For reality TV fans, the early aughts can be considered somewhat of a golden age. It was a time where anything was possible: Xzibit could mysteriously pop up in your driveway to put a cotton candy machine in your cheap Craigslist car; MTV could tear you out of your bed in the middle of the night and give a future date a blacklight to inspect your embarrassingly messy room; and The Swan, arguably the cruelest reality show ever created, was somehow greenlit.
Meanwhile, in the middle of Ashton Kutcher’s wildly successful original run of MTV’s candid camera prank series, Punk’d, he also producedBeauty and the Geek. Touted as a social experiment rather than a run-of-the-mill reality show, it brought together polar opposites – the geekiest, most socially awkward men casting directors could find and seemingly shallow bombshells – and forced them to work together to complete challenges.
The show’s popularity erupted into international success with offshoots in both the UK and Australia, but not everything was as happy-go-lucky as it seemed on the surface. From alleged stunt casting, to manipulative editing, to a cast member losing his virginity on set, here is the disturbing untold truth of Beauty and the Geek.
Playing a geek is easy if you’re an actor
It’s no secret that reality TV producers know how to pull the juiciest scenes from their subjects. It also helps if one of their subjects is a professional actor. Beauty and the Geek Australia came under fire after “geek” Bendeguz Daniel Devenyi-Botos (above) admitted he was a professional actor who joined the series to help his career. We’re going to guess the “geek” in Beauty and the Geek isn’t referring to theater nerds.
According to The Sunday Telegraph, the mustache-clad reality star studied acting and theater at a number of performing arts schools. He had “a professional headshot and casting card,” yet Beauty and the Geek apparently “concealed” his background from fans. They claimed he was a “historian;” he claimed he dropped out of school to pursue acting. According to SheKnows, the alleged geek had “more than a dozen acting credits” ranging from stage to film.
Devenyi-Botos told The Sunday Telegraph that producers absolutely knew he was an actor because they approached him to be on the show after seeing him perform. He claimed to have joined the cast to give his acting career a boost. Needless to say, fans felt duped.
Hide your children, hide your girlfriends
Beauty and the Geek and it’s international counterparts have touted their loveable but socially awkward geeks as basically incapable of talking to women. After all, they go on the show looking for love. This is why fans were shocked when it was found that Corin Storkey, a contestant on Beauty and the Geek Australia, fathered a child with his live-in girlfriend .
According to Herald Sun, the PhD student lived with his organic chemist girlfriend while he attended college in New Zealand. They dated for four years and had a ded Beth.
“She was the main relationship of my life after we got together when I was 18,” Storkey told Herald Sun, “But we split up just around the time she got pregnant and she has since married.”
Fans accused Storkey of being a “fake” alleging he couldn’t possibly be the virginal, socially inept geek the show painted him to be if there was definitive proof that he was, in fact, not a virgin. Of course, a rep for the series claimed they never cast geeks based on their sexual history. They were more concerned with Storkey’s interests than his past relationships.
