Brooks Nader’s Naked Ambition

At a pickleball court straddling SoHo and the West Village, Brooks Nader is splayed out on the ground, doing splits for the camera. It’s a brisk early autumn afternoon — and though she’s wearing little more than a sheer bodysuit, wraparound Balenciaga sunglasses, and stiletto boots, Nader appears entirely unbothered by the elements. Beatific, even. After all, this is exactly where the model, reality star, and newly minted tabloid darling always envisioned she’d end up.

“My mom goes, ‘I’ll never forget [when] you were 6 years old, you said, ‘We have to go to Dillard’s to look at heels,’” Nader recalls. When her mother asked why, exactly, she needed heels, Nader was unequivocal: “I said, ‘Because I need to pick out my shoes for my first red carpet. I want everyone to see my shoes when I step out of my limousine.’”

Long before she got her big break as a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover star, and long before Freeform’s Love Thy Nader anointed her and her three younger sisters — Mary Holland, Grace Ann, and Sarah Jones, all models as well — as Hulu’s second family of reality TV, Nader was a church-going, hypersheltered little girl in Maringouin, Louisiana. She hardly knew life outside her small bayou town: The furthest the family ever ventured was on road trips to neighboring states like Alabama and Mississippi; Nader didn’t board her first plane until high school.

But if Britney Spears and Addison Rae could make it out of Louisiana, why couldn’t she do the same? “I Googled ‘acting coaches in Baton Rouge’ and found this random woman who worked with one person from Vampire Diaries once and was like, ‘I create stars,’” the 28-year-old recalls. “She said, ‘So what are your goals?’ I said, ‘I want to have my own show.’ She was laughing in my face.”

Nader was undaunted. In 2017, she left a full-ride scholarship at Tulane University and moved to New York to pursue modeling. (OK, and to be with her now-ex-husband, sales executive Billy Haire.)“My dad said, ‘See you in Baton Rouge in a month when you run out of money,’” Nader recalls. But while her credit score may have faltered — she put four months of rent on a credit card without understanding she’d be charged interest — her confidence never did.

“I ran to my agency and was like, ‘I’m desperate; I need a job. I’m talking hand modeling.’ Hand jobs — but not those kind,” Nader says, peering over her sunglasses. She ended up with a gig modeling for BareMinerals in a New Jersey basement. “I did that for a year and a half, five days a week, [taking] the NJ Transit at 5 a.m. That’s what allowed me to stay in New York, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Nader ignored her agency when they told her she had no business entering the 2019 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit open casting call. She flew to Miami, beat out 10,000 applicants, and eventually worked her way up from in-book talent to cover star. By the time the image of her in a red Baywatch-esque one piece hit newsstands in 2023, she had left that agency — she’s now represented by the same IMG exec as Gigi and Bella Hadid — but still remembered its lack of faith. “I sent them a signed copy,” she says. “When I got on the cover, I was like, ‘I can do anything. I just have to work at it.’ I told my sisters, ‘You can’t just manifest. You need to get out there and f*cking do the work.’”

Sometimes, doing the work means getting work. As we have coffee on the stoop of a stranger’s brownstone, just a few blocks from the three-floor townhouse she recently rented, Nader gamely lists the cosmetic enhancements she’s undergone. There was a nose job (“People say I look like Michael Jackson,” she says with a shrug); veneers (courtesy of Dr. Michael Apa, whose work can run upward of $50,000, but who gave Nader a free mouthful in exchange for a collab post); and countless injectables from salmon sperm facials to the “Nefertiti” Botox neck lift (“Every Christmas, you can catch me looking like Freddy Krueger”).

“If I didn’t get a job, I would say to [my old agency], ‘Can we get feedback from the client?’ The direct feedback was I needed to lose 30 pounds. I didn’t shed one tear over it. I don’t feel bad for myself. I just say, ‘The facts are they want me to lose weight. How can I achieve that?’” says Nader. “The facts are that when I started GLP-1, my career took off. I’m not saying it’s OK. I’m not saying it’s right. I think everybody is different — but I lost 30 pounds, and I booked all the jobs.”

Statements like these cut to the heart of Nader’s appeal. On one hand, she’s every bit the ’90s-era Pamela Anderson-style bimbo archetype the culture no longer really produces. (During a recent episode of Watch What Happens Live!, Nader quipped, “I don’t really read.”) Her rumored romantic exploits — she’s been linked to Tom Brady, Prince Constantine-Alexios of Greece and Denmark, and both finalists of this year’s U.S. Open, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner — only perpetuate this man-eating, headline-hungry persona. (Her no-response response? “It’s fun being able to do whatever you want.”) And yet: Ever since Love Thy Nader premiered on Hulu this summer and skyrocketed her public profile, women everywhere have found themselves unabashedly rooting for Nader and her utter unabashedness.

When filming began last spring, Nader was newly divorced from Haire and still dealing with the fallout from her disapproving extended family members back on the bayou. She was also on the brink of breaking up with her Dancing With the Stars partner, Gleb Savchenko. So Nader leaned on her sisters — who were all living together — to get her out of bed and back in the game. “Someone that’s very much in the public eye told me, ‘When I was your age, I was only for the guys. If I could go back, I would have done more for the girlies,’” Nader says. “The good news about the show is that people actually now see my personality: I am for the girls. I’m an older sister, I love women, and I still want to look hot — as every woman does.”

The show also gave viewers an inside look at the body image issues that still plague the bombshell. In the penultimate episode, her sisters stage an intervention about her GLP-1 use and eating habits after finding her nearly unconscious in a bathtub. (Nader says she had upped her dosage so she could get “extra snatched” ahead of a Maxim photoshoot but also, according to her sisters, was basically subsisting on bone broth.) “The thing that I was so shocked about with the show was that I had so many people reach out to me saying ‘I’m also addicted to GLP-1. I’m ashamed to talk about it because there’s such a stigma around it. It’s a crutch for me,’” Nader says. “I’m still on it. It’s a crutch for me, too. It’s not healthy. I should get off it; I’ll be honest about that.”

If divorce taught Nader anything, it’s not to underestimate her will power. “Once I got to that other side, I realized, ‘Wait, I got me. I can do anything I f*cking put my mind to,’” she says. “I was with someone for 10 years, and I cut it off and came out better. I can push out a human; I can start a company; I can get over anybody. It’s euphoric, that feeling.” But the hustle stops for no one — least of all, Brooks Nader. “I have a townhouse to pay for, bitch,” she says.