‘Below Deck’: Chef Rachel Reveals the Only Reason Why She Returned After Quitting the Boat
Chef Rachel Hargrove from Below Deck made it perfectly clear that there is only one true reason why she returned to My Seanna after she quit.
“I didn’t really want to leave Captain Lee [Rosbach] hanging,” Hargrove explained to ET. “I just needed a breather and needed to walk off and take a second. Especially for everything that was happening to process it. That was one of the craziest [preference] sheets I’ve seen in my life. And then, I’m running as a sole chef? But it really was, I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
But she said the stress of cameras and mounting news of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) threat became too much. “It’s a lot of stress when you got all those cameras in your face constantly,” she remarked. Unfortunately, her departure left bosun Eddie Lucas feeling sour about Hargrove. She laughed about how he’s still harboring resentment toward her, especially after nearly a year.
Chef Rachel didn’t realize Eddie Lucas was so resentful
She told ET she had no idea Lucas was frustrated with her. “It was funny to me, ‘cause I was like, just tell me,” she said.
“I’m the kind of person who you have to just lay your cards on the table,” she added. “For him to go on to social media and go onto other interviews and carry it over after a year, I was actually surprised. I was like, you took that to heart, didn’t ya? It wasn’t like I took a dump in his Cheerios. I don’t understand why he’s crying about it now.”
Lucas merely hinted to Showbiz Cheat Sheet about his relationship with Hargrove. “She is a character,” he said. “Crazy as they come. And her and I had some really, really great moments. But those moments like kind of died out pretty quick.”
Chef Rachel shares how she stays drama-free with the crew
In fact, Hargrove told Showbiz Cheat Sheet she generally got along with the entire crew. She later told ET that she separates herself from the crew to avoid drama. “There’s a dynamic that goes into being with a crew, and certain crew members,” she said. “I learned to separate myself completely from them. So, there is no drama.”
She also wanted to avoid the drama of getting in the middle of the contention between Elizabeth Frankini and Francesca Rubi. But, “For me, supporting another crew member who feels like they are being bullied and attacked? I’m gonna stand by them,” she said.
“There was a lot of unnecessary, derogatory remarks made to that specific individual,” she said referring to Frankini. “Whether she’s capable of doing her job or not doesn’t matter. No one wants that direction of derogatory remarks that will hurt or harm them, which will make them worse at their job anyway.”
Despite the season being cut short thanks to COVID, Hargrove said the drama is going to get even more heated. “There’s a lot more,” she said. “It’s kind of weird, too, because … we didn’t even film six weeks. This was all condensed because we had to wrap up because of the pandemic. Like, everything that we do and film, we’re doing this 24 hours a day. … There’s a lot of footage.”
