Before the Oppenheim Group broke ground on Sunset Boulevard, Nicole Young was part of its inner circle. The real estate agent might be new to audiences this season on Selling Sunset, but she’s been one of the O Group’s top-producing agents with over $100 million in sales — and a friend to both Jason and Brett Oppenheim for the past 15 years.

“I’ve been in the background,” she tells Tudum. “I’ve even had friends from growing up or college or high school who were like, ‘Oh wait, you work there?’”

Young was even approached to join the cast before the series found a home at Netflix, but the timing wasn’t quite right. “I really wanted to focus on real estate,” she recalls thinking at the time. “I didn’t know where the show was going to go, and frankly I just wasn’t ready to expose my life to the world.” But eagle-eyed fans may have spotted her on camera over the years, including her short stint as the officiant of Mary Fitzgerald’s wedding (and a guest at her dogs’ birthday party during Season 4).

Cut to almost five years later, and Young is taking center stage on Selling Sunset, as one of two new cast members alongside Bre Tiesi. While she was admittedly “very nervous” at the onset, Young isn’t afraid to go toe to toe (or heel to heel, rather) with her fellow agents and quickly becomes the focal point of Season 6’s interoffice drama. “If I was going to do this, then I couldn’t do it half-ass,” she says. “I couldn’t be on the fence. I had to just trust it and go for it and that’s what I did.” 

Case in point: her clash with Chrishell Stause. The two agents share a particular history (and an ex, in boss Jason) that quickly gets unearthed early on in the season. To put it simply, they have diverging opinions over how a pair of past listings were handled: Young believes Stause took unfair credit, claiming Jason’s favoritism was at play, since he was dating her at the time. Stause firmly denies any wrongdoing. Ever since then, Young has carried a grudge because, as she says, past sales are a “huge part of real estate” and a point of personal pride. “This issue has been a longstanding thing,” she explains. “I didn’t just go on the show to pick a fight. This was already in the mix, and obviously when cameras come into play and emotions are heightened, things tend to come out. I wasn’t just pulling something out of thin air.” 

Stause, however, sees things a bit differently. Speaking with Tudum in a separate interview, Stause says that she was “blindsided” by Young bringing up their past on camera. “She’s come to my Friendsgiving, she’s come to my home for parties. I think that we’re friends,” she says. “When you’re joining a show and all of a sudden I’m seeing someone now with a camera crew kind of coming at me, it definitely threw me for a loop.”

While Young says she tried to “stay cool and ride it out,” things quickly spiral out of control when Stause later accuses her of doing drugs and acting “cracked out.”

“I was gutted, absolutely gutted,” Young says about the allegation. “I was so shocked that it took me a second to even process the words that had just come out of her mouth. The damage is in the accusation and I knew it was something that I was going to have to crawl out of.” And so she does, as Young takes swift and immediate action by taking a drug test the very next morning to “prove [her] innocence and nip it in the bud” once and for all. “I wanted that to be my mic drop moment in a sense that, ‘No, we’re going to close a casket on this and move on,’ ” she adds. 

As for where the two currently stand, Young says she and Stause have “gotten to a point where we can just coexist” — and for now, that’s the best case scenario. “I know it was just a malicious below-the-belt jab and nothing else,” she says. “[Stause] doesn’t think that and no one else thinks that.”

Despite what Stause (or the rest of the world) might believe, Young is standing by her truth and history with fellow O Group veterans, adding that her relationships with Mary, Jason, Brett and Amanza Smith are “just on another level.” Going forward, she hopes cameras will stick around to showcase the other parts of her story, including her home life with husband Brandon Young, which didn’t make the cut. “I’m very driven, dedicated and committed to my job and clients, but on the personal side, I’m also really fun and don’t take myself too seriously.”

But a little mess just comes with the territory — and that’s something she more than understands as the the longest-standing realtor at the brokerage. “Real estate is dramatic, even without the cameras,” Young says. “This is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I’m just excited to embrace it.”

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