Before a single question is asked, the cold open lands its gut punch: Missé's voice, barely composed, saying 'the night Jake died, I was there' and 'I wish he called me.' Paul briefly teases the breadth of the conversation to come — grief, love, modelling, motherhood — before framing the episode with a content warning for viewers who may be affected by discussions of sudden loss and bereavement.

Paul C. Brunson opens the conversation with unusual care, noting that just a week has passed since Jake Hall's funeral and that Missé is still deep inside raw, early grief. Missé explains she chose to speak here because Paul creates a space of honesty and warmth that made her feel safe. She describes her inner experience since Jake's death as total disbelief — a feeling that someone will wake her up and tell her it isn't real ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Till this day, I'm like, surely it's not true. Like, someone is going to wake me up and say it's a bad dream. Like, it's not happened. It f…" 05:58 Play} . Paul reflects briefly on his own familiarity with Jake, noting it was Jake's clothing brand Preview that first put him on Paul's radar when Paul arrived in the UK in 2018.

Paul, who has never been to Sweden but has it firmly on his travel list, leans into the geography and culture of Missé's upbringing. He reveals a research nugget that surprises even Missé: approximately one-third of Sweden's Albanian population is concentrated in Skåne, the district containing Malmö, which gave her family a ready community. Missé explains her parents moved to Sweden when her mother was around 29 or 30, having left Albania partly due to marital tensions — her uncle, already working in the Swedish government, invited them for a break that became a permanent relocation. Growing up surrounded almost entirely by Swedish peers, Missé felt Swedish — but trips back to Albania brought a different verdict. 'You don't even speak the language properly,' relatives would tell her. It is only with age that she has come to feel genuinely proud of her Albanian heritage, even as the question of her identity remained a constant undercurrent throughout her public life.

Missé's mother was a schoolteacher: industrious, strong, a quiet model of resilience. Her father, by contrast, was 'laid back' in ways that shaded into volatility — the home was not always a safe place, and Missé describes herself as a sensitive child who never quite got what she needed from him. His affection, she says, came not as warmth but almost as a consequence — arriving after he had gone too far, as a form of repair rather than love. She is careful not to blame him fully, locating his parenting failures in his own upbringing, but is equally clear about the damage done. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "I feel like a lot of choices, decisions I've made in my older Missy was because the little Missy never was, didn't get the hug, you know. A…" 12:40 Play} By her teens, she had found a surrogate source of validation: male attention, which she received easily but could never fully satisfy the wound her father had left. It took, she says, 38 years to fully unpack how much of her adult romantic life was driven by the little girl who never got the hug.

The first nudge came from a television show approaching Missé on the street for Sweden's Next Top Model — she made it close to the final cut but didn't get through. What mattered more was the door the experience cracked open. Working weekends at a clothing store in Copenhagen — accessible via the famous Öresund Bridge that her own father helped build — she caught the eye of Jackie, owner of Unique Models, one of Copenhagen's biggest agencies. Jackie walked into the store, looked at her, and essentially said: this isn't where you belong. Missé was nearly 19, older than the industry's typical starting age of around 14, and had no experience beyond family comparisons to Julia Roberts. Yet bookings came quickly — swimwear in Milan, shoots in South Africa, campaigns in New York and Germany. Her mole, the feature some told her to 'laser off', became her signature and sparked endless comparisons to Cindy Crawford that Missé found both flattering and, over time, a little reductive.

Paul references a conversation with Miranda Kerr in which she described modelling as gruelling rather than glamorous, and Missé confirms the parallel immediately. The real psychological cost, she explains, is the dissociation — the ability, cultivated over time, to shut down how you feel and perform a professional persona regardless of what is happening in your private life. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Behind every glamorous shoot, models learn to numb their pain and perform joy on demand. Missé describes arriving to set after the worst mo…" 23:50 Play} Models arrived at apartments, 10 girls to a building, and quickly entered social worlds run by promoters who valued them as decoration at VIP tables — something the girls, arriving from ordinary backgrounds, didn't always immediately understand. Stories of photographers and bookers crossing professional lines circulated constantly. Missé says she was never directly in an unsafe situation but was close enough to feel its proximity. Her career high point came when she shot a billboard for the Danish brand Birgersen and realised for the first time that she had actually made it — and later, shooting for Agent Provocateur, which she describes as a reclaiming of power and feminine identity.

Paul pauses the conversation for the episode's sole sponsor segment: Huel's new Huel Lite Ramen. He tries it on air, notes it smells good and is surprisingly filling despite being under 230 calories per pot, and highlights the nutritional credentials — 25 grams of protein, vitamin C, B12, iron, magnesium, and 26 vitamins and minerals. The preparation requires only boiling water. The promo code WNTT offers new customers £10 off at uk.huel.com/wntt, valid for 30 days.

Paul, having done his research, produces a photo of Missé's brother taken in Manchester — the city he loved to visit, her happy place and his. Missé is immediately stilled by it, unable to take her eyes away. She describes her brother as a natural hustler: a man who ran music labels, owned properties, knew everyone, moved across every world simultaneously. He was three years older and, crucially, was the one person she always called when life became complicated. When he died, she says, it was like a light shutting off — and she has had to learn how to exist in the dark. She reflects on how difficult it was not to judge herself for still wanting to post photos of him, still wanting to speak his name, still needing to grieve openly.

Missé's brother led multiple lives simultaneously — property owner, music entrepreneur, social connector — but some of those connections, it would emerge, ran into dangerous territory. The murder was premeditated: the perpetrator had spent 6 months planning it, then flew from Sweden to London to carry it out. He shot Missé's brother in daylight in front of his family, who had been coming home from school. The killer was convicted and is now serving life. Missé describes the shock not just of losing him, but of the media coverage that followed — articles picking apart her brother's life and connections at the very moment his family was trying to process the loss. She rejects entirely the journalistic instinct to write 'ugly things' about someone who has just died, describing it as deeply unfair to a grieving family. His wife, a lawyer, has since rebuilt her life and raised their children with extraordinary dedication — something Missé speaks about with genuine pride.

Anders Lindegaard's pursuit of Missé was, even by Missé's own romantic standards, unusually direct. He saw her photograph in a Danish men's magazine, tracked down a mutual friend in Copenhagen, and then bypassed that friend entirely to send her a Facebook message declaring his matrimonial intentions before they had ever spoken. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Before Instagram, before DMs, a footballer saw Missé in a magazine and tracked her down on Facebook with a single opening line: 'I'm going …" 43:35 Play} Missé, sitting alone in her Milan apartment, was simultaneously charmed and taken aback. She checked his profile — blond, tall, objectively attractive — and a daily phone friendship developed across borders. When he flew to Copenhagen to take her to dinner, that was effectively the end of her Italian chapter. Manchester beckoned, and when Lindegaard gently but firmly suggested that the casting world she was navigating was not a safe environment for her — having listened to her accounts of the industry's underbelly every evening — she found herself choosing love and security over the career grind.

The relationship between Missé and Anders moved at speed — she was pregnant within the first year, proposed to while expecting, and married in Mauritius when their son was around six months old. Manchester, meanwhile, transformed her professional visibility: English model agencies who had never heard of her began calling the moment she appeared on Anders' arm at public events. Fame arrived through association rather than assignment, and Missé found herself navigating a new identity — the footballer's wife — while also trying to maintain her sense of self as a model in her own right. Anders, for his part, was generous and protective: he effectively told her he didn't want her going on uncomfortable castings and offered to support her entirely. She describes the early years of their life together as genuinely beautiful, even as the seeds of their later difficulties were already being sown by his frequent absences for away games.

Alone in Manchester while Anders travelled for games, Missé saw the reality TV show as a way to create activity and shared purpose — she remembered the glamorous American Housewives franchises and expected something similar. What she found instead was a format that demanded she expose the fractures of her private life while the cameras were filming footage that would air 6 months later — by which point she had already moved out of the family home. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "I've never said this before out loud, but I do think that the show did ruin our family." 58:32 Play} The dislocation between what was on screen (a couple seemingly intact) and the lived reality (a separation underway) was profoundly disorienting. She watched herself on television in a relationship that had already ended. Anders had never really wanted to participate but went along to make her happy — and Missé acknowledges she changed during filming, becoming the more assertive, independent 'old Missy' again in ways that created further distance between them. Paul shares his own experience of turning down a similar offer for his family, noting his wife predicted it would be the 'demise' of their relationship — a warning Missé received no equivalent of.

Missé and Jake's origin story has none of the engineered romanticism of a set-up — it was social media discovery followed by a chance collision in a Manchester restaurant. But the electricity was instant. Jake, who had spent years building Preview into a nationally recognised brand and who had a long tenure on TOWIE, was magnetic in person — beautiful, funny, electric, and possessed of an intelligence that Missé found exceptional but that he himself struggled to fully express. She fell completely. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Jake Hall was one of the most intelligent people Missé had ever known, but his frustration at being unable to articulate his ideas became a…" 1:06:18 Play} He proposed to her twice, the first time in Mauritius with a violinist and a beach hut covered in candles spelling out his question in the sand — a moment Missé almost completely missed while filming it on her phone. She said yes. Despite the engagement, they would not ultimately marry — but the love was unambiguous and the child they shared, River, became its most visible testament.

The relationship between Missé and Jake was, by her own account, the most intense she has ever experienced: inseparably high, then devastatingly low, back and forth without ever fully stabilising. She speaks with care about Jake's mental health struggles, noting how much men can withhold from those who love them, how their pain surfaces in indirect ways, and how hard it is to know whether holding on or letting go is the right call. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Missé doesn't just grieve Jake Hall's death — she's haunted by the question of whether a single phone call could have changed everything. K…" 1:29:50 Play} By the time they separated, they had lived together in Spain for a year and a half — Missé full-time in Mallorca with River, Jake coming and going — before she returned to London alone. She does not pretend she was always a perfect partner: she had to set boundaries, she was sometimes 'toxic' herself, she was dealing with her own pain simultaneously. But the question that now haunts her — would this have happened if I hadn't left? — is the bargaining that Paul identifies as grief's first resting place.

The relationship between Missé and Jake was, by her own account, the most intense she has ever experienced: inseparably high, then devastatingly low, back and forth without ever fully stabilising. She speaks with care about Jake's mental health struggles, noting how much men can withhold from those who love them, how their pain surfaces in indirect ways, and how hard it is to know whether holding on or letting go is the right call. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Missé doesn't just grieve Jake Hall's death — she's haunted by the question of whether a single phone call could have changed everything. K…" 1:29:50 Play} By the time they separated, they had lived together in Spain for a year and a half — Missé full-time in Mallorca with River, Jake coming and going — before she returned to London alone. She does not pretend she was always a perfect partner: she had to set boundaries, she was sometimes 'toxic' herself, she was dealing with her own pain simultaneously. But the question that now haunts her — would this have happened if I hadn't left? — is the bargaining that Paul identifies as grief's first resting place.

The new show arrived at a different moment in Missé's life — post-separation, post-grief, more settled in her own identity — and she describes it with warmth she conspicuously didn't bring to the Cheshire chapter. Where the Housewives franchise centres on status and display, Ladies of London leans into the messier truth of women navigating reinvention: careers rebuilt from scratch, relationships remade, life lived on a real scale rather than a curated one. The first episode attracted 2 million views, and the show appears to be more popular in the US than in the UK. Paul admits he didn't need to research Missé for this episode — he just sat down with his wife, who had described Missé as having a calm, winning sweetness. Missé laughs at this, fully aware that her Instagram persona reads entirely differently: silent, beautiful, possibly intimidating. The gap between that image and the clumsy, funny, self-deprecating woman in the room is one of the episode's running threads.

Missé was supposed to be in Ibiza for a magazine cover shoot, but a lost passport changed everything. Unable to fly back to England, she was sent by police to the Swedish embassy in Mallorca — meaning she spent the night on the same island as Jake without either of them knowing. She woke to 10 missed calls. Her first fear was that something had happened to River. When Jake's father said it was Jake, she heard the weight in his voice before the word arrived. What followed was total collapse: guilt, panic, grief for River, grief for Jake's family — especially his mother, father, and brother, whose loss she understood intimately from her own experience. ^{[1] — Missé Beqiri "Missé Beqiri was stranded in Mallorca after losing her passport — not knowing that Jake Hall was also there and dying that very night. She …" 1:24:50 Play} The days that followed brought the strange comfort of strangers' support and the strange pain of watching her daughter grieve a father she adored. She speaks about Jake's final Instagram post — 'Remember the good things' — with a tenderness that suggests she has thought about it every day since. ^{[2] — Missé Beqiri "Hours before Jake Hall died, he posted 'Remember the good things' on Instagram. Missé believes he wanted to be remembered for his love, his…" 1:31:20 Play} The funeral, just a week before this recording, was a celebration by intention: because that is what Jake would have wanted, and because Missé has learnt, from losing her brother, that burying grief only delays the pain. ^{[3] — Missé Beqiri "Both Missé and Paul had been furious at the people they lost. Missé explains that the anger isn't resentment — it's love that has no outlet…" 1:32:40 Play}

The gesture is simple but devastating in context: Paul has done his research, found a photo, and hands it to Missé without ceremony. She recognises it immediately — Spain, the period when they were all living together — and goes quiet. She speaks about Jake's relationship with River as something she genuinely does not have the words for. 'Insanity' is the word she reaches for, as though ordinary language cannot hold the scale of that bond. Whatever had been difficult or broken between her and Jake as a couple, it was entirely absent when he was with his daughter. That love was pure. And Missé's heartbreak is not just for herself — it is for River, who asks her mother why her dad, and for whom no answer is adequate.

With the grief still acute and the funeral barely a week behind her, Paul asks Missé to look forward. She doesn't rush to positivity — there is no false brightness — but she is not defeated either. She speaks about her brother and Jake as twin forces now pushing her onward: they were the two people in her life who would always tell her to stop being lazy and get moving. That voice hasn't gone silent just because they have. She talks about her son's quiet act of care during a recent trip to Sweden — waking up, making eggs and scrambled toast for her and River while she lay in bed — as evidence that something beautiful is already being built, even in the wreckage. The future is River, it is her son, it is work, it is growth.

The question Paul asks every guest draws from Missé an answer that is both personal and universally applicable. Her most important conversation was with her mother, who cut through Missé's spiral of self-blame with firm, loving clarity: enough. Stop being a martyr. Take care of yourself first, not because you don't love your children or your partner, but because your emotional state is contagious — your wellbeing is their wellbeing. Missé expands on this into a small manifesto: if you give everything to everyone and leave yourself empty, the whole system collapses. Fill yourself first. Then fill everyone else.

Paul uses the closing segment to surface the episode's broader cultural argument: UK society has a deeply conservative relationship with death. The default is silence — don't mention the person's name, don't relive the pain, don't make anyone uncomfortable. But Missé has spent two hours doing the opposite, and in doing so has demonstrated something Paul believes matters: that normalising death, talking about it, refusing to treat grief as a problem to be fixed, is how we prevent the secondary harms of depression and PTSD. He praises Missé for being, in his view, more in love with who she is today than she has ever been. The episode ends with a brief additional audio segment touching on Missé's broader life — including a mention of a prior boyfriend who died in a car accident — before cutting to post-roll commercial content.