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Starting off on a strong foot by winning consecutive challenges, Will, a 23 year-old software engineer, and Rebecca, a 24 year-old massage therapy student, quickly became targets for elimination in the house. As the third contestants eliminated from Beauty and the Geek, they do some soul-searching and share their experience on the show. As Will stated on the show, “People aren’t obstacles to the prize; they are the prize.”
[Sorry to say the phone connection kept cutting out during this interview.]
Hi, Rebecca and Will! Thank you for speaking with me today.
Will: Hi!
How did you become interested in becoming a contestant on Beauty and the Geek?
Will: For me, I heard about it on the radio and said, “Ah, why not?” I asked some friends, and they all said, “Do it. Do it. Do it. It will be a lot of fun. It will be hilarious to watch.” So, I went off to see if they liked me, and they did.
Rebecca: My friend had actually told me about it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it. I was kind of like, “Oh, I don’t know.” Kind of like Will, and I went and they said, “We’d love for you to come back.” I was just kind of like, “Well, I don’t know. Well, okay.” [laughs]
Are you glad you did it?
Rebecca: I’m very glad.
Had you watched previous seasons of the show?
Will: Nope!
Rebecca: No.
Really? Neither one of you had? That’s interesting!
You quickly became known as a power couple and a threat. Did you have a strategy going into the competition, once you became partners, and how did that make you feel being labeled a threat so early in the competition?
Will: Strategy going into the competition? Really, it was do our best, learn what we can, and let the chips fall where they will. As to being labeled a power couple, I have to admit, you know, it’s a little bit of a stroke to the ego knowing that we were considered so dangerous and so dominant. At the same time, it was a little disheartening to think that people were saying, “We’ve got to get rid of them,” but I can understand why, I suppose.
Rebecca: The way I feel is neither one of us knew that we were both going to be so competitive; neither one of us knew that we were going to do so well. That was a surprise to both of us. Of course, we were going to fight it. We were going to be like, “Okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to win.” Once we started realizing we were going to win, we were determined. We’re both very ambitious people, as well, so for us to be doing so well, it definitely looked bad. A lot of the people were not liking us as much. I mean, yeah, that is a stroke to the ego, and I’m thankful that we did make such a big appearance while we were there. But, then again, I don’t want people to not like us.
Last week when you put Erin and Jesse up for elimination, you stated it was because they were strong competitors, and they didn’t interact much with others. Erin was really upset, and from that point on, you really had a huge target on your back. Do you regret that elimination choice?
Will: You know, if Erin and Jesse hadn’t turned around and won the following week, we would have still gone to elimination. Somebody else would have put us in there. I’m really certain of it.
Rebecca: No matter who would have went in there, yeah. You know, I wonder if Sam and Nicole both would have won if we would have went in there.
Hmm. That’s interesting.
Rebecca: Would Sam have allowed that, you know?
Speaking of interacting with others, how do you feel you interacted with others in the house, since others have stated that you were hypocritical, because the two of you didn’t interact with others—except Rebecca with Sam?
Will: Well, I don’t think it’s fair to say that we weren’t interacting with others, but as to how I was interacting, I didn’t realize until I watched the show how arrogant I must have appeared to everybody, and I am so sorry for it. That certainly wasn’t my intent. You know, it was almost horrifying for me to hear—not that I was lording it over them, but that people could see it that way and think that was how I looked. My God! What the hell was I thinking when I did that! It looked awful, you know? It was very much a case of, “Oh God, that wasn’t my intent.” I’m so sorry for making people feel that way.
Was that something you discovered after watching the show and seeing the confessionals?
Will: The whole time I was oblivious! I mean arrogant is not caring what other people feel, and oblivious is not knowing. And, if you don’t know, then you look like you don’t care. So, really, I was incredibly oblivious and looked arrogant. When I realized I was arrogant as I watching the show, I just wanted to bang my head against the wall for being that stupid.
Rebecca: Awww.
That’s sad. How about you, Rebecca?
Rebecca: I didn’t realize that I wasn’t interacting with other people considering actually the people I didn’t start to hang around with were the people that were talking about me behind my back, which was Hollie, Natalie, and Erin. But, the rest of the people I was still interacting with. It’s just I think they were more upset because I stopped talking to them. At first, I was talking to everybody, but I’m not going to keep talking to people that are talking about me.
Will: It wasn’t me interacting with the beauties and Rebecca with the geeks. Certainly, the geeks all in a group were very, at least as I see it mostly, very good interacting with each other because we all know where the sort of problems are, so we can dodge some of the things that would lead to hurt feelings. Interacting with the beauties was far more interesting, and I think I tried to do that as much as I could, just because interacting with people wildly different than myself—that was one of the things I was hoping to get out of this because it’s not something I’m used to.
What did you think of the twist this year, and what effect do you feel it had on the group dynamic of geeks and beauties?
Will: You’ve got more to say, Rebecca, so you mind if I start this one?
Rebecca: No, go ahead.
Will: I’ve got a bunch of female [dropped connection], and they’ve been saying, “I want the girl geeks and hot guys.” So, when Mike [host] starts going into, “We’ve changed the variable,” my reaction was, “They didn’t, did they?” Oh, they did!” On principle, it’s an interesting idea. I’m not necessarily sure it will work the way that it’s intended. It might be more interesting to do a completely reversed-gendered season and see how that interacts. As to the geek and beauty, in particular, both Nicole and Sam . . . Nicole impressed me. She’s very smart. She’s not unattractive, certainly, despite her claims about being the ugliest girl in the house. Further, I could talk to her, and it was sort of familiar. Sam surprised the hell out of me. I expected someone straight out of Jock Central casting. Sam was a good guy. [Phone cuts out again.]
Rebecca: I think that the change this year of having the guy beauty and the girl geek . . . I mean, you’ve got to change it up every season. You’ve got to try something. It’s an experiment you’re willing to try, but at the same time, it was going to happen. One of the beauties was going to be with one of the geeks. Some people may not like that, but some people may. It was liable to happen, and I think that I would have to disagree with having all guy beauties and all girl geeks because that’s going to leave a really huge portion of viewers by men. . . .
Will: Probably, but that will be an interesting thing.
Rebecca: Right.
Rebecca, that just leads right into my question of what was going on with you and Sam?
Rebecca: Sam and I—at the beginning, I was automatically attracted to him. He said the same thing with me is that there was an instant attraction, and I tried to ignore it. I tried to say, “Okay, I’m not here for this; I’m here for change.” Actually, hooking up with him or having any kind of encounters with him would be bad because it just goes to show that I’m going completely against what I’m supposed to be doing.
Are you an item?
Rebecca: Him and I? Well, I’m hoping. I’ve been thinking about him every day. He’s on my mind a lot, and I’m happy to see him again on the show. Hopefully, maybe there will be something. I can’t exactly say there can be too much considering we both live very far away from each other, but I’m willing to come and see him. I’m looking forward to the reunion show. I’m also looking forward to the rest of this show, too. We’ll see how that goes.
Will, how did you feel about your partner hanging around with another guy, a beauty, no less?
Will: I think I was the strongest supporter of him and Rebecca’s relationship in the house, except possibly for the editors, who loved it. I am firmly of the belief that the people are important, that the game is not important, and that you touch passion when it comes your way because you don’t know when it’s coming back. So, when I saw that they were interested in each other, I said to Rebecca, “I’m going to tell you to keep in mind what is important, and I don’t mean winning money. I mean people.” I also told Sam, “You know, Rebecca is kind of like a sister to me for this, so if you hurt her, then I’m going to have to, you know, punch you.” Rebecca made it clear how she felt, and when she felt Sam reciprocated it, I was probably behind them saying, “Act on your feelings.” I had no problem with it.
Rebecca: It was something I tried to avoid, but I couldn’t. I mean, I said that. There was nothing I could do about the way that I felt. It was just there. It was like I’d try to fight it, and I couldn’t. Being in same house with him, every time I walked past him, I just couldn’t help but [laughs] to look at him.
You had said that Sam might have played you, while Will didn’t think so. Do you think today that you were played?
Will: We were played, but not by Sam.
Rebecca: We were played by his roommate.
Will: I’m downright impressed with Nicole for that. I mean, yeah, it kind of hurts that that’s what happened, but that was remarkable. She was skilled. Actually, I’m impressed!
Rebecca: Very scandalous, if you ask me, and wrong, and very evil, but she has her reasons, and she has her rights. Obviously, I’m not completely to blame for the romance. It took two, but we should have definitely—I should have looked out for her feelings more than him because I am a woman, and I wouldn’t want somebody to disrespect me like that. So, it was more thinking about ourselves, rather than other people, and that was very selfish and immature.
Are you saying that of yourself?
Rebecca: Of me to do that to her.
Is Sam included with that, or are you just speaking for yourself?
Rebecca: I think that both of us were very immature. Let me rephrase that. Not that we were immature by making those decisions, it’s just that we didn’t think about what we were doing before we did it.
Editing plays a large part in reality TV. Will, you were portrayed as being on a power trip. Rebecca, you were portrayed as not doing much studying, other than Sam’s body. What do you think of the edit you received?
Will: I said early on that cameras are lenses. They might distort, but they can only in the end show what’s there. I looked incredibly arrogant, and, in fact, I was horrified that I looked so arrogant, but I did the things that made me look arrogant. It was obliviousness, yes, but that’s an easy mistake to make, and I’ve made it. I thought, “Oh, he’s so arrogant it turns out he just didn’t realize it.” So, now, I’m suffering that. I’m not going to go into the edit I had or whether they made me look bad, because everything they said I did, I did.
Rebecca: As far as Sam and I go, the editing, we did make out, I guess, a lot, but not as much as it did portray that we did. We made sure that we did our studying. I still won a round. He was still winning a round. So, it’s not like we weren’t still involved, you know. Obviously, we were both doing very well with the game still. Yeah, we did have our time, but we also had—I was also spending time with my teammate. We were studying together. I was spending time with a couple more of the other contestants, but, yeah, I definitely balanced it out very well.
Who do you think was the most difficult person to get along with in the group?
Rebecca: What does that mean exactly?
Who was the trouble-maker of the group?
Rebecca: I would have to say Hollie. Hollie was the one who was always talking—before we stopped not talking and everything—she was always talking about other people. So, when somebody told me she was talking about me, I wasn’t surprised. She was always trying to start things between people.
Will: I think the person who I had the most trouble interacting with was probably Shay. You don’t see much of it, but we didn’t always communicate well. It was just a lot of sort of butting heads. Definitely some of that. We’re both just very opinionated, very stubborn people, and we bounced off each other.
Were there any cliques or alliances going on?
Will: I knew that Dave was my closest friend there, but I don’t know if that makes an alliance. It seems, from what I’m seeing, that Erin, Hollie, and Natalie were very close.
Rebecca: Oh, yeah.
Will: I don’t know if the geeks were similarly allied, allies. We, the geeks, all sort of looked at this whole thing and said, “You know what? We’re not going to do this. We’re not going to play this making alliances game.”
Rebecca: I think there was an alliance thing between the three of them. It wasn’t there at the beginning, but then as soon as Sam and I had started, you know, talking, it seemed there was more on an alliance against me with those three girls. Maybe that’s the reason why they were aligning against me, but that was the only alliance that I saw was because it seemed that’s when it started.
What was the most challenging aspect of the show for you?
Will: The most challenging aspect of the show for me was the part of the show that sucked the absolute most, and that was choosing teams for elimination. Far and away, far more than getting eliminated—than going to the elimination room—was sending other people there because there is nothing I like less in this world than hurting other people. Here I was, quite literally, making Erin burst into tears, and all I could do was stand there.
I think it did show that you cared on your face during that portion of the show. You didn’t appear that you enjoyed doing it.
Rebecca: The most challenging aspect for me was probably . . . I don’t know. Just being there and making sure that we were going to make it to the next round, I guess, was pretty challenging.
Did you feel uncomfortable being surrounded by so-called geeks?
Rebecca: No. Not at all. I’m not that judgmental of a person. I don’t look at them like they’re not human.
Some people do.
Rebecca: Yeah!
There was one last season who did that.
Rebecca: It was a little surprising when we did the introductions, and I was like, “Wow, this is what they have been settling their life with doing, and here I’ve lived a completely different life.”
Going into the elimination challenge, did you think you had a chance?
Will: Going into the elimination room I thought we had as much a chance as anybody. In there, it could be luck of the draw, what questions you get, whether you happen to come across this maybe outside of the challenge, you know, outside of the house, whether you happen to have studied that bit of material and remembered it. Particularly for the challenge yesterday, there was so much material.
Rebecca: That was probably the only time that I wasn’t very confident. I knew it was going to be hard. It’s not one of my strongest subjects. It never was—even in high school I didn’t do very well in science. But, I had a bad feeling. I kind of knew. I did my best. I gave what I had, but I really had no idea with any of the answers.
You were really upset and couldn’t seem to get yourself together before going into the elimination competition. Was there anything going on in particular to get such a strong reaction from you?
Rebecca: I don’t know.
Just emotions coming into play?
Rebecca: Well, yeah. Whether I’m being very happy or very sad, I just knew, and I was more or less crying because I knew I was going.
As a learning and social experiment, what will both of you take from the show, and did you get out of it what you wanted to?
Will: I’m not sure I’m ready to answer either of those questions. Well, the second one is easy. I didn’t go in expecting anything, so on the one hand it means there is nothing I went in expecting to accomplish. That’s really not the concern, but it’s not over the way I see it. I’m still learning as I’m watching myself, and even now that I’m off the show, I’m still learning and seeing myself and everybody. For example, I want to know what happens when everybody realizes we’re gone, you know, next week. Those first moments are going to be very indicative of a lot of things.
Rebecca: They’ll probably really party it up!
Will: So, I’m not ready to say what I’ve taken away from it because I haven’t finished taking it.
Rebecca: When I returned home, I did a lot of thinking about how my life was. Granted, I felt like, “Wow, I’m home way too soon.” Everyday, I was thinking, “Wow, they are doing this today. Somebody is getting sent home this day.” I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It wasn’t really like a traumatizing experience, but more like changing. I said I’m going to change the way I am. I’m going to change the way I look. I’m not going to spend so much money—like I realized how much money I was actually spending on myself now. It’s maintenance, but it more like a downgrade of what I was and to realize that real beauty comes from inside. Real beauty—like the geeks—they’re not even really geeks. They’re gentlemen that people portray them as a name. They give them a name. [Can’t hear] just as beautiful, and I’m sure it comes from the inside as well as the outside.
Will: The term geek may have been given in scorn but has been adopted with pride.
I know! It’s almost an endearment when you say it anymore.
Will: In this day and age with computers so dominant anyway, being a geek can be a badge of honor.
What’s in the future for both of you?
Rebecca: For me, I’ve just graduated school, so I’m going to pursue my career in massage therapy. I’d also like to do some modeling as more of a hobby. If something happens with that, that would be wonderful. I’m more or less just focusing on myself and my career.
Will: I am back at work, obviously. I am currently finishing my application to law school, so, probably within a year, I will be moving again going wherever I get into law school.
Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?
Will: I do want to say to those who were supporting us: Thanks so much. It means a lot. To those who didn’t like us, I’m sorry that we bothered you or made you upset. And, enjoy the rest of the show!
Rebecca: Well, I’d like to say thank you for watching the show, and that I do apologize, as well, that we did come across as being very arrogant and myself as not wanting a change, when in all actuality, I did. But, the way that I felt for Sam is who I am. As a person, whether I change completely, even if I have that chemistry with Josh—Josh and I started to have a sort of chemistry, but he wouldn’t take charge. Maybe something would have happened. Maybe if Sam wouldn’t have shown up, and he actually would have taken charge, there might have been something between Josh and I. So, having a certain kind of feeling toward somebody is something that I can’t change. As far as how competitive and how strong we were, we’re both just very ambitious people, and I’m sorry if you don’t accept us for that.
I’d just like to thank you both for taking the time to speak with me and wish you lots of luck in the future.
Rebecca and Will: Thank you.
Many thanks to THE CW© and Will and Rebecca for this interview opportunity!
Photo Credit: THE CW©
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