Photography by It’s 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening in July, and I’m chatting with Whitney and Conner Leavitt while their three kids—Sedona, 6; Liam, 4; and Billy Gene, 20 months—make a jungle gym out of the couch. We’ve already spent nearly 12 hours together for this photo shoot, and we’re all a little weary. But Whitney and Conner have just one more thing to do before family time takes over: an interview for this story.
In a way, it’s a fitting end to a day spent toggling between work and life—the balancing act they’re still figuring out in real time after returning to Utah after a brief chapter in New York City.
“It was very hard to leave New York, but it wasn’t working for our family and our kids,” says Whitney, 33. “We enjoyed the opportunities—we never wanted to say no. But we needed groundedness. With this house, we’ve found our base camp.”
From bright lights to red rocks
This morning, the route to the Leavitts’ house took me through a patchwork of pools, pickleball courts, and horse paddocks. When I arrived, I was greeted by the distinctive pock of paddles hitting balls. Whitney and her children were jumping on their built-in trampoline against the backdrop of the region’s red rocks and a striking morning moon.
Yes, we’re back in the state where Whitney and Conner became famous on the reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but we’re much closer to Las Vegas, with its direct flights to L.A. and New York City, than we are to the Salt Lake City area, just over four hours north, home to most of the MomTok crew, Whitney and Conner’s castmates.
The Leavitt family has been in their new home, a gorgeous “modern desert”–style house in St. George, where much of Whitney’s extended family lives, for two weeks. The proverbial paint has barely dried on Whitney’s Instagram post showing her with Conner and the kids celebrating in their new living room with confetti shooters (and of course the requisite thank-you to @safeshipmovingservices for doing a careful job with the family’s belongings, a nearly universal signal of online influence).
The couple have returned to Utah with their family fresh from what could only be dubbed a meteoric rise to fame. Secret Lives led to prime-time opportunities such as Dancing With the Stars, on which Whitney, alongside pro Mark Ballas, showed off her dance background and dazzled the nation until late into the competition. She then rode the reality-to-Broadway pipeline and played the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago, her 15-week run helping the show break a previous record for highest-grossing ticket sales.
In April, Cool Sips, a “dirty soda” brand, introduced Whitney as its new chief creative and brand officer (her first order of business was the launch of “The Whitney,” club soda mixed with sugar-free pineapple, peach, vanilla, and lime syrups along with raspberry puree). And in an expression of his own burgeoning creative chops, Conner joined the dance ensemble in the hit Off-Broadway production 11 to Midnight. “I’ve been really inspired by Whitney’s creativity and her desire to act and be onstage,” he says. “As we’ve grown in our careers, I’ve gotten to explore some of those elements too.”
It takes a village
The Instagram announcement celebrating their new house was just six days ago, but the drawers in the Leavitts’ craft room are already full of construction paper, markers, and Play-Doh. In their office, already stocked with paper clips and sticky notes, is a stack of family journals to which Whitney contributes reminders of the kids’ milestones, from growing out of a first car seat to school recitals. As I think of my own 2-year-old’s catchall box of miscellaneous unannotated items, it’s genuinely unclear to me how Whitney finds the time to do this.
On that note, I ask her if she feels that societal pressure for women to “do it all” still exists. “One thousand percent,” she replies. “But no one around me is making me feel that way. I put that pressure on myself. It’s something I’m working on in real time.”
“Whitney has a natural inclination to do everything,” Conner says. “It’s not a bad quality, but we can’t forget to take care of ourselves.”
One element of Whitney’s attempt to “do it all” is inescapable. The day I visited, I recognized my own experience in some of Whitney’s moments of maternal anxiety, many of which involved the family’s lagoon-like swimming pool, complete with a red rock waterslide just steps from their back door.
Luckily, the Leavitts have a lot of help. Whitney and Conner are proud of not having formal nannies, but they employ various assistants and several sitters and also have help with housecleaning, landscaping, and the pool. On shoot day, Whitney’s sister and sometime assistant Lexi, who’s also open on social about her role in helping the family, is on hand as kid control.
I notice myself (and others on set) repeatedly making ambitious comparisons between the Leavitts and the best-known reality family on the planet, the Kardashians—in part because their new project feels like a natural next step on the road to a family empire, and also in relation to the openness with which Whitney and Conner accept help from family members and others.
“It’s crazy how many people we’ve hired to take care of this house and how much we still have to do,” Whitney says.
How they make it work
Regardless of the help around them, Whitney and Conner appear as aligned in real life as they do on TV. They seem to have their housekeeping routines down pat, or at least a shared philosophy about who will do what and when.
“There’s not a division of responsibility,” says Conner. “There are days when Whitney does the dishes and days when I do the dishes, days when I’m out skimming the pool and days when Whitney is out skimming the pool. It’s just, whatever needs to get done, whoever has the time does it.”
“Conner and I have created a relationship where I can come to him and be like, ‘I am dead today. I don’t have energy to do the laundry. Can you help out?’ ” says Whitney. “And sometimes we’re both at zero. Then we just don’t do it that day.”
Their move from New York City to Utah was somewhat motivated by a desire to be closer to their “village,” Whitney’s family, and the extra help they could offer. But this property comes with bigger responsibilities than a couple of family hands can tackle. Conner assures me that the yard has been recently sprayed for scorpions prior to our shoot (though he knows where to find one if I want to see one).
“I have a budgeting mindset. Before purchasing the house, I wanted to know, how much do utilities cost in a home like this? What does the landscaper cost? We’re going to need a lot of help with this house,” says Conner.
“I just said, ‘This house is beautiful!’ ” Whitney adds with a laugh.
But regardless of their individual approaches to house shopping, when I visit, their shared focus is on making their new house a home. The two tell me, nearly in unison, about their ambitions to buy a fruit tree (“We’re thinking cherry,” Whitney says) and what they hope this home will represent for their children as they grow up. “I want to teach my kids to take care of things you’ve worked really hard to get,” says Whitney.
Dreaming up their next act
At one point Conner describes how he and Whitney had a “pinch me” moment lying in bed one recent night, realizing their accomplishments. It’s a level of prosperity that might not have been possible without their somewhat sudden fame. But as Whitney and Conner tell it, they’ve both dreamed of success since the start of their relationship—she of working in the entertainment industry and he, originally, of working in finance.
“Being in New York was an eye-opening experience,” says Conner. “It was really nice to be surrounded by a community of working parents who were doing something Whitney and I were trying to figure out. We realized that we were not crazy for wanting both to pursue our dreams and to take care of our children.”
While the past year has been one of growth for Whitney and Conner individually, one of the next projects they’ve been touting is a joint venture. Their new company, Leavitt Media House, is producing both scripted and unscripted (read: reality) series, which are in development now.
“There’s so much freedom, because we are so confident and comfortable together. We get to throw the craziest ideas at each other,” says Conner.
In conversation with me, Whitney repeatedly returns to the term “blessed.” “I feel so incredibly blessed and grateful, but I don’t want to downplay how hard Conner and I have worked,” she says. “No one really sees the other side, the rejection and failures. It’s not that fun to watch. But it’s what led us here today. I just feel so blessed that we get to be Mom and Dad, and be in love, and be business partners. It’s everything and more.”
A week or so before my visit, Whitney and Conner renewed their vows at Little White Chapel in Las Vegas before returning to an In-N-Out Burger like the one where they’d celebrated their wedding with burgers and milkshakes a decade earlier. Side-by-side photos Whitney shared on Instagram say it all: Even after all that has changed since the start—three children, reality TV fame, Broadway, New York City—they’re still the couple in the booth dreaming about what comes next.
CREDITS
Editor-in-Chief: Elspeth Velten
Photographer: Aaron Richter
Stylist: Eliza Yerry
Hair: Natalie Martinez
Makeup: Elizabeth Garcia
Senior Entertainment Director: Nojan Aminosharei
Executive Editor: Beth Dreher
Deputy Design Director: Miguel Rivera
Deputy Art Director: Laura Formisano
Visuals Vice President: Alix Campbell
Visual Director: Roni Martin-Chance
Video: Kathryn Rice, Darren Kho, Jake Mitchell,
Sam Miller, Jordan Abt
