Mary Fitzgerald is sitting behind her desk in her open-floor-plan Hollywood office, accompanied by her husband Romain (who's just out of Zoom's range), telling me about her decision to sign a reality show contract three years ago. "I was nervous, because we didn't know how we were going to be portrayed and if it was going to be twisted, but I just think I wanted—" She stops mid-sentence as her boss walks into the camera frame to cut her off, cell phone in hand.
"I'm going to interrupt this. One second," Jason Oppenheim says, holding a finger up to the camera as Mary stares at him with her big blue eyes in shock, tilting her head toward the screen to subtly, professionally signal my presence. Jason, crisp white polo shirt hugging his body, waves hello, having met me earlier in the day from his (slightly sunnier, slightly more primo real estate) corner of the spacious Sunset Strip room, and hands his employee the phone anyway. Mary sighs, turns away from the camera, and begins negotiating the details of an upcoming house walkthrough.
The two agents are working (
really working; more on that later) from their office—socially distanced, responsibly (mostly) empty, exactly as it appears on camera—midday on a Monday in late August. Normally, late summer might be a quieter period for the Oppenheim Group, a luxury real estate brokerage that sells seven-figure-and-up homes with amenities that range from putting greens to guest houses larger than most people's only houses. And during a pandemic, you might not expect anyone to be in the office at all, let alone two of the biggest reality stars of 2020. But the Oppenheim Group is a different kind of beast. Fans of Netflix's sleeper hit
Selling Sunset, a show about luxury L.A. homes and the lives of the women involved in those big-ticket transactions, have come to expect this heightened level of buying and selling from its stars. Why should a global pandemic stop them in their tracks?
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