Ladies of London: The New Reign star Margo Stilley was all for a “new adventure” on reality TV, but she had no idea her on-camera panic attack would lead to a surprise health discovery.
“I didn’t know that I wasn’t physically or mentally positioned to take on so much more responsibilities,” Margo, 43, told People on Thursday, April 23, speaking about her time on the Bravo series. “What I didn’t realize was that I was trying to build my life on a new life [that was] on completely broken foundations.”
Fans met Margo in March when the revived series — with a whole new cast — premiered on Bravo. While viewers have loved the non-stop drama, some were shocked when Margo started to cry and had a panic attack during the Thursday, April 23, episode following a fight with costar Mark-Francis Vandelli.
“I’m with two costars who I do consider my friends and they’re just telling me what someone said about my clothes. There is no historical reason for me to have had that reaction,” Margo confessed, referring to Mark-Francis, 36, negative remarks about her wardrobe — and her subsequent breakdown after calling him “weird and creepy.”
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She explained, “I remember being like, ‘Am I dying? What the hell’s going on?’ It was just strange, I’ve never had a panic attack before. It was the first time I was able to admit, ‘OK, this is not normal stress. This is strange.’”
Margo noted that after that moment, she started to realize she was “watching myself just decline, decline, decline. I wasn’t sleeping. On my days off, I would just lay in bed, but I couldn’t rest.”
While Margo hoped that her panic attack — and her other ailments — were linked to the stress of filming in London and she’d feel better once she was back in California, that was not the case.
Mark-Francis Vandelli, Margo Stilley. Nick Wall/Bravo
“I never got better, I got worse and worse and worse. And I never stopped crying, I would cry all day long,” Margo recalled, noting that after being back in Los Angeles for three months with her husband and their three children, she knew she needed to see a doctor.
Margo revealed that after conducting a hormone panel, the doctors discovered that she had “no available testosterone, no progesterone and 30 times the amount of estrogen that any woman at any age should ever have.”
“And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not an awful person, I’m not weak, I’m not a bad mom, I’m not a bad wife, I’m not a bad friend. I just am hormonally imbalanced,” she remembered thinking, sharing that she started “feeling like myself again” after a few months of balancing her hormones.
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Margo noted that during this health journey she also realized she never fully dealt with her postpartum depression or Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex (D-MER) that she experienced after giving birth to her daughter, Della Rose, in 2023. (D-MER is a condition that affects breastfeeding or pumping women giving them “intense negative feelings” if their milk “lets down during a feeding,” according to Cleveland Clinic.)
She explained that after doing about “six or eight weeks” of postpartum therapy she felt better but didn’t realize “how long it can last.” (Margo is also the stepmother to two boys that her husband has from a previous relationship.)
Instead, Margo agreed to do Ladies of London and spend the summer in England, a special place for her, to see “if I could just get back to my old life and get back to myself.”
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“I didn’t know that my kind of postpartum would not resolve itself. I didn’t know that I needed to do hormone panels to see where my hormones were, to see if I was rebalancing at a normal rate, which I wasn’t,” she recalled. “I didn’t know that I could have medicated myself. I had nannies and my husband was like, ‘Why do you need so many nannies?’ And I had shame, I was embarrassed. I was struggling to survive internally.”
Looking back at that time period, Margo said she is “grateful” she did Ladies of London because it helped her identify that something was off in her body.
“How else would I have known? I didn’t believe anybody when they said, ‘Are you OK? It feels like something more is going on,’” she revealed. “I didn’t know why they were saying that. Sure, Mark is talking about me within earshot. It’s annoying. He won’t make peace. But it’s not a big deal. I was just hormonally imbalanced and I needed help.”
Ladies of London: The New Reign airs on Bravo Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET.
