Current “Bachelor” Clayton Echard admits not everything came up roses during his season on the ABC reality show ― and he does have some regrets.
Echard appeared on former “Bachelor” Nick Viall’s podcast on Monday and admitted that he second-guessed his decision to do the show after it premiered earlier this year.
“I think the first three weeks of the show airing, I definitely thought that, because you just don’t know what to expect going into it,” Echard said.
Echard faced a unique challenge compared to previous “Bachelors”: Because the show filmed his season right after he appeared on Michelle Young’s season of “The Bachelorette,” he didn’t have any opportunity to reach out to former contestants for tips.
“Having no frame of reference, not really watching prior shows. I went straight from Michelle’s season to jumping into my own, so I didn’t have that time in between to really reach out to [past] Bachelor, Bachelorettes, ask them these questions that now I’m asking,” Clayton said. “ ... Having that reassurance, I didn’t get that.”
It didn’t help that Echard’s casting has been heavily criticized on social media by fans who didn’t think he showed much of a personality on Young’s season and preferred many of the other contestants.
One of those early critics was Viall himself, who told People back in December that while Echard “seemed like a nice enough fellow,” he thought the four biracial men who made Michelle’s top four all had “better storylines, more charisma.”
Echard figured that, once his season premiered, the criticism over his selection would die down.
“[For] the first three weeks, I thought, ‘This is going to be great. Everyone’s going to come around, start seeing my personality,’ and people weren’t,” Echard lamented. “It seemed like no matter what they showed, even when they showed my personality, showed me being goofy, people would still say, ‘He has no personality.’ It’s like, what more do you want to see? I’m showing you this on social media and you’re still wanting to find something to be mad about.”
Echard added: “I just wasn’t ready, I guess, for the magnitude of the criticism I was going to face.”
You can hear the complete interview below.