On a chilly Los Angeles evening, Chrissy Teigen, 30, throws open the door of her house with a wide smile, calling out, “Come in!” She’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair pulled into a messy bun. The mom-to-be is eager to get back to the couch, where she’s snuggled up with her two bulldogs, Puddy and Pippa, and an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. On the brink of giving birth (she’s not revealing exactly when, to throw off the paparazzi), she’s at the point where a night in with reality TV is her idea of happiness. For now, Teigen is embracing the nesting phase and enjoying the brief calm before the storm of motherhood sets in. “I can sleep so hard now, I love it!” she exclaims.
Anyone familiar with Teigen knows that she goes hard and puts 110 percent into pretty much everything she does. Sleep included. At 18, a modeling agent found her working in a surf shop in Huntington Beach, California. Teigen eventually landed numerous magazine covers (including the holy grail: the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition), advertising campaigns (for Nike, Olay, Billabong) and television cohosting gigs for shows like FABLife and Lip Sync Battle with LL Cool J, which is worth tuning in to for her off-the-cuff quips alone. These days, her packed schedule often leaves her exhausted, but it’s a good kind of tired, and Teigen has no complaints. “I’ve always enjoyed things a little more chaotic than most people would prefer,” she says, laughing. “I feel that I run well in chaos.”
Nowhere is her nonstop energy (and total honesty) more on display than on social media. In fact, beyond any magazine cover or television show, Teigen has mostly built her successful empire online, with a wildly popular food blog, Delushious, and her Instagram and Twitter accounts, where she shares her every waking thought with a combined audience of six million. Her ability to tune out the haters and speak the truth to her fans has earned her an army of admirers, who wait for the next laugh-out-loud comment, like: “I am horrifically ballsy in every way except telling a waiter they got my order wrong.” And she’s not shy when it comes to getting real about her relationship with her husband of nearly three years, R&B singer John Legend. In a Tweet, she wrote, “Every time someone asks John for a selfie and says, ‘I never do this,’ I think back to the night we met when I said it but not about selfies.” (She got more than 30,000 likes for admitting that!) Of putting it all out there and sharing her opinions, Teigen simply says, “If I’m passionate about something, I’ll say it and deal with the consequences later.”
