Aspyn Ovard Doesn’t Need This

When you’re famous enough to have your own dedicated snark Reddits, you get used to people asking questions — about your dating life, about the makeup you’re wearing, about how you’re raising your children. What Aspyn Ovard is less used to is having to answer back. The 30-year-old content creator has spent the past week running around Southern California for press events and interviews to promote The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County, her first foray into reality TV and Hulu’s first spinoff of the Emmy-nominated phenomenon that made #MomTok a household name.

“I was very anxious,” Ovard admits over Zoom from the back of an Uber, palm trees whizzing by as she heads home to Orange County from Los Angeles, where she just recorded a podcast with her castmate and fellow influencer Avery Woods. “But I was lucky to be with the other girls for most of the stuff, so it’s nice that I didn’t have to be alone navigating it all for the first time.”

To most reality TV aficionados, Ovard is a newbie, but to the chronically online, she already has more lore than an average A-list celebrity. By 2014, before she even graduated high school, Ovard already had a million YouTube subscribers who tuned in to her lifestyle and beauty vlogs, watching her grow from a wide-eyed high schooler to a young wife and mom. She’s since expanded her platform to TikTok and Instagram, but she still doesn’t want to be called an influencer: “I usually say I’m a YouTuber if people ask, actually.”

A reality show is only as good as its cast, and Ovard resembles a producer’s dream, someone who’s already used to documenting themselves on camera and whose nontraditional romantic life — she is in a loving throuple — brings a built-in horde of curious viewers. Ovard admits she didn’t need reality TV to maintain her career, but she knew the power Mormon Wives holds as both a fan of the flagship series and a friend of some of the Utah stars. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity even though I have had so much success on my own,” she says. “It would’ve felt crazy to say no.” But taking the leap also means she’d have to divulge details about her life she adamantly kept private until now.

Ovard was born in St. George, Utah, one of the epicenters of the Mormon Church. Her family is no longer religious, but in the early 2000s, she and her four siblings were steeped in Mormon culture. “I grew up going to church when I was little, and I did end up getting baptized when I was 9. The missionaries, they got me,” she says with a smirk.

Ovard dutifully hit all the traditional hallmarks of a young small-town Mormon woman: “I got married at 19” — to her high school sweetheart (and now ex) Parker Ferris — “pregnant at 22, and wanted to have four kids by my 30s.” But the online fame she found as a content creator was already starting to break her out of her bubble. “I didn’t go on a plane until a couple of days before my 16th birthday,” she recalls. “When we started getting opportunities to travel out of the country, you realize you think in such a small way when you come from a small town.”

Ovard’s social media made her the breadwinner as she and Ferris, 31, welcomed two daughters, 7-year-old Cove and 4-year-old Lola. The couple divorced in 2024 while she was pregnant with their third child, 2-year-old Elle, and relocating to Orange County for a fresh start. Ovard said in a video that she found out a “10-year secret” Ferris had been keeping, which set the subreddits ablaze. Looking back, she didn’t realize how ominous it sounded. “I’ve said in every interview that I think the 10-year secret will be pretty underwhelming to people,” she jokes.

On Mormon Wives O.C., she finally filled in the blanks, revealing that Ferris hid his alcohol use from her while they were married — a sensitive point for Ovard, whose father died due to complications associated with alcoholism. “We’re just not each other’s people. We love differently, so we’re definitely better off as friends,” she says. “But finding that out two months after my dad had died was definitely a lot. It’s not necessarily what he did, but knowing something was hidden from you was a hard pill to swallow.”

While the divorce provided enough fodder for followers, the exes were navigating unimaginable tragedy at home. Ovard confirms on the show that one of their young daughters received a terminal cancer diagnosis three years ago, and the family doesn’t know how long she has to live. (Suspecting fans had already noted that Ovard’s collaboration with Tarte Cosmetics last year donated all net proceeds to pediatric cancer research organizations.)

“We’ve been through a lot the last couple of years, and we haven’t had a lot of things to really look forward to.”

Ovard is careful not to reveal any specifics on-screen, including which child is navigating the disease, aside from saying she received a “stable” prognosis during a scan. However, she is candid about how her daughter’s health factored into her decision to do the show: Reality TV stardom is another source of income that lets her and Ferris, who also appears on camera, maximize family time. “We’ve been through a lot the last couple of years, and we haven’t had a lot of things to really look forward to,” she tells me. “Parker being able to look at this as a career opportunity is a helpful thing for him, so we came to an agreement that we would both do the show and on the things we would share.” Regardless, Ovard won’t let the show invade her children’s privacy, blurring their faces if they appear on-screen, and her reps asked outlets to refrain from questions about how her daughter is doing.

“I was hoping my boundaries would be followed with certain things that I did not want to talk about, and it was, thankfully,” she says, then quips: “Most people just wanted to ask me about being in a throuple.”

In March of this year — before the spinoff was announced — Ovard hard-launched her relationship with a married couple, Briana “Bri” and Billy Davis. Her newfound throuple status threw everyone in her life for a loop — including herself. “There was never a moment of coming out for me,” she says. “I just kept saying, ‘Oh, you’ll never see me with a man again’ to my friends or family as I was going through the divorce process. Obviously, I was wrong. There are good ones out there.”

Ovard had been interested in dating women after her marriage ended, and she connected with Bri through Instagram in late 2024. (She prefers not to put a label on her sexuality: “Sexuality is so fluid, and I love not feeling the pressure to label mine.”) In their first conversation, Bri shared that she’s ethically nonmonogamous. “I was not in a place of looking for anything serious at all, so it didn’t really make a difference to me that she was married,” Ovard says. Despite being long-distance, things got serious quickly, with Ovard regularly flying to Bri’s home in New Jersey. “After I was with her, I was like, ‘Oh, wow. I can’t imagine ever wanting anything to do with a man,’” she recalls. “We connect on so many things. Loving a woman and being loved by a woman is so special and such a beautiful, different type of love that I’m so grateful I get to experience.”

But after a month of dating, Ovard decided she wanted to meet Billy. “I was like, ‘If he’s good enough for her, he is good enough for me,’” she says, laughing. “They were always so respectful. If I changed my mind and didn’t want to hang out with both of them, that was totally OK.”

Last fall, Bri and Billy moved across the country to Orange County to live with Ovard and her children, with whom she shares custody with Ferris. (Her ex wasn’t a huge fan of this idea at first — as seen on Mormon Wives O.C. — though she says he’s slowly starting to come around.)

“People expect it to be a lot more salacious than it is.”

Any concerns Ovard had about living as a throuple vanished upon move-in. “I didn’t have a lot of conflict resolution skills, so getting a front-row seat to two people who do have those skills has accelerated my growth in that way,” she says. “When we get asked, ‘Do you ever feel attacked by the third?’ We’re like, ‘You shouldn’t ever feel attacked by your partner.’ But we’ve all learned if it is two against one, you really have to take a look at yourself, and odds are you probably are the one in the wrong.”

She is, however, still figuring out what being a prominent face of nonmonogamy requires of her. She’s happy to dispel stereotypes by inviting cameras into her home and showcasing their love, though open discussions of their sex lives are a touchy subject. “I love to talk about that with friends because it’s a fun topic, but I’m only going to share so much,” she warns. “We get a lot of questions like, ‘Oh, would you ever add another one?’ Imagine how weird [it’d be] if I asked someone that as a hetero person in a straight relationship. People expect it to be a lot more salacious than it is, but they meet us and are like, ‘Oh, wait, they’re pretty normal.’”

Tell that to her costars. Since the first day of production, Ovard’s relationship has been a hot topic, especially among the castmates she hadn’t even met yet. Jen Affleck, a star of the flagship Mormon Wives series, moved to Orange County and leads the spinoff, which follows two polar-opposite friend groups: Ovard was already close with Woods, Bobbi Althoff, and Salomé Andrea — women with more progressive values and years of influencing experience — but wasn’t as familiar with Affleck’s friends who are still devout members of the Mormon Church: Ashleigh Pease, Madison Bontempo, Jordan McClanahan, and McCall DaPron (the older sister of OG star Mayci Neeley), who are oft referred to as “Molly Mormons.”

Within the expanded friend group, Ovard emerges as fiery and outspoken, unafraid to put herself on the front lines when culture clashes come to the forefront. During a cast trip to Palm Springs, Ovard confronted DaPron and McClanahan about their resistance to explicitly say they supported “gay rights” in spite of the Mormon Church’s practices. “We talked about politics a lot in that conversation, and that was cut out from the show. That’s Disney for you, I guess,” she says with a shrug. “I wasn’t looking for them to just say they support my relationship. I want the people I surround myself with to be aligned with supporting human rights. It’s a hill I will die on. It was hard at that moment because I don’t feel like they were understanding exactly what I was asking, but I know they were trying and have kept trying.”

Ovard isn’t that worried about all the new eyeballs she’ll get from Mormon Wives O.C. You don’t become a teen YouTube star without learning to deal with a fiery comments section. “I feel like I’ve always had thick skin doing this job,” she says. “There’s a screenshot from years ago: Someone commented on my video saying my hair was really curly, and the comment was like, ‘You don’t look good with curly hair.’ And I replied, ‘Yeah, I do.’” She’s more concerned about what her less experienced castmates are in store for: “It’s a bigger adjustment for them to go from sharing nothing to sharing everything on your socials and reality TV,” she says.

Still, when the show premieres, Ovard will be on vacation in Mexico with Bri, Billy, and her children, with plans to turn off her phone and lie on the beach. Oh, and Ferris is joining them, too. “We’re in a pretty good spot right now,” she tells me happily, as her car gets closer to home. “It’s definitely a unique relationship, but all three of us are willing to do anything we can to make him feel more comfortable and good with the situation that we’re in.”

The Mormon Wives franchise has already proved itself to be an effective star-launching vehicle: Just ask Whitney Leavitt, who leveraged her participation into starring roles on Broadway. But with everything her family’s going through, Ovard isn’t interested in a career change or world domination: “I’ve done this for 16 years now, and I’m transparently looking to keep this going for as long as I can,” she says. “I just want to spend time with my kids and be able to work the least amount possible.”

But like a great reality star, she knows how to keep you watching: “I feel like I’m slowly gathering the strength to be the person that I want to be again, and to show up for friends and myself,” she says, as we talk about what viewers might see on a potential second season. “Even getting through these press days, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I did it.’ I can do hard things.”