Want to Be Friends With a Bravolebrity?

 That’ll be $5,000.

It’s a scorching Sunday in Los Angeles, and Devyn Parrott, a 36-year-old mother of twins from Phoenix, has already made the pilgrimage to a few sites of celebrity worship: the Beverly Hills Erewhon for a Hailey Bieber smoothie, the Four Seasons for a massage, and SUR, the main setting of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, for a glass of wine. Then comes the highlight: a dinner with Reza Farahan and Mercedes “MJ” Javid of the reality series Shahs of Sunset, The Valley: Persian Style, and The Traitors. It’s her second time meeting Farahan. The first took place in November, when she and her mother had drinks with him at BravoCon. “It was like catching up with an old friend,” she says. “He’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.”

Parrott is a client of Fan Social, a start-up launched as a sort of Cameo on steroids: Whereas Cameo allows users to pay around a couple hundred bucks for a personalized video from a celebrity, Fan Social has its clients pay two, three, or ten times that amount to actually hang out with them in person. Parrott’s experience in L.A. would cost you $7,888 ($2,888 for Javid, $5,000 for Farahan); her drinks date at BravoCon was $2,500. On Fan Social’s menu, you can have lunch with Luann de Lesseps for $5,000, grab coffee with Jamie Kennedy for $750, dine with To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen for $3,500, or golf with former L.A. Laker Byron Scott for $20,000. For $10,000, The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Margaret Josephs will officiate your wedding. For a tenth of that, comedian Tom Arnold will virtually preside over your divorce counseling.

The wealthy have always been able to buy access to celebrities (consider the many pop stars who appeared on My Super Sweet 16), but Fan Social seeks to standardize what were formerly backdoor negotiations with an individual’s management. The idea was born in 2024 when a fan called in to “Jeff Lewis Live,” a two-hour SiriusXM show hosted by the former star of Bravo’s Flipping Out, asking if she could take Lewis to dinner, to which he joked that she could — for $10,000. The dinner never happened, but other fans took him seriously: Soon Lewis was receiving multiple $10,000 dinner invitations over DM, which he accepted. Months later, Lewis started Fan Social along with Southern Hospitality showrunner Michael Beck and Charleston-based software and product designer Shannon Barnes. Fan Social launched with ten celebrities, mostly Lewis’s friends from the Bravoverse. Within a year, the site had hundreds of bookings; the roster now sits at around 50 and includes comedians, actors, and influencers. The founders are currently expanding Fan Social’s talent pool of athletes, who are often based in smaller cities and have local appeal; they’re also hoping to land Andy Cohen, who Lewis expects could charge up to $20,000 per dinner. Barnes describes the pitch as “Uber for celebrities,” a side hustle they can squeeze into their schedules whenever they want. “It’s such an easy way for somebody to make money for one hour of conversation — usually about themselves, which they’re happy to do,” says Beck. 

Like most Fan Social clients, Parrott had heard about the company on “Jeff Lewis Live,” which she listens to “religiously.” (Until now, the platform has done no traditional marketing or press, relying on celebrities to promote their own pages.) Along with her family, she owns three subcontracting companies and was using the trip to L.A. to “capitalize on alone time.” “Here’s the thing,” she tells me, a stack of gold designer bracelets dangling on her wrist, as we wait at the bar for Farahan and Javid to arrive. “You can spend $500 on a Cameo that you watch one time and post. This is more expensive, sure, but it’s the memory of it. That for me is what’s so cool: the memory.”  [...]

The day after Parrott’s meetup, Amy Powers, a 54-year-old from Tennessee, arrives at the SiriusXM offices in Hollywood for her “Jeff Lewis Live” studio visit — a Fan Social experience where, for $5,000, a client can listen in on the prep meeting and taping of Lewis’s show. Powers is a Fan Social power user, a tiny blonde OG Housewives fan with a southern drawl who owns a construction company with the husband she’s in the process of divorcing. ChumpCon, the convention for fans of “Jeff Lewis Live” held last year in Las Vegas, was “the best weekend ever,” she says. Last night, she had a Fan Social dinner at the West Hollywood restaurant Craig’s with Doug Budin ($2,000) and Jamison Scala ($1,500), who both work on “Jeff Lewis Live.” “Any time I’m in town, the first thing I do is call Shannon, like, ‘Where are my boys? Can they do something? Can they have lunch? Can we have dinner?’ ” she says. [...]

Not all “Jeff Lewis Live” listeners support Fan Social; posts on Lewis’s sub-Reddit have criticized him as being “desperate” and “grifting off his fans” for his $4,000 drinks and $7,500 dinner offerings. Lewis waves this off. “My guess is most of those people, if they had the opportunity to do what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure they’d be doing it. Why wouldn’t you?” he says. “You wanna go to a thousand-dollar dinner and have an amazing evening and then sometimes get a gift on top of it and be paid for it? It’s crazy.” Last year, Lewis did 33 Fan Socials and made well into the six figures on the platform (Fan Social takes a commission of around 20 to 25 percent). “I get to go to all my favorite restaurants for free,” he says; he’ll usually suggest Craig’s, the Polo Lounge, Boa, Cecconi’s, or Steak 48.

by Rebecca Jennings, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Michelle Groskopf
[ed. Sad. They'd have to pay me.]