Arie Luyendyk Jr. Is Not Beefing With Below Deck’s Kate Chastain After ‘The Traitors’ – ‘She Really Did Make the Show’ [Exclusive]
No beef here! After what ended up being a spicy reunion between The Bachelor‘s Arie Luyendyk Jr. and Below Deck‘s Kate Chastain on The Traitors, Luyendyk said he is in a good place with Chastain. In fact, he thinks she was a big reason the Peacock series was so successful.
“She kind of came after me in the after show tell all,” he told Showbiz Cheat Sheet, referring to the explosive reunion.
“But I don’t know. I feel like we had a good relationship. We follow each other on Instagram,” he continued. “I feel like it’s all cordial, and ultimately, Kate is really good at making TV. And she’s a really good person. And I feel like without her, the show definitely wouldn’t have been what it was. She really did make the show and she was really fun to hang out with, even though she got our their nerves sometimes. But I’m really happy that I met her and, I think we’re in a good place.”
Why were Arie Luyendyk and Kate Chastain beefing?
At one point during filming, Luyendyk referred to Chastain as a “cancer” on The Traitors, mainly because she made it clear she wanted to leave.
“It was just because so many people thought she was a traitor, and I kind of felt like she wasn’t. But she was such a distraction that it kind of made it hard to know what was going on. So I think that was kind of the main thing,” he explained.
He was also in it to win it and revealed an advantage he had over the rest of The Traitors cast. “Well, I was one of the only people who could speak Dutch. And there was a Dutch version first of all,” Luyendyk said.
“And everyone got a subtitled version of the Dutch show, but only the first two episodes,” he explained. “So I was able to watch the whole season in its entirety. So I had a little bit of a strategic advantage going in. I felt like I did have a leg up and so I really, really kind of flew underneath the radar for as long as I could. And that’s kind of the name of the game in the beginning.”
Arie drops a little castle tea from ‘The Traitors’
The nineteenth-century Ardross Castle may have been the perfect setting for The Traitors, but Luyendyk revealed the property had some help thanks to production.
“The art department does an amazing job,” he said. “And those sets, just like The Bachelor and The Traitors, they have an entire team, and they spend months preparing for the show. It was really interesting how intricate the art department was on The Traitors. A lot of that castle they had painted and did the complete decor. And so I think that castle, before production moved in, it looked a lot different and it was pretty cool to see what they did.”
Being a real estate agent, Luyendyk was also curious about how much it would cost to buy a castle in Scotland. “I was really interested in the real estate of Scotland, to be honest, because you can buy one of those old castles on a ton of land for like $1 million to $1.5 million. Prices that would just blow your mind. And I was like, ‘Wow, well, maybe I needed to move to the Highlands with my family and live in a castle.'”
The “catch” is that most of the castles require more than $1 million in renovations and most don’t have functioning plumbing or electricity.
He joked about if he did plan to move, he’d use Scotch™ Brand to reduce some of the stress. “I typically give my clients a few things in the moving process. I have Scotch shipping tape or packaging tape. This is called a Box Lock tape. This is a really great tape. It’s super adhesive. So that’s like number one most important thing is a really good tape,” he shared. “Secondly, we have the Cushion Lock protective wrap. So this would replace any sort of plastic products. It’s pretty cool. You stretch it out, it turns into kind of a honeycomb wrapped around a protective out of your items that you’re trying to protect and save a lot of space in the box.”
