Preview: Las Vegas man competes on Oxygen’s ‘The Battle of the Ex-Besties’
When best friends become sworn enemies, it can be tough to ever confront them again — and even tougher to swallow pride and convert them back to best friend in order to compete on a reality-TV series.
But that’s the situation Las Vegas club promoter Trevor Hunt found himself in with ex-bestie Melissa Erickson as the stakes and emotions ran high on Oxygen’s new reality-TV competition series “The Battle of the Ex-Besties,” which premieres Tuesday.
Trevor and Melissa are forced to team up to compete against 12 other ex-besties. He is the only guy playing opposite 13 women. Nothing prepared the teams for the moment that they discover they’d been paired with an ex-best friend.
This battle of domination to win a life-changing $100,000 grand prize becomes tumultuous competition under the same roof where the price of friendship is determined through past accusations, lies and betrayals.
Here is a sneak preview. E! News anchor Sibley Scoles, who was the first female host of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt TV, tries to keep order amid fighting and feuding of the ex-besties. Three is definitely a crowd when it comes to significant others and besties.
Trevor fell out of BFF status with Melissa when his attention began to shift to boyfriend Eric. Melissa landed a stage manager position for a musical that cast Trevor as a dancer. She got him fired after he skipped out on dress rehearsals to attend an event here, which led to him moving here full time. Their relationship ended with him moving out of their apartment overnight.
“This project delves into the true value of friendships. Viewers are thrust into these relationships that are already at their lowest points. By adding $100,000 as a prize to the emotionally and physically demanding experience, it becomes real drama for the audience to love,” said Rod Aissa, Oxygen’s VP of Original Programming. My former “Entertainment Tonight” producer Vin Di Bona is one of the “Ex-Besties” producers.
Trevor, who has lived here the last two years, is a VIP host and promoter at Piranha. Producers discovered him and his story with Melissa on his Facebook page. “We were secretly paired together to compete for $100,000. I thought that I was going to be by myself. I never expected her to be there, my old best friend,” Trevor said.
“We hadn’t spoken to each other in over five years. She’s in my past, from my hometown in Utah. She lives in New York now, but we used to live together in Utah. We didn’t know we were going to be paired with somebody. It was a complete surprise, and we faced challenges immediately, a series of really physical and emotional mentally draining challenges.
“It was like ‘The Amazing Race,’ but suddenly we’ve gone from never speaking again to being a team. Every challenge that we go through, you’re only as good as your partner. Now we’re teammates working together on every challenge figuring out how we could be a team again while competing for the big prize money.
“It was difficult when we started. We didn’t even have the chance to resume the friendship. We were immediately thrown into the game. So, here’s my old best friend I haven’t seen or spoken to in more than five years, and right away we’re handcuffed to in order to tackle the first physical challenge. We had to start working as a team together before we could even deal with our past friendship issues.
“We were high school best friends, we went to college together, we lived together, we did everything together. I started to date somebody, so my attention focused from our friendship to my new relationship. There were a lot of jealousy issues while we were doing a show together in Utah, ‘Anything Goes.’ Melissa was the stage manager, and I was a cast member. She got me kicked off of the show, so I decided to move out overnight without telling her.
“That was the last time we had seen each other or spoken until we were put together on the TV show. What I didn’t know back then, though, as she told me while we were filming was that she had packed up stuff in her room and was actually planning to do the same thing. It’s kind of funny that she was planning to do the same thing.”
I wanted to know if the duo repaired their friendship as a result of the show. “That’s the $64 million question,” Trevor said. “We hadn’t talked in nearly six years. We had a long history before that, but we were put in some very, very intense situations together physically and emotionally on the TV show.
“So you have to watch to see where it all goes because it’s pretty interesting. I want people to watch to see our journey because it’s pretty interesting. I don’t want to give away the outcome of the friendship. It was very difficult emotionally and physically. It was strenuous on an emotional level, a physical level, but also rewarding.
“It’s not every day where you’re put in those physical and mental situations, and I learned a lot about myself as far as my relationships with other people. You know, also the other teams on the show, the other cast mates I was living with 24/7. It wasn’t just my ex-best friend, it was also the competition aspect we had with the other teammates and our relationship living with them.
“We were all living together in a house in Beverly Hills while we filmed. Seven pairs of ex-best friends as seven teams. Each individual had their own ex-best friend beef. Frenemies at their finest! I would say I’m the frenemy and Melissa was the ex-bestie. There was no time to learn from the other teams’ mistakes.
“I was so focused on what we were doing trying to get our tasks completed because it was all about timing. The first team who finished in the quickest time was how it was ranked. We were focused so hard on doing what we needed to do, but you could hear the other teams yelling at each other and fighting with each other.
“Whenever Melissa and I would get heated, we listened to what we heard from the other teams and calmed ourselves down. The other teams taught us what not to do and to figure out what worked best for us. There is plenty of drama, but nothing was really physical. It was against the rules to hit anybody or do anything physical or harm anybody’s personal belongings.
“There were some pretty close fights. I slept through the worst ones but heard about it the next morning when they’d calmed down because they didn’t want to get disqualified. I was the only boy with 13 girls, so that was a little odd. We filmed around the clock for just under three weeks. I was exhausted. There was no privacy. That was really mentally draining.
“I really did learn a lot about myself and how I relate to other people and how I interact with other people from being in these high-pressure situations with these strangers. That’s what I walked away with, a deeper understanding of myself. The whole point of the show is about second chances. I’m 100 percent glad that I did it.”
