Austen Kroll and Craig Conover Break Down The Trips and the Tantrums on This Season of ‘Southern Charm’

By Lea Palmieri @littleleap
Published July 24, 2019, 8:38 a.m. ET

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“I woke up, I had some fruit, some oatmeal, and some hot tea, and got my nails done,” Craig Conover told me of his morning, one that sounds awfully relaxed for the man who has spent the last two out of three episodes of Southern Charm launching into DEFCON 1-level tantrums. One was over his friend Austen Kroll leaving a bar to go home at a reasonable time, the other was out of frustration due to his friends debating if they wanted to take a bus to their accommodations on a Colorado vacation. Conover teases of his tantrums, “Apparently there’s another one,” still to come this season.

But today, on a partly sunny, 92-degree day in New York City, as I sat across from him and Kroll on the gorgeous docked boat-turned restaurant Grand Banks in the Hudson River, Conover is all relaxed smiles and giggles. “I didn’t know I had three weeks of mental breakdowns and on the plane I was like, dude I look like a fucking nut.”

There’s a self-awareness and a relaxed vibe that these two share that perhaps doesn’t always come across on screen. And sure, who wouldn’t be chill right now, sipping on cocktails and snacking on oysters, crab claws, and ceviche, with gorgeous views of downtown New York City? But it’s these same qualities, plus the fact that they are a handful of years younger than their fellow male castmates, that finds their bromance, if we’re still using that term, blossoming. They’re most likely to be ribbed by the other guys, yes. But they’re also the ones not only looking for a real, solid relationship, but willing to put that relationship on national television for millions to watch, judge, and comment on. Conover and Kroll are both attractive, tall (both well over 6 feet) guys who are building their own businesses, enjoying all that being on a hit reality TV show has to offer, and happy to unwind with a Frozen marathon at the end of the day. It’s not that life is hard for either of them, but at least when it is, they let us watch.

So what triggered Conover during this airport meltdown, exactly? “Whitney gets off on fucking stuff up,” he said of the Colorado bus incident. “He was being a grouch and it was Cameran’s trip. She was all excited to go on the bus with us and we had activities planned and all of a sudden Whitney was like, ‘Oh no, I don’t think we should go on the bus, that’s not safe, let’s fly on the plane.’ I don’t know why anyone else wasn’t handling this but I ended up having to handle it,” he explained.

“I was going to say something but in a more constructive way, and let’s not distract from the fact that Craig is fit for a straitjacket,” Kroll added to laughs from Conover. It’s hard to argue with that point, especially considering the tantrum started in the baggage claim area when Chelsea Meissner asked Conover if he was drunk and he responded by saying, “I will never speak to you again, ever.”

“I don’t remember saying that,” Conover confessed, laughing at himself now. At the time, it made him so angry because “You can’t defend yourself from that and I wasn’t [drunk],” but Kroll exclaimed of his pal, “What a nut job, dude!” to more laughs at the table. “I wish you were wearing like a mink coat, extra as shit,” Kroll said of his pal’s storm-out. “And then he’s sitting on the bus just waiting for us.”

Conover’s previous tantrum was also surprisingly focused at Meissner for encouraging Kroll to leave the bar at a normal time, which Kroll says was designed in hopes of getting ex-girlfriend Madison LeCroy back. Kroll says he was lamenting to Meissner that, “I don’t deserve someone like Madison who has her shit together more than me, and Chelsea was like, you can’t be going out until 2am on a Wednesday night.” Kroll was ready for improvement and she advised him to self-impose a curfew, going so far as to track his location on her phone and as it neared midnight, reminded him to go home, Cinderella-style. “I just thought that it was a way to better myself,” Kroll said.

“I was mostly mad at him for leaving me, it was mostly for selfish reasons,” Conover confessed. “No shit!” Kroll replied. “I was mad because I needed you at the end of the night and I didn’t have anyone,” Conover told him.

“Craig has separation anxiety,” Kroll stated. “I have to remind him, Craig, you’ll be fine. Just turn around and you’ll see a girl that’s looking at you and you’ll be fine.”

“They don’t understand me like you do,” Conover joked.

And after those two tantrums, he’s lucky Meissner understands him too. “She’s the sweetest girl ever,” Kroll said of Meissner, who he previously dated on the show. “Her texts to me this season are the sweetest texts ever like, ‘Craig, I’m so sorry,'” Conover said. “She was like, ‘I still love you, I’m so mortified that I told you I have a bigger penis,’ and I was like, ‘Chelsea, don’t be. It’s hilarious.'” Kroll took a rather mature route when he found himself in a rift with Meissner earlier this season over mean things he said about her over text, admitting, “I knew that if I just apologized and accepted what had happened then everything would blow over and that’s exactly what happened.”

He learned to take a similar approach to social media, referring to earlier episodes of the show this season where it was debated if LeCroy had a friend send a flirty message via Instagram to Danni Baird’s boyfriend at the time, with the two women engaging in a back and forth on the social media site. “I realize that in this whole DM-gate, the dumbest thing ever, I stopped engaging because I was like, this is so dumb, I can’t believe I put any effort into this.” Well, Conover helped him put an end to those efforts as well. “We were at the golf tournament I was like, ‘You really shouldn’t do that,'” Conover told him. “He was like, ‘I’m just gonna do one,’ and I was like, ‘Don’t do it,’ and then I was like, alright, I guess I gonna go drink over here by myself.”

“Honestly my phone should be taken away when I’m drinking,” Kroll confessed. “That’s why I got in trouble the night I broke up with Madison, I was rage texting her and that’s when she was like, ‘Oh yeah Chelsea, look at what Austen’s texting.’ Austen, just put your phone down.”

Someone who should’ve taken that same advice was Ashley Jacobs, the ex-girlfriend of Thomas Ravenel who has popped up again on this season of Southern Charm for what she claims is redemption, though the others might classify it as aggravation. Instead of anyone accepting her half-hearted apology, she was grilled on her tweets that were rather rude towards the Southern Charm cast members. Conover and Rose ran away to go fishing, but I asked Kroll why he stayed to witness her eruption during the group’s recent outing to Eliza Limehouse’s plantation. “It wasn’t like I was sitting there waiting for fireworks. I was talking to the [women] and she just came and sat down next to Chelsea,” he said. “I think that she thought that she was gonna come there and get redemption and I was like, alright, I’m gonna listen to this. And I listened to enough. She was trying to gain the favor of Chelsea and Cam because she thought that if she gained that favor that everyone else would fall in line. I don’t care if I ever see the woman again in my life. I just don’t care to be friends. In the nicest way possible too, because we just shouldn’t and that’s fine. I don’t think she cares either. The whole thing was very strange,” he sighed.

“She just keeps wanting to prove that she wasn’t wrong last year,” Conover chimed in. “She thinks she’s the victim still.” Though it was himself and Kroll that were perceived as victims just a few episodes earlier when Rose and Sudler-Smith were relentless with their bullying during a guys’ trip to the woods in Tennessee. “A lot of things happened that night,” Kroll said, “But when Shep was a bully, yeah it made me laugh, but then I see that Craig’s not having a good time and that’s not what I wanted,” he explained of the trip that was supposed to take his mind off his recent breakup. “Let’s go out into the middle of nowhere and throw some dogs on the grill and drink some whiskey, build a fire.”

“We ended up having to steal the fire from a neighboring campsite,” Conover revealed through a laugh. “Craig and I ran and grabbed it,” Kroll added. “We didn’t have any starter logs, so we were like, what are we supposed to do, whittle this fire together?”

That would have definitely served as a distraction, that’s for sure. “Just because you break up with a girl does not mean the first thing you want to do is find someone else to sleep with,” Kroll continued while Conover nodded in agreement.

Kroll was able to get his laughs in during the group’s current trip to Colorado where he made it the first order of business to stop by the legal weed dispensary. Unfortunately, he forgot to brush up on the metric system on the way there, and later realized, “Oh my god, did we confuse grams and milligrams? We grossly overestimated how much we needed.” The same goes for Rose, who, in tonight’s episode we’ll see, “Shep was just eating the butter sauce, he was higher than I’ve ever seen anyone higher in my entire life,” Conover said.

We’ll also see Kroll realize a day-long dream of his in Steamboat Springs that he recalls fondly, which he earned after motivating his pals to take in the day of snow sports (minus Rose because of a knee injury and Sudler-Smith because “you can’t make him do anything”). “There’s this bar at the bottom of the hill,” Kroll explained, “It’s a legendary après bar in Steamboat called T Bar, and there’s a bell there and if you ring the bell then you have to bar the whole bar a shot. So I’m over there with Madison and I’m warming up her hands and being all flirty and everyone’s like, no!” This led to them encouraging him to ring the bell, he did, and there were shots all around. “He wanted to do it the whole day,”  Conover confirmed.

Though when I asked what their current relationship status was, Kroll played coy with a, “You are gonna have to watch and see,” and Conover played…confused? “I don’t even know the answer to that,” he smiled. Though he wasn’t quite as confused as Sudler-Smith, whose rumored hookup with Kathryn Dennis has extended throughout the season as Kroll declared, “He’s the one that turned it into a big deal.”

The guys probably rightly assume that if he’d just copped to that night’s events, the conversation would’ve died down, with Kroll adding, “I just know that Whitney’s very, very, very, very private.”

“I don’t know if it was because he was dating someone at the time or he’s just embarrassed,” Conover offered, marveling at a recent awkward exchange on the show between Sudler-Smith and Dennis where she brought up the topic and he remained tight-lipped about it all. “I’ve never seen someone have the conversation that they had at lunch, that was remarkable,” Conover said, with both guys admitting how shocked they were to also see Sudler-Smith walking out of the confessional.

“It is so dumb. This is so stupid to even talk about,” Kroll exclaimed, that awareness creeping back up. “It’s so stupid!” he repeated, though he’ll definitely need to state that again when the topic arises at the upcoming reunion. “So much happens until the finale and that’s really gonna lead up for a fantastic reunion,” Kroll predicts, though neither had anything to look forward to when it comes to the big event. “This will be one of the worst ones ever,” Conover said.

In preparation, they’ve already started to own up to some of the season’s biggest moments. When it comes to Conover’s tantrums, he says, “Colorado was deserved. The birthday party one, that was a little crazy.” And while Kroll dreads the number of times his infamous YouTube video will be played during the taping, he admits he can now laugh at it because “that’s the only way to do it. I have to.” He’s ready to own up to the way his relationship’s played out on TV vowing, he’ll no longer share his romantic decisions with Conover and Rose, stating, “I can’t tell them because I’m just gonna get scolded like a little boy. Why am I listening to these goobers about relationships?”

“That we’re so good at,” Conover interjects, to Kroll’s “When they’re clearly inept.”

At this point, a group of Kroll’s friends from Charleston arrives to say hi, in town to watch their pal on that night’s episode of Watch What Happens Live, and they retreat to the bar as we finish chatting. I ask what the guys learned about putting their relationships on display for all to see, and Conover admits to “always be transparent, my life is so much easier on the show when I’m just myself,” and for Kroll it’s that “The next girl that I date, you don’t want to repeat the same mistake, you want to grow and learn. I’m like Ross Geller when he’s like, ah yes, everyone’s taking joy in my pain.” (I offer that Conover is the Ross Geller when someone steals his sandwich the day after Thanksgiving.)

“I want to be good,” Kroll continues. “I’m not gonna get in a relationship with anyone unless I’m super confident.” For now, he’s confident in his business, celebrating the official launch of his beer, Trop Hop, this Friday at Uptown Social in Charleston. While the product will only be available in the Charleston area for now, he explains that you can try it on draft first for the exclusive release but that “I’m also gonna incorporate cans in the fall when I can roll it out to a bunch of restaurants and grocery stores and such.”

As for Conover’s Sewing Down South business, he tells me, “We’re just under one thousand pillows sold, approaching 10 retail partners and stores and we have our first in Germany which was awesome. That was an incredible feeling when I saw that order.” There are new lines coming soon, including outdoor pillows which will be available any day now, and he’s found a new factory in South Carolina about an hour away from Charleston for production, including some housewares which will also be available soon. “I’m proud of you, man,” Kroll tells his friend.

Perhaps much of this is due to Conover’s new grown-up, responsible schedule. “For the last six weeks I have been living a normal schedule and it’s pretty phenomenal,” he says. His assistant Anna-Heyward got him melatonin gummies which he eats around 11pm each night, “And I would just get tired and fall asleep and wake up in eight hours,” he said, almost surprised at the concept.

“I feel like I’m a better person,” Conover says of his full nights of sleep, during one last round of awareness. “I haven’t had any rants lately.”

Southern Charm airs Wednesday at 9pm ET/PT on Bravo.

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