[INTERVIEW] Exclusive with Chris Harrison | The Hottest Show Gets Cold With The Bachelor Winter Games Monday 12 February, 2018

Disney is literally making all of my dream come true. My first Disney press trip with them and one of our activities of the day was to visit the ABC Building, where lots of television shows are filmed and produced. I was super excited, I think I reached a milestone in my media career!

On this media visit to the ABC Building, our job was pre-screen the first episode of the upcoming The Bachelor Winter Games, and then interview with the host Chris Harrison!

The Disney Bloggers at the ABC Building located in Burbank, California

It was an honor interview Chris Harrison who has 2 strong decades being the host of one of the largest dating shows in the world, The Bachelor.  Chris has been the host of The Bachelor for 22 seasons. That legend status.

Chris Harrison + I after our interview

I got a chance to interview the legend of dating reality contest shows, and he was extremely nice ,humble and down to earth! We asked him a lot of questions about The Bachelor and the upcoming international Olympic Style spin-off of the show,The Bachelor Winter Games.

INTERVIEWING CHRIS HARRISON

Photo Credit: Natasha (HOUSEFULOFNICHOLES.COM)

Chris on the how many applicant received for the show and casting process for The Bachelor

It depends.  Thousands and thousands.  But also, we cast now 24/7.  I mean, 12 months of the year we’re casting.  And we have this kind of Rolodex built up.  Say out of the blue, Ari’s our Bachelor.  Well maybe we have a girl who a couple of years ago, we ran into and she’s like yeah, who are you interested in?  I always loved Ari.  You remember that girl we met in Kansas City who loved Ari, I think she’ll be great.  We’ll go back and we’ll reach back into the well to find people or maybe someone had a boyfriend at the time or a girlfriend so long story short, the casting is huge.

So there’s people that always apply per Season but then there’s people that we have from years back so it’s kind of this exponential.

Chris on clarifying the medical screening process of his contestants for health reasons around intimacy

It seems like a horrible Petry dish, right? Well first of all, you can do whatever you want.  You don’t have to kiss anybody and you’re not under contract to touch or be touched.  But to your point, yes.  Everybody goes through very stringent tests of all kinds.  Believe it or not, [they get screened for] Mental as well.

THE BACHELOR WINTER GAMES – Is love the universal language? Find out as 14 international bachelors and bachelorettes from such countries as Switzerland, Japan and Australia compete and, hopefully, find love with 12 of America’s Bachelor Nation favorites. These singles will go head-to-head in winter-themed challenges, including the toughest sport of all love. Chris Harrison hosts this highly anticipated, four-episode series, complete with the usual dose of tears, drama, romance and laughter, as “The Bachelor Winter Games,” a global celebration of unity and love, premieres on TUESDAY, FEB. 13 (8:00-10:01 p.m. EST), on The ABC Television Network. (Photo Credit:ABC/Lorenzo Bevilaqua)

Chris on the idea of how The Bachelor Winter Game got developed

When we started Bachelor Winter Games, we had no clue about what we getting ourselves into and what we were gonna do.  We had this concept and it was very loose and it was fun for us because we’ve been doing the Bachelor and Bachelorette for 16 years, which I love and it’s my baby but if you’ve seen the show, we’ve been doing it for awhile, we got it down, we know what we’re doing.

And so, we have all these franchises around the world.  So we thought how do we kind of open the door to that?  And how do you kind of take advantage of this huge phenomenon, not just in the States but around the world so we thought, let’s bring out our Stars a la Bachelor’s Paradise.  But then let’s get Stars from around the world.  And so that’s what we did. Let’s make this Global Celebration of Love.  OK, let’s define that and figure out what that means.  And so what we figured out was, The Bachelor is a phenomenon here obviously in the United States and it’s one of the biggest franchises in the history of TV, and it has been for almost 2 decades.  But it’s actually huge around the world and I’m not sure you guys know that but a lot of people don’t know that from all corners of the world from Japan, China, Finland, Sweden, from Russia, the UK, and Australia and New Zealand and Canada.

We kind of decided it would be this pseudo Olympic Village where we’re gonna get the biggest Stars from around the world join the biggest Stars from our Show, bring them together, let them live in one house, let the mayhem ensue. 

Chris on his take on who will be the breakout star of The Bachelor Winter Games

So Yuki is going to be the biggest Star in America ever.  She is partially in love with her, obsessed with her.  The great thing about Yuki and I’m just excited for everybody to get to know her and enjoy what we enjoy.  Yuki is one of our hard finds from Bachelor Japan and she was just so huge, so successful and I believe that the story is correct.  There’s a loose interpretation.  She wasn’t brought back for the next one because she was too big of a Star. And now we know why because when she was on, we have this Bank of Monitors obviously in our Control Room and we all were just mesmerized by this girl and every time she was on TV.

Get Ben and Dean off camera… I just wanna see Yuki talk for days.  And so she was just fascinating.  She was incredibly sweet and yes, we had a Translator.  My guess I would say, over under, it was probably 15 to 20 words that she legitimately knew in English and then we had a Japanese Translator who helped us and helped Yuki.

Chris on his thoughts on Ashley I. and her overly dramatic antics and consistent crying on the show

That’s why I love Ashley.  What you see is what you get.  I’ve been around her on camera obviously now for years and off camera and I always love and respect people who just own who they are.  No matter what that is.  We’re all different shapes, sizes and whatever, backgrounds, and you bring, we all bring something different to the table.  And as long as you own that and you are who you are, I respect that like I get it.  And that’s Ashley like I’ll be talking to her at a concert.  She’ll be talking about whatever and suddenly, she’ll start crying. 

Sometimes she’s laughing hysterically and it turns into crying.  And she’s happy and she cries and it’s her.

Photo Credit: me (KiwiTheBeauty.com)

Chris on how he stays humble

I love what I do.  I have been in television my entire Adult life, from Sportscasting to Home and Garden Shows, to Game Shows, and what have you.  Obviously, the Bachelor Franchise, and Miss America, and some other things and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.  I love what I do, I love TV, I love creating it but I love.  I’m a student of the game and I look back at people that I really respected whether it was Sportscasters like Al Michaels or Bob Costas back in the day. 

And I think if you’ll get to know me, you’ll know that I guess I’m the same guy that’s on The Bachelor.  That’s how I live my life.  That’s how I host Shows and that’s how I treat the people on the Show.  And I treat them with love, respect, dignity until you cross me and then I’ll end you.  They’re like my Children.  And I tell my Children this in all sincerity, it’s like don’t confuse me for one of your friends.  I’m not your friend I’m your Father.

Photo credit: me (KiwiTheBeauty.com)

Chris on keeping in touch with people on the show

 I do. A lot of them.  Whether intended or not, I run into a lot of them, like I was at a Concert last Monday and ran into Christine Schulman and just ran into Graham Bond who’s a DJ here in town.  But a lot of them are my friends whether even back in the day, it’s Tristan and Ryan are dear friends of mine, and Andrew Firestone is one of my closest friends.  Bob Ginny, and even now Ben Higgins and I talk all the time, Kate and Jo Jo.

Yeah, one of the weirdest things about this job is I’ve had 16 years of these people that have come into my life and that I’ve taken care of.  I’ve married some of them and watched them have babies and created these families with them and on the off-camera side, we’ve had deaths and divorces and love affairs and marriages.  We’ve kind of done it all and that’s not even the Television Show.  And so yeah, we’re kind of a traveling band of Gypsies in this family that’s kind of stuck together, which is pretty special.  It’s neat.  I have some really good friends because of this Show.

Chris sharing some of the games to look for during The Bachelor Winter Games

So we did Biathalon.  That was our first event.  We did Downhill Skiing.  I guess it like the Winter Olympics where it’s just not fair.  If you’re born on Skis in Finland and Sweden and Russia, or you’re born in Ohio, you’re gonna be a little disadvantaged.  I’m sure you grew up skiing a lot in Ohio.  But yeah, when we’re on the ice, when we’re on the snow.  Ice in Winter from Canada and the wintery Finland and Norway and all that.  They just crushed it. So it was fun, we did the Biathalon, we did Downhill Skiing.

I mean our people were all over the place.  And I give them credit because some of them were learning to ski and then we threw them down a Mountain and said ski through this gauge as fast as you can.  And then we did speed skating, and then couples ice dancing is the penultimate of that.  It was fun.  You know, it was really cool.

Photo credit: ABC Studios

Chis talks about co-hosting with Hannah Storm

if you guys don’t know Hannah, she’s a legend in Sportscasting.  She’s someone that I–  I was a Sportscaster so she’s someone I admired very much and looked up to when I was a Sportscaster.  So it was fun for me to be able to call on somebody and say, will you please come sit next to me and do the Show.  Turns out she’s a huge fan of Bachelor Nation, or a huge member of Bachelor Nation and fan of our Show.

For me, I’m like I’m sitting next to Hannah Storm.  And we would sit and talk Sports.  I mean I met her when I was a really young man and I was starting out in Sportscasting back in the early ’90s.  I was at the NFC Championship Game and I remember like I saw Hannah Storm like Oh My God, that’s Hannah Storm.  And I walked up and I introduced myself.  It’s like I’m just a fan and she was so wonderful and polite and talked business with me, and gave me advice because I was just, I think I was 23 years old.  And I never forgot that night.  I told her that story, the first night we sat down and had Dinner and she’s lovely, an incredibly giving lovely woman and Ashley Brewer who’s a young and up and coming Sportscaster, she’s the young me now which is cool to be able to reach in and find this young raw talent.

She’s a Sportscaster here in Los Angeles and she is a rising Star.  It was fun for me and Mike Palicick, [we] created a Show… let’s give this girl a shot, like let’s tap from the shoulder and be like this is your chance and she took it and ran with it. But it was fun to see her for a brief moment.

Photo credit: me (KiwiTheBeauty.com)

Chris on working with the other International Bachelor stars for the first time

It was fun for me to walk in and the first thing I did was ‘Hey guys, I’m Chris Harrison. I’m the Host of the American version of this Show. Half of you don’t know who I am or what I do but I’m gonna be the guy talking to you now.‘… and because not all these Shows are the same.  Obviously, they have their own version of Chris Harrison.  And so it was fun to kind of introduce myself to these people and teach them.  And they have a lot of respect for our Franchise because they know we’re the Mother Ship.

Chris on the Global melting pot and positive effect The Bachelor Winter Games will have on television

And it was cool to show and I don’t want to get political by any means but in this day and age, it was cool to just do something positive where we had all these different Races, Religions, Cultures from all around the world, no borders, no questions asked.  We all came together and had a helluva time.  And I’m like we can overcome differences and just have a great time, and kiss.  I think what I’m saying is my platform is more Fantasy Suites.  That’s what the world needs, more Fantasy Suites.

Photo credit: ABC Studios

Winter Tears Are Coming

Fall in love with The Bachelor Winter Games.
Watch the premiere, Tuesday, Feb 13 at 8|7c on ABC!

Baby, it’s cold outside when bachelors and bachelorettes from around the world meet in the streets of Manchester, Vermont, for a grand celebration of unity and love. Is love the universal language? Find out as international bachelors and bachelorettes from such countries as Switzerland, Japan and Australia compete and, hopefully, find love with America’s Bachelor Nation favorites. These singles will go head-to-head in winter-themed challenges, including the toughest sport of all – love. Chris Harrison hosts this highly anticipated, four-episode series, complete with the usual dose of tears, drama, romance, and laughter.

The series will continue on Thursday, February 15; Tuesday, February 20, and will have its finale on Thursday, February 22. All episodes will air 8:00-10:01 p.m. EST.

The hottest show on television is about to get cold. Get ready for #TheBachelorWinterGames Tuesday at 8|7c on ABC!

Will you be tuning into The Bachelor Winter Games edition?

About the Blogger - Kiwi the Beauty


Kiwi is the free spirited blogger and content creator of KiwiTheBeauty.com. As a digital influencer, she produces creative inspiration around beauty, lifestyle, media and travel leisure. Her life mantra is to make manifesting fun! When she’s not blogging, she is eating trendy hipster food, carrying crystals, making it rain at her local farmer's market and binge brunching. Follow her on her blog and social media at kiwithebeauty.com + @kiwithebeauty


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