Jenni “JWoww” Farley is fist-pumping her family’s latest chapter.
Nearly seven years after the Jersey Shore: Family Vacation star shared that her son Greyson was diagnosed with autism, she gave insight into the 9-year-old’s life.
“He’s crushing it,” Jenni exclusively told E! News in a joint interview with costar Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi. “He’s just so perfect. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a pain, and he still goes off. But he’s just a testament to early intervention, proper schooling, and all his aides were just so incredible.”
Simply put, the reality star—who shares Greyson and 11-year-old daughter Meilani with ex-husband Roger Mathews—noted, “If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know where he would be.”
As for what Greyson has been up to? Along with being “head of his class,” he has been hitting the field for soccer practice and on the mat for jiu-jitsu.
In fact, Jenni, 40, revealed that her son reached another milestone by wearing contact lenses, which, at his age, she emphasized, is “huge.”
“He said he wants to do it so he can perform better in sports, because the glasses hold him back,” she explained. “For him to just hone in on anything he wants to accomplish, he’s going to accomplish it.”
As Jenni focuses on Greyson’s progress, she admitted that planning her wedding to Zack Clayton—who proposed to her in February 2021—isn’t at the forefront of her mind.
“To me, we’re married,” she explained. “He’s my life partner. We’re going to be together forever. I don’t look at marriage as something as significant as it needs to be, because I always say, ‘Don’t fix something that’s not broken.’ We’re just perfect.”
Jenni—who split from Roger in 2018 after eight years together—also noted that tying the knot isn’t the same this time around.
“When you go into a relationship after marriage, and I have children that’re not with him, and we don’t have joint bank accounts,” she explained, “the marriage perspective is just different.”
“If it never happens, or if it does happen, it has nothing to do with our love,” she continued. “Our love is just there, regardless.”
She does,however, plan to have a celebration at some point, mainly at the behest of BFF Nicole—and Zack’s mother.
As Jenni and Zack, 30, slowly inch closer and closer to ringing those wedding bells, fans will have a front row experience on Family Vacation. After all, the revival goes beyond the elusive beach house from the OG series.
“Now, we have a style where we’re involving our families, we’re going on vacation, you see our home life,” she noted. “That gives a way for the viewers to grow with us.”
And season eight is no different, with viewers getting a glimpse into the lives of Jenni, Nicole, DJ Pauly D, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, Vinny Guadagnino, Ronnie Ortiz-Magro, Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, Deena Cortese and Angelina Pivarnick.
When it comes to the season finale premiering Sept. 11, Nicole shared how the gang’s 15th anniversary celebration at Seaside Heights will be “a walk down memory lane.”
Now, take a sip of that Ron-Ron juice and keep reading for Jersey Shore‘s most tantalizing secrets.
1. The show was originally set to air on VH1 and was more of a competition series, titled America’s Biggest Guido and only featured male guidos. The only JS cast member who was part of that initial pilot was Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino.
2. When the concept changed, with producers realizing they needed women as well because they “fight,” per casting director Doron Ofir, The Situation was their first housemate. He made quite the impression during his casting interview, too. As creator SallyAnn Salsano recalled to Vulture in 2019, The Situation was like, “‘Okay, let me just take my shirt off first.'”
“I was like, ‘What?'” Salsano added. “I have never in my life met someone that felt more comfortable upon not knowing you. He’s like, ‘Enough said, right?'”
3. Working as a bartender on Long Island, Jenni “JWoww” Farley actually auditioned for another VH1 reality show: Paris Hilton’s My New BFF. But a few weeks later, she got a call about a little show about guidos instead.
4. For Paul“Pauly D” DelVecchio, who was working as a DJ in Rhode Island, he was contacted via MySpace (that’s 2009 for ya.) But what sold the casting directors was a certain amenity he had in his home when they filmed a day-in-the-life package as a trial.
“What put Pauly D at the instant top of the list was that he owned his own tanning booth at his own house,” Ofir told Vulture. “A tanning booth is like $10,000. Who’s saving up coins and then buying a tanning booth?”
5. Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, who already developed a taste for reality TV stardom when she appeared on MTV’s Is She Really Going Out With Him? with an ex, showed up “drunk” for her audition after seeing a casting call on Facebook.
“Nicole showed up in a miniskirt and she literally did cartwheels and flips,” Ofir remembered. “She was extraordinary. Her application was smudged with fingerprints from her bronzer to the point that I was like, ‘What happened to her application? What spilled on it?'”
6. While she’s known by her infamous nickname Snooki, the pint-size reality star didn’t actually go by that nickname, she just listed it on the application. As she admitted to Vulture, “Then I was like, “Oh, s–t. Now that it’s stuck, I wish I’d put something else.”
7. Before the show moved from VH1 to MTV, another guido was selected to join the show: Joey Fist Pumps, a pretty well-known regular on the Shore.
“He was literally called Joey Fist Pumps,” Ofir added. “He was a union contractor, which is one of the reasons he wasn’t able to do the show.”
Another reason: MTV wanted a few younger stars. Goodbye, Joey Fist Pumps, hello Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and Vinny Guadagnino!
8. According to Salsano, the iconic duck phone, which was found at a local thrift store, was a happy accident.
“Our art director went out and goes, ‘I saw this duck phone. It’s so ridiculous,'” she continued. “I said, ‘We cannot leave that in the house. It doesn’t make sense.’ Then the show started and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, we left that duck phone in there.’ Now the duck phone is the national symbol of Jersey Shore.”
9. In season one, the cast really did work at the T-shirt shop, with Vinny telling Vulture, “We did the first season for nothing, zero dollars, except whatever we made at the Shore Store.”
10. Shop owner Danny Merk even revealed their salary to Vulture: “They started off at $10 an hour, then it went to $15, and then I think I gave them 20 bucks an hour at the very end.” The hardest worker? If you asked Merk, he’d say Pauly D, with Jenni and Sammi proving talented at the cash register. Meanwhile, he says the worst employees were the Situation and Snooki.
11. After the monster success of the first season, the cast reportedly got a major pay raise, earning $10,000 per episode, per the New York Daily News. By the series’ end in 2012, they were bringing in $100,000 per ep, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
12. Ever wonder where GTL came from? You can thank production, who found the cast’s daily routine of going to the gym, hitting the tanning salon and doing laundry so tedious and mundane they were afraid they didn’t have a show.
“We were writing on a dry-erase board—because we always were like, ‘OK, so-and-so went here, so-and-so went here’—and every day we’d write ‘gym, tanning, laundry,'” Salsano revealed to Vulture. “Then we got lazy and just started writing ‘GTL.'”
13. Unlike many reality shows, over 40 cameras are rolling 24/7 on the Jersey Shore cast for the 30-50 days of filming, with Salsano once telling us, “We don’t wait for something to happen, we keep them rolling.”
14. The reality stars initially had no access to cellphones, TV, pen and paper and magazines, though they were initially allowed one personal call per week.
“The only time you’re off camera is when you’re in the bathroom. Even if you’re in the bathroom with somebody else, they say two is a party, so they film it,” Pauly D revealed to Vulture. “We took long showers to get away from cameras. But it does become second nature.”
15. After Angelina’s dramatic exits from the cast, Deena, who had auditioned for the show before it began, was brought in as her replacement in season three.
“Well, me and Nicole have been friends for, like, two years now,” Deena told Entertainment Weekly in 2010, “and, you know, she needed a partner in crime, like, you know, on the show with her.”
16. Any guests were carded before being allowed to enter the Jersey Shore home.
“People are literally given a field sobriety test to get into the house,” Salsano explained to Vulture. “We have the same carding system they have at that club—that electronic thing where they run your ID—because we don’t let anybody in the house that’s not 21. Also, if someone is that inebriated, we’d ask people to leave.”
17. Could you imagine Jersey Shore with a new cast of guidos and guidettes? It almost happened, with MTV initially looking at an all-new line-up of housemates for the second season.
18. The gang’s Jersey Shore home is available to rent, but it’ll cost you $3,500 per night to stay in the 6-bedroom and 3-bathroom Seaside Heights landmark. But fair warning: the jacuzzi isn’t part of the house, as it’s actually on the roof of the t-shirt shop.
19. When Jersey Shore first debuted in 2009, many advertisers boycotted the show and pulled their ads, including Domino’s Pizza and Dell. The show also received backlash from the Italian-American organization UNICO for its depiction of guidos.
“It was insane, I did not expect it,” Salsano told THR at the time. “I was like, ‘Why are they so mad?’ If you look at the credits on the show, it’s all Italian kids from the East Coast. This is our heritage; this was us as teens.”
20. While the cast rarely held back on the show, JWoww and the Situation revealed the struggles they kept off-camera during the show’s initial run on an episode of the revival series, Jersey Shore family Vacation.
Ahead of the cast’s Italy-set fourth season, JWoww suffered a miscarriage, revealing she was a “f–king mess” during filming because of the medication she was taking to cope. The Situation, meanwhile, explained his erratic season four and season five behavior was due to withdrawals as he was struggling to get sober.
