Summer House first introduced viewers to Danielle Olivera in season 2, but for many fans, they’re just starting to get to know the 32-year-old tech/finance professional. It’s thanks to season 5’s format pivot. While the first four seasons of the series documented the weekend comings and goings of a group of friends in a Hamptons share house, season 5 captured the 24/7 lives of the housemates for six weeks straight. It was a change made necessary by the coronavirus pandemic, but it paid off, helping Summer House to deliver its best season ever.
“I think that there was definitely more of me to see,” Danielle muses to ET over video chat, trying to nail down why exactly she finally “clicked” with viewers four seasons in. “For me, I didn’t love myself on TV in the previous seasons. I’m thankful for what I was portrayed as this time around.”
Danielle says she mostly stays off Twitter (thanks in part to the often toxic atmosphere it breeds around reality TV commentary), but she is aware of the shift she’s had with viewers this year — and she welcomes all the positivity and love with open arms.
“I love that people are responding to me and that I’m representing in a way that makes a lot of people that look like me very proud,” Danielle, who is of Puerto Rican descent, remarks. She’s proud to represent the Latinx community — and the nerd community. As the only Summer House-mate with a corporate job, she jokes she lives a “double life.” The show’s used that to its editing advantage in season 5, with Danielle’s corporate jargon punctuating work week montages in nearly every episode.
“I am obsessed with my team and the people I work with because they have a sense of humor, and they see the humor in me having this double life,” she shares. “They know I’m a fun time after work. So they could see how I would be on the show, and being in tech, they’re like, ‘You’re living our dream!’ Because when you’re with a bunch of engineers who only code every single second of their lives, they love that one of them is out there, I guess, representing. Nerds can be cool and party, too.”
It’s getting to see that mix of all sides of herself — young professional, family-oriented and best friend to many — that finally brought Danielle out of the Bravo shadows, so to speak.
“In previous seasons, you just saw me sweating, coming off of a train, getting to the venue and just immediately start drinking and being ‘party girl Danielle,'” she notes. “Most of my life is not ‘party girl Danielle.’ I really like to focus on work and my career, and before you didn’t really get to see that side of me. So you could never really understand why I was coming out so hot on the weekends.”
Making things even more complicated is the fact that, in season 4, Danielle wasn’t a full-time house guest. She bunked with Lindsay Hubbard on much-needed party weekends.
“Everyone was like, ‘She’s thirsty, she’s trying too hard,'” she continues. “I’m like, no. All that steam from an insane workweek is just coming off. And I’ve been going to the Hamptons for many, many years before the show, and … I use it as a way to get drunk — and before Robert — hook up with people. That’s always been me, and so this time you get to see that I really am this balanced person, that I do work hard, and then I play hard.”
Robert is Robert Sieber, an executive chef whom Danielle started dating just weeks before she started filming Summer House last year, after meeting him at an intimate dinner party he catered. He temporarily moved into the house for the end of summer, as viewers saw last week, and Danielle is excited for people to see more of him in the final episodes to come.
“I was so, so nervous,” she admits of bringing her man into the orbit of reality television. “I think that I was just nervous that he wouldn’t take well to the environment, and that is not only the [cast], but it’s our crew, as well. So, I was honestly so excited that he was just a ham. He was a natural. I think that when he watches himself, he still freaks out. He was pacing back and forth over the ‘suicidal caterpillar’ conversation. He’s like, ‘How are they going to do us like that? … That’s not us! We’re fun. We’re cool. Right?’ I’m like, ‘No, I know that, but this is your first foray into an edit…'”
Before the edit came the experience for Robert, and it was quite the experience. Within his first few minutes at the house, Danielle realized that her co-star Hannah Berner and Hannah’s visiting boyfriend, her now-fiancé Des Bishop, were christening multiple rooms of the house — including castmates Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke’s bathroom.
“I had no idea what they were doing in their bathroom because, in my mind, that would be the last thing that I would think two people would do to people that they call friends,” Danielle says. “I did know that they were trying to get after it in every part of the house. I only can confirm the laundry room, which is not big by the way. It wasn’t very large and there were a lot of bugs in there, so I wouldn’t have chosen it as a place to have sex in, but that’s the only place that I knew for sure that they were doing the dirty in. And even then, I was just like, ‘Oh, dear Lord. OK, Des. Nice to meet you.'”
It’s been a rough season for Hannah, who started the season off at odds with Danielle’s BFF Lindsay, going on to feud with ex-fling Luke Gulbranson, as well as Kyle. Danielle promises the cast unpacked everything at the just-shot reunion in New York City.
“I’m still fully recovering from what happened,” she discloses, calling the day “chaos,” while promising host Andy Cohen left “no stone unturned.”
“You could probably slice in half the room on who sees each other often versus what we needed to really get off our chest from people that we haven’t seen since we wrapped, and getting that all out took hours and hours of time and, honestly, not sure if it was all resolved,” she adds. “Luke, [Carl Radke], myself, Lindsay, Kyle, Amanda, I can say we love each other pretty hard, I think in the reunion, you’re going to see a lot of that.”
The only housemates Danielle did not name there were Paige DeSorbo, Ciara Miller and Hannah.
The cast of season 5 of Bravo’s ‘Summer House.’
