Bravo confirmed Ben Waddell will not return for Season 11 of “Summer House,” ending the model and reality personality’s run after a single season that doubled as one of the most chaotic chapters in the show’s history.
Waddell, a former lead of “The Bachelor Australia,” joined the cast last summer alongside girlfriend Sabrina Belle. A representative for the couple framed the departure in upbeat terms, telling Deadline that Waddell and Belle “had the greatest time” and that their future with the franchise remains open.
Production on Season 11 is set to begin around the Fourth of July weekend in the Hamptons, where cast members live together for the duration of filming, a structural quirk of the show that makes off-camera fallout especially hard to paper over.
Waddell’s exit is the latest in a string of departures reshaping the roster following Season 10, the franchise’s highest-rated cycle yet. That surge in viewership traced back to a relationship between castmates Amanda Batula and West Wilson, confirmed in late March just weeks after Batula announced her separation from fellow original cast member Kyle Cooke.
Wilson had his own tangled history in the house, having spent prior seasons in an on-and-off dynamic with Batula’s close friend Ciara Miller. The fallout consumed a three-part reunion and prompted Bravo to air a follow-up special, “Summer House: The Aftermath,” after producers determined the reunion alone hadn’t resolved enough.
Both Wilson and Batula were dropped from the new season, a decision a Bravo executive described as necessary given that castmates effectively have to function as friends sharing a house for months at a time. Batula had been a fixture since the series premiered in 2016, when she appeared as Cooke’s girlfriend; the two later married on camera before divorcing this year. Her future on Bravo remains unsettled, with speculation continuing about whether she could resurface on “In the City,” the spinoff she launched alongside Cooke and Lindsay Hubbard.
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Cooke, Hubbard, Miller, Carl Radke, Jesse Solomon and Mia Calabrese are expected back for Season 11, along with a wave of new cast additions. Miller is currently overseas co-hosting “Love Island USA Aftersun” before rejoining the Hamptons cast.
