Holiday travelers, keep an eye out: Shay Mitchell might be scoping your baggage.
“Whenever I’m away, my phone gets filled with photos of people in the wild with Béis bags,” the actress and entrepreneur, who founded the luggage brand, tells me. “I’m like a hound at the airport. It’s so fun!” Her eyes light up. “That just gave me a good idea for a TikTok.” Sure enough, after our interview, Mitchell posts a montage of her stealth shots of people wearing or carrying Béis.
When we connect on Zoom, Mitchell’s just back to her LA home after weeks on the road. She’s in a comfy sweatshirt, her long brunette mane tousled; her mom is staying over, helping care for Mitchell’s two young daughters, Atlas and Rome, whom she shares with boyfriend Matte Babel.
The actress is fired up about her latest project but has to keep details on the down low. “There’s 9,000 food shows, but how many drinking shows?” she says. She’s got a point: Well-made cocktails deserve their own showcase. “The rituals people have around them, that’s what I find fascinating,” she says. “I’m not going to clubs and getting s- -tfaced. It’s learning about different cultures. I learned a lot, and I brought a lot back with me.”
Whatever this forthcoming show is, it’s likely to reach a massive audience. In the 12 years since she burst onto the scene playing the sporty Emily Fields in “Pretty Little Liars,” Mitchell, now 35, has proven wildly adept at parlaying her own interests into financial opportunities. The Ontario native talks about the minutiae of her life as a business owner — of a luggage company, a beverage company and the production company Amore & Vita — with a contagious zeal. She’s the only person I’ve ever heard profess love for six-hour meetings.
“I was just gone for three and a half weeks, and I have a 5-month-old,” Mitchell says. “Fifty percent of people would say, ‘Good for you! That’s amazing.’ And the other half would say, ‘That’s insane, you shouldn’t be traveling that much.’ I sold this show before COVID, before I was pregnant, so it is what it is! That’s modern parenting. I hope when my daughter’s older she watches it, and she’s like, ‘You shot this when I was young? I’m proud of you.’”
And now she’s gearing up for the release of “Something From Tiffany’s,” a new Christmas movie streaming on Prime Video Dec. 9, in which she plays a sleek sophisticate in a classic wacky mix-up plot involving swapped gift bags from the iconic jewelers. Mitchell’s character is a little icy and a lot intimidating, which sets her up as the foil to Zoey Deutch’s lovably manic baker character. Mitchell, like her “Tiffany’s” character, isn’t so into the idea of living in New York. “But when I get the chance to shoot something there at Christmas? It’s magical,” she says.
What you won’t catch in “Tiffany’s” — at least, this writer didn’t — is that Mitchell “was definitely pregnant. Like, six months,” she tells me. Through creative editing, her pregnant belly didn’t make it into the film. But it did star in countless social media posts, where she let her followers (over 40 million across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube) in on the glory and the grit of her two pregnancies. Her first daughter, Atlas, was born in October 2019; Rome followed in May 2022.
Her posts ranged from high-end photo shoots to hilarious, humbling moments, including her solution to a long day on set. “Wear a diaper, and pee in it,” she says. “F- -k it, you’re going to be changing a lot more of them, get used to it!” She found joy in sharing the realities of pregnancy. “The actual truth is more entertaining,” she says. “At times, it wasn’t all peaches and rainbows, and I wasn’t a glowing goddess. I don’t necessarily love being pregnant, and that’s OK! I love what comes of it. But do I love that state? Not really.”
Her playful documentation of pregnancy dovetailed with a larger evolution in her approach to social media. “There was a time when I was so curated on my Instagram,” she says. “I won’t even tell you how much time I spent making sure everything looked good.” Now, she favors lighthearted TikToks juxtaposing her natural face and her going-out glam. “I want to show both sides. It’s more fun and freeing. We were all getting tired of seeing the most perfect videos. You don’t have to be perfect all the time. That’s so hard, and also so boring.”
“Do I have kids with a man? Sure. Am I in a relationship with a man right now? Yeah. I fell in love with him as a person, not because he was a man. I don’t know who I’m gonna be with in the future. I’m not married. There’s a lot of things I don’t do, following the stream of everybody else.”
Shay Mitchell
And then there was the green couch post. In October, Mitchell cheekily responded to user
@NourishedWithTish’s question: “If you identify as bisexual, do you own a green velvet couch?” Mitchell’s video showed her flopping onto that exact item, and the internet went nuts. “I’ve never said that I’m straight!” she says. “Do I have kids with a man? Sure. Am I in a relationship with a man right now? Yeah. I fell in love with him as a person, not because he was a man. I don’t know who I’m gonna be with in the future. I’m not married. There’s a lot of things I don’t do, following the stream of everybody else.”
This is the same philosophy with which she wants to raise her two girls. “I don’t care who you bring home as long as they treat you with respect and you’re happy,” she says. “Anything else,” she adds with a laugh, “and I will destroy them.”
As an actress who’s become known for playing queer characters, from Emily on “PLL” to Stella on “Dollface” and Peach Salinger on “You,” Mitchell has seen the landscape of inclusive representation grow and change over the years. One thing she’s glad to see the end of, she says, is the question, “What’s it like to play a lesbian character?” “That was the only question I used to get, a million times, and I’m like, ‘Why don’t you ask Lucy Hale what it’s like to play a straight character?’” she says. “People are like, ‘Oh my god, this is the third time you’re playing a character in love with a woman?’ And I’m like, thank god. I keep telling them, ‘Can I make out with her and not him?’” Thankfully, the days of being interrogated about those roles seem to be waning. “I think we’re making moves.”
Mitchell certainly is. She’s two for two on developing product lines people like on their own merits, celebrity association aside. She was offered various opportunities to put her name on other products over the years, which left her cold. “They’re like, makeup? Clothes? What do you want? I’m like, ‘I have no interest.’” But as a world traveler, she had spotted a niche any woman who’s grumbled about the lack of pockets in her bag will relate to: Too often, the choice comes down to aesthetics or function.
One of Mitchell’s favorite new products from her 4-year-old Béis line is a pouch that can be a fanny pack or a crossbody, or expand into a backpack. “You never know where the day is going to take you,” she says. The reasonable price range is another point of pride. “You know what does break the bank? Traveling,” she says. “Why do I want to make your f–king bags just as expensive as your trip?”
In building Onda, her line of tequila seltzers, Mitchell and her partners opted to work with one of the only female-owned distilleries in the business, a tequila manufacturer in Jalisco, Mexico. “Just like in any other male-dominated environment, it was hard for them to be taken seriously,” she says. “We didn’t choose this distillery just because of that — it had the best energy, we got along the best with the people there. Finding out more about the space and the testing and distribution of tequila was such a learning process. I didn’t go to [college], so this is my way of learning.”
It’s an ethos she’s applied to her “Shaycation” travel series on YouTube, where she chronicled adventures in Bali, India, Greece, Morocco and more close-to-home locales like the Coachella music festival. One rule of thumb: Avoid itineraries. “I love not having an agenda,” she tells me. “I’m a big believer in fate.”
I ask where she sees herself in five years: Running a Shay Mitchell empire? “I would love an office,” she says. “It’s not about the money, it really f–king isn’t. If I die tomorrow, I can’t take it with me. It’s about the experience I get from being able to do all these things. I’m not trying to sit on a yacht and do nothing. I need to be working with people. I love meetings. I love ordering lunches! I love all of it, so it’s not work for me.”
Photographer: Greg Swales; Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Shalev Lavàn/@shalevlavan for The Visionaries Agency; Photo Editor: Jessica Hober; Fashion Assistants: Arlen Vagera, Eden Shim; Hair: Ricky Mota using Unite, RitaHair; Hair Assistant: Sergio Ruiz; Makeup: Ash K Holm at The Wall Group using Buxom Cosmetics