I Was On MTV's The Real World: It Was Not Like You Think

I Was On MTV's The Real World: It Was Not Like You Think

When MTV decided to throw a bunch of Gen-Xers into a New York City loft and film the results -- calling it the Real World -- they basically invented reality TV as we know it today. A whole bunch of '90s kids grew up thinking some day they, too, could get famous just by hanging around and being themselves. Fast-forward about a quarter century, and we now live in a world in which every kid who doesn't have a popular Twitch channel by age five is tossed off a cliff, 300-style.

Meanwhile, the Real World is still going. We talked to "Pat," a member of the 2009 Real World: Cancun cast, to find out what really happens when people stop being polite, and start being completely aware that they're on television. He told us ...

5
They're Looking For A Certain Kind of Person (And Make Damned Sure They've Found It)

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If you want a life of glamorous reality show stardom, step one is show up to the audition looking like the type of person who likes to start shit, but not too much shit. And then prepare yourself for some rigorous psychological testing.

It turns out that making sure all of the ingredients for a successful reality show are in place (to achieve the exact right amount of shirtless yelling) usually doesn't require scripted fakery -- it's just a matter of being very, very careful about who they cast. They are, after all, trying to cast certain "parts" (the Nice Girl, the Troublemaker, the Black Guy).

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The Future WWE Champion Guy.

Pat was designated as his season's "Bad Boy." "There was a casting call at the bar, and me and my buddy were just like, 'Hey, wouldn't it be funny if one of us were picked?'" he says. "I think I had a dirty white stained t-shirt on, nothing cool." They filled out a questionnaire in line, then went inside. "There were a bunch of casting directors sitting people down in groups of ten, asking questions like 'Describe yourself in one word,'" he says. People clearly knew what the producers were looking for -- "Everyone was like 'Crazy! I'm crazy! I'm wild, you never know what I'm going to do!'" -- but just like your English teacher told you, it's all about showing and not telling. Pat finally exploded in eye-rolling frustration at one timid girl who described herself as "Um, aggressive, I guess?" He chided her, "'What do you mean 'aggressive'?! If you were aggressive, you would be aggressive."

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It's the difference between drunkenly talking about chucking a fire extinguisher into the ocean and actually doing it.

He thinks that caught the eye of the producers, who undoubtedly witnessed this slightly unnecessary confrontation and saw dollar signs. The chosen few proceeded to the next stage, where a battery of tests gave the impression they'd be trusting the cast with state secrets. "We go in the back and there's like a textbook of questions," he says. "One of them was 'List all your family members,' and I have a ton of those. They wanted to know, 'What's your relationship like with your mother, your stepmother, what was middle school like.' It was the most intimate thing -- I swear, the CIA doesn't have as much information as they do."

Pat was also required to take an IQ test ("like the MTV SATs, all these math questions") and be evaluated off-camera by a psychologist. This is all to make sure they're getting a cast with just the right amount of personality disorder. The psychologist is there "to make sure you won't be violent," he says. "If you do get violent, you're off the show." As for the rest of the probing questions, one casting official explains, "You want to see how far people will go in terms of opening up -- how much they will tell you about the guy they have a crush on or their confusing relationship with their father. You need people who are open, enigmatic, and unpredictable."

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And if you can't expose yourself emotionally, doing it physically is a good fallback plan.

Just not unpredictable enough to start spontaneously raining fists down upon another cast member, although Pat points out that if someone does, "that's always what they show in the trailer." That might sound like a contradiction, but it's kind of like how NASCAR doesn't want crashes and certainly doesn't want drivers getting hurt ... but everyone involved knows a certain percentage of the audience is only watching for the fireworks.

4
Some Events Are Staged (But It's Mostly Small Stuff)

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Every season of the Real World starts the same way, with cast members paired up and arranged to meet each other at the airport, hopefully configured for maximum conflict ("Have the gay guy meet the Southern Baptist! If at all possible, have a copy of Leviticus fall out of his suitcase!"). "On my season, when you meet 'my character,' it shows me walking out of the airport terminal, and I meet my castmate and it's like 'Hey, what's up!' [but] that's not how it happened at all."

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If racial or religious tension isn't possible, setting cast members up to bone at the drop of a hat is an acceptable substitute.

As you can guess, MTV isn't about to let things be that spontaneous. It may not be scripted, but it's tightly controlled, to the point that the first day feels like checking in to prison. When Pat arrived in Cancun, "they took me to a separate hotel," and then, "they went through all of my stuff," mostly to ensure he wasn't packing any contraband sponsorship. "They took away like two pieces of clothing because it had brands on it, they said, 'We'll give this back to you at the end.'"

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We're not saying MTV tranquilized this guy to get that American Eagle shirt off of him, but we are saying MTV doesn't mess around.

In other aspects, the search was a little more lax. "They told me, 'Bring all your stuff down here, we wanna make sure you don't have any illegal drugs or anything' but they didn't come into my room, so if I had illegal drugs, I would have just left them in my room." At this point, of course, their psychologists had presumably calculated exactly how likely he was to do drugs and whether he'd be smart enough to hide them.

Pat's "arrival" at the airport actually took place the next day (they had him go stand off in the corner and then walk out into the view of the camera, as if he'd just stepped off the plane). That's the sort of fill-in-the-gaps shots producers do have the housemates stage from time to time (other "dramatically reenacted" events recalled by cast members include having everyone pretend to shut off the lights and go to bed just so they can get it on tape). They've also been known to hire actors as background characters to help push the plot along. In one instance, during the filming of the New York season, they paid a man to follow a female cast member and hit on her. This might be the only time getting paid to do something made it less creepy.