Mary Bonnet Says Selling Sunset Producers Made Her Wait to Find Out if She Was Pregnant to Film It (Exclusive) (original) (raw)

When Mary Bonnet returned from a trip to Bali with husband Romain Bonnet, she had a “strong hunch” that she was pregnant — but she claims in her new memoir, Selling Sunshine, that she had to wait to find out.

The Selling Sunset star, real estate agent and vice president of Oppenheim Group, 44, writes in her book (out Sept. 24) that she realized her period was late after the couple took a belated honeymoon in 2022.

She shared her suspicion with the Netflix docusoap’s production team, who already knew the couple were trying to conceive.

“Naturally, they wanted to capture the entire thing on camera, so they asked me to wait to take the pregnancy test until they could be there,” she writes.

Netflix

Mary recalls responding, “Well, then you need to come over now, because I’m going to do it.” She says she was told they were in the middle of filming other scenes and would have to wait.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’” she writes, remembering her reaction. “You’re going to delay us finding out whether or not we’re having a baby?! Can’t we just re-create the scene?”

She says they asked her to wait to take the test until the next morning, and it wasn’t until the crew showed up that she learned she was indeed pregnant.

Netflix declined to comment on the incident.

“In addition to my absolute astonishment, I suddenly became aware that I had cameras on me, recording my reaction, which made me hyper-focused on what I was saying and doing,” she writes.

'Selling Sunset'.

Harper Influence

The moment appeared in the premiere episode of _Selling Sunset_’s seventh season. Three episodes later, the show documented Mary revealing the news to the rest of the cast.

Mary writes that the scene was shot the same week she learned she was pregnant — and she decided to tell the other agents when she saw them spray painting their initials where they wanted their desks to be, and knew she needed to avoid the harsh fumes.

She tells PEOPLE the circumstance prompted her to share the personal news with her castmates sooner than planned.

“Everyone says to wait until you're in the safe zone,” she says. “I was so excited and I was around my friends and I didn't really think that through enough because there was spray paint around. I was like, "Oh, I can't be around this."

Nine weeks later, Mary suffered a miscarriage, which she and Romain learned of during a scheduled ultrasound appointment.

Netflix

She writes that they had been set to film a scene at home in which they showed the ultrasound pictures right after the appointment.

She recalls Romain calling _Selling Sunset_’s producers with the heartbreaking news and telling them, “You are not coming. We need to grieve alone.”

However, she says the producers wanted the couple’s “emotions to be fresh” when they discussed the loss, offering to keep the crew small and have only her close friend Amanza Smith in the scene with the couple.

“Somehow, by the grace of God, we got through it,” she writes of filming the scene from season 7’s sixth episode. “I sat there, speaking in a robotic tone, entirely numb, while Romain did everything he could to shield me from any more pain."

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Mary and Romain entered into a civil union in 2018, and celebrated their nuptials with a wedding ceremony the following year. Mary has one son named Austin, whom she welcomed in 1997. He's now 27.

She also opens up about teen motherhood in Selling Sunshine, sharing what it was like to become pregnant at age 15.

Mary tells PEOPLE the process of writing her deeply personal book was “very difficult.”

“I had to really put myself back in situations that I never want to be back in again and really think about it to describe the situations properly,” she says. “I had to talk to my therapist quite a bit to make sure I was handling it okay.”

Selling Sunshine is available now.