybody on the show. There’s a line that we do not cross. We can be super uncomplimentary, we can scream at each other, and there is someone this year that just didn’t know that or wasn’t raised the right way to know that.”

Oh? Consider my interest (and likely yours as well) piqued. While Eubanks clarified it was Madison LeCroy that Shep was referring to, Austen Kroll’s girlfriend of about a year who will make her debut this season, the tension between Rose and LeCroy is clear from the first episode. But it doesn’t end there. “She was a lot to handle for a lot of people,” he said. “Later in the season, this person behaves like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

Worse than Ashley? I ask. “No, but in the same ballpark,” he says.

“I disagree, Shep,” Eubanks tells her pal.

“Well, she just crossed lines and did it with insanity. But it’s okay, I can handle it,” he assures her.

So just in case anyone was worried about the drama level of this show dipping after the utter craziness of Season 5, rest assured. We’re in for a ride. “We’re our own show,” Rose says in between bites of waffle fries dipped in ketchup, a (seemingly still fresh) condiment he did have handy in his fridge. “We’re not the Kardashians, we’re not the Vanderpumps, just let us do our thing, give us our space, I swear we will deliver. I don’t know how but it just always happens. That’s the beauty of our show, it’s like we caught lightning in a bottle somehow,” Rose said, with the pair both pointing to their friend, producer and cast member Whitney Sudler-Smith for his expertise in casting their show, as well as the Southern Charm New Orleans spinoff.

Which brings us to the Ashley of it all, Thomas Ravenel’s girlfriend who proved to be a gift from the heavens for the show’s producers, and a headache and a half for most of the cast, especially Kathryn Dennis who was on the receiving end of her vile insults last season. “I think she got a lot of negative feedback on social media after the way she behaved last year,” Eubanks said of Jacobs. “People created parody accounts of her, it was pretty brutal.”

“She created parody accounts of herself so she could talk shit to other people,” Rose said. “She’s just as implicit, I think.”

And she’s back for more, as the Season 6 trailer shows the cast reacting to her presence with everything from exhausted eye rolls to screams. “I think she wanted to use this season as a way to come back and make amends and try to portray herself in a better light,” Eubanks offered. “Unfortunately, I don’t think she is capable of that. And I don’t think it’s gonna be a redemption.”

In reflecting on last season, Rose said, “There were some moments where as a viewer I was like, oh my god. Mostly it was Thomas and Ashley moments where I [thought], this is crazy. The marriage innuendos, the awkward silences, I was like, what the fuck, is that real? Do people talk that way? For morbid fascination I understand, yeah, it was a great season.”

So great that they even felt some pressure to deliver coming into this season. “We knew that Thomas and Ashley was a void,” Rose stated. “We probably were the underdogs coming into this season. We had to rise to the occasion, and I don’t know what that means because all I know to do is live, but my guess is to be a little more confrontational than one normally would want. And that happened. There’s a lot of little things that add up, sort of like death by a thousand papercuts this season. There’s no one big wallop over the head but there’s a lot of shit that goes down.”

The good news for their pal, Dennis, who bore the brunt of the abuse last season, is that much of her real-life drama with ex Ravenel is off-limits this season, as she is legally unable to discuss much of their ongoing custody battle on the show. “Kathryn is a very hard person to get close to, not in a bad way, she just doesn’t open herself up very much,” Eubanks noted, as the two have grown closer over the show’s existence. “I think she’s been hurt so much in her life that she has her guard up, which is sad. We’ll go for weeks and don’t hear from her but then we see her and she’s fabulous.”

“She went through a lot this season,” Rose said, “And unfortunately she kept a lot of it to herself. That’s her M.O. and that’s what we learn this year, is that you gotta meet a friend halfway. She was either unwilling or unable to do that until we figured out that maybe she was going through a lot. What I told her was, you can’t afford to be rattled right now. You’ve got a lot going on, you’ve got two kids. You have to know what your priorities are, but that’s easy for me to say.”

“If I were going through everything that she’s going through currently, I would probably be in a padded room somewhere,” Eubanks said.

“I thought this season was tough,” Rose confessed. “I really did. I still am enthusiastic, but it was challenging this year.” Perhaps that is due to the fact that over six seasons, the show, including its rather extra personalities, have shifted a bit. It’s changed the drama, the friendships, and even the end result of what each TV episode encompasses, which is certainly different from what we were watching in the early days. “We laugh about it because really the only ones left are me, Cameran, and Craig,” Rose said. “Whitney’s obviously there but he’s in an absentee role which he loves. If he’s happy, I’m happy. It’s just the three of us that were there from the beginning so you have to adjust to the new rhythms of other people.”

When I ask if there have been times when they’ve consciously kept their mouths shut on a topic, both answer at the same time with a confident “Yes,” which of course gets my mind working on what those situations could’ve possibly been — even more so for Rose than Eubanks.

“We try to stay out of things but I’ll be damned if I don’t give my opinion,” he stated. “I’m not gonna be rude to someone’s face. I mean, everybody says things but you just try to be polite. But you gotta be interesting sometimes and walk that razor’s edge and it is an edge, I think. It was an interesting season. I had fun some of the time.”

“That’s kinda how we’re different than say, Vanderpump Rules,” Eubanks offers. “They really just let it go, but I think us being raised in southern families, we’re just taught differently and it’s ingrained in us. There are some things you don’t talk about, that are tacky to talk about.”

“We have this understanding, most of us do,” Rose said. “There’s a decorum involved: yes, we can have fun and yes, we can yell at each other, but you gotta behave yourself to a certain degree. I hope that’s why people like the show, is that we pull it back a little.”

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Falling down with excitement that SOUTHERN CHARM is almost back.🍍

A post shared by Decider.com (@deciderdotcom) on Mar 27, 2019 at 9:03am PDT

Eubanks even offers a promise she made for herself — one that she’s admittedly broken. “I made a rule for myself when I decided to do this show, that I was going to stay to a two-drink maximum no matter what. I’m a lightweight and that’s when you really get in trouble is when you let your guard down when you’re shitfaced and you have a camera on you. Not a very good combination. But I did let that slip.” That applies to this season, where Eubanks says she doesn’t even remember the clip from the trailer where she’s shown swaying and then falling on the ground.

Though it’s not Party Cam that’s here snacking on fast food, as she breaks off pieces of her cookie. She’s in full Mom Mode, reaching over with a napkin to wipe ketchup from the corner of Rose’s mouth — an action it feels as though she’s likely done before, with him specifically and not just her young child, who she’ll soon scoot out to pick up.

“I NEVER thought it was gonna last this long,” Eubanks admitted of Southern Charm. “When Whitney talked me into doing it I was like, oh this’ll be one season. But it’s hard for a show to even get picked up and then to remain on the air, I know that is an anomaly in the TV world.”

And both Eubanks and Rose are quick to express their appreciation for the opportunities that have risen from being TV stars, with Eubanks even scoring an invite to the Chick-fil-A headquarters. But it was a request for a special lunch by a certain celebrity that really blew their minds.

“Sia was in town a couple years ago and her PR person reached out and said, ‘Sia wants to have lunch with you and Shep,’ and we’re like, why?” Eubanks revealed. And yes, they did get to see her face. They even took a photo with her but promised not to post it. “It was weird because you don’t know what she looks like, but she was totally normal, obsessed with the show,” Eubanks said. Meanwhile, she and Rose were “geeking out because it’s Sia, I mean it’s weird.”

Rose describes the singer as “really funny” and even showed her many of the hot spots around town. “I gave her a tour around Charleston,” he said, and when they passed by Patricia Altschul’s house, Sia asked, “Can we meet her?” Rose told her, “I don’t see why not!”

“Patricia had no idea who she was and Patricia’s hairdresser was like, ‘Miss Patricia she’s one of the biggest pop stars,'” Rose says.

Just a few days before we spoke, Rose was attending the Hall Wines Cookoff where he rubbed elbows with actress Wendi McLendon-Covey, but it was a different West Coast bash that had him gushing. “I went to Dave Grohl’s 50th birthday party in LA,” he proudly tells me, as though I didn’t watch it all chronicled on his Instagram stories myself this past January. And I wasn’t alone.

“This is Shep at Dave Grohl’s birthday party,” Eubanks said, busting out her nerdy voice and holding up her phone in selfie mode to imitate her pal, saying, “I’m at Dave Grohl’s birthday party!”

“Listen, do you really think I’m ever gonna see any of those rock stars again?” Rose justified.

“You are not cool,” Eubanks told him. “I know. I know. I’m never gonna see Steven Tyler socially ever again, therefore I don’t think it’s a big deal,” he replied.

“Dave was cool,” Rose recalled. “I was at a urinal and he passed me and pushed me into it, I thought it was really funny. He couldn’t be nicer.’ While Rose is unsure if Grohl knew who he was or considers himself a regular viewer, he knows that Grohl’s wife is a fan of the show, as is Foo Fighters guitarist, Pat Smear.

“It’s been a funny, wild ride,” Rose reflected. “Sometimes you get bogged down in the things that piss you off, but really you should let those slide.” Which is precisely the attitude he has when it comes to recent headlines that claim he was kicked out of a VIP tent at a PGA tournament. “I’m not pissed about it but what a joke,” he tells me. “We had these VIP passes, but only to one area. I was with some girls, I was definitely having fun, people were buying us shots left right and center and I love that. They’re so nice, but it adds up. I’m not saying I wasn’t drunk. I was drunk. It was the afternoon and I’d been going all day with all my friends and other folks. But I went up there to a tent that wasn’t my badge tent with some girls and was having a ball. I can’t say for sure but I guarantee you it was a husband or a boyfriend who was not pleased with how much fun we were having and laughing and carrying on. Or maybe it was just an old curmudgeon who tends to like golf. I love golf, I like playing it. I’ll go to a tournament, but whatever. It makes me crazy. Did you see the video? I was like, ‘Oh ok, yes sir, whatever you say.'”

“They said, ‘He was dancing and being belligerent,'” Rose continued. “I said you cannot be both. And I don’t have a belligerent bone in my body so yes, I might have been dancing. I’ll apologize actually, but when I’m being myself and I’m not hurting another soul on earth, it’s hard for me to apologize.”

But do not expect him to do much apologizing when it comes to his Twitter activity. “Man, I can get into some vicious, vicious wars on Twitter and I will win them. I will tell you that much. I will eviscerate them,” he says proudly. Not that he doesn’t grasp the futility of it all. “You’re really shouting into the wind. You’re never gonna change anybody’s mind, you just aren’t,” Rose says. “You can present them with every fact on earth, these Trump people, you can’t change people’s minds. But if something happens with Trump and it’s just so illegal and disgusting and offensive to everything I’ve ever been taught, then I’m gonna talk about it. I don’t care. I literally think he’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to this country and there’s not even a close second, so that’s how I feel.”

However, not all of his friends agree with his use of social media, specifically when it comes to sharing political opinions, and as Conover told me later that day, “Shep is completely outspoken and that’s great. He says, ‘I don’t care.'”

“Which I think is a big mistake,” Altschul offered.

“I think it’s absurd, you’re alienating half your fan base,” Conover agreed.

“He’s changed a lot,” Rose said of Conover. “He used to [read everything about the show]. I think he’s a lot more relaxed and I think Austen is sort of going through, or was, reading everything out there. It can be insidious but I also get it.” Rose insists that he and Conover are “harmonious the whole time” this season, save for their “typical little squabbles.”

I also asked him about his childhood friend Teddi Mellencamp, who’s currently in the thick of the drama over on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills this season, but Rose said, “She sounds like she’s having a lot of fun with it,” and says he only encouraged her to participate in the show because “the negatives far under weigh the positives.” Rose also speculates, “I don’t think there’s much of a difference there between someone on a reality show and someone on a hit an NCI [show]” in a place like Los Angeles. “She’s probably going to parties that it’s not like she couldn’t have gotten invited to before, but now she’s the center of attention. Who wouldn’t like that?” he asks before chuckling.

Rose claims in his own personal life, he goes to “the same five places,” to hang out and isn’t worried about people paying attention to him, good or bad. “I just focus on the funny conversation I’m hopefully having with my friends. And I’ll take a picture with whomever,” finding himself pleasantly surprised when the request comes from “a biker-looking dude” and other unexpected fans. “I’m a big dumb animal just walking around the world,” Rose laughed.

It’s Eubanks who is more aware of the stigma Southern Charm has created in their town. “The consensus that I have received is that the local people would rather the show be off-air because you have the old guard part of Charleston who thinks the show is making a mockery of the Old South.”

“They’re making a mockery of the Old South,” Rose replied, adding, “You’re hanging in the wrong crowds, everybody’s enthusiastic,” when it comes to the hit Bravo series. Eubanks reminded Rose that she’s not hanging around dive bars the way he is, a handful of which he even owns, as well as his apparel company ShepGear, where the t-shirt and hat he’s wearing are from. “When my husband and I have gone to events at the yacht club downtown,” Eubanks shares, “They’re like, ‘Oh you’re on THAT show.’ They won’t even say the name. Like, that show.”

But Rose has no interest in outsiders complaining about the show. “At this point, if you live in Charleston and Southern Charm in any way affects your life, you have some things you need to get through. It has no bearing on anybody’s life, it’s just ours. It’s ours that we’re ruining, not theirs!”

Southern Charm premieres Wednesday, May 15 at 8pm ET/PT on Bravo. 

All photos by Paul Cheney.

Where to stream Southern Charm