Ready to feast on the last magic moments of this year’s messy Married At First Sight experiment? A TV insider serves up the best goss from the final hurrah to Woman’s Day.
1. JACK’S SCRIPT EXPOSED!
As the cast prepared to sit down with the experts to look back on their time in the experiment, Jack Dunkley, 34, knew it wouldn’t be pretty, so he took Tori Adams, 27, to discuss the best ways possible to help defend his controversies.
“However, he didn’t realise their mics were turned on at the time, meaning everybody on set heard him coaching her with what to say,” shares our spy. “Everyone was gobsmacked and cringing hard. They got so annoyed that they stormed off and refused to continue filming.
“So they didn’t just end the season as the most unpopular couple, but everyone believed more than ever they’d been acting throughout the whole show.”
2. JONO & ELLIE TWIST
It’s not a Married At First Sight reunion without a huge bomb being dropped, and this year’s one came in the shape of Jono McCullough, 39, and Ellie Dix, 32, walking in holding hands! As the cast reacted in shock, the pair explained they connected at the start of the experiment, kept in touch as friends and then met up once they were both single – which is when one thing led to another.
However, not everybody believes their relationship started as innocently as they made it sound…
3. TWO COUPLES SPLIT
Just 24 hours before filming this year’s reunion, intruders Jade Pywell, 26, and Ridge Barredo, 27, decided to end their relationship after weeks of living apart and arguing since the experiment ended.
The news wasn’t well received by producers, who did everything in their power to convince them to smile and fake it for the sake of the show. “In the three months since then they’ve been constantly on and off, with Jade believed to have received anonymous messages on Instagram from a woman claiming Ridge has been messaging her, which he’s denied,” says the insider.
“Meanwhile, Jayden [Eynaud, 26] and Eden [Harper, 28] arrived at the reunion happy, but after watching footage of their time in the experiment, Eden saw a different side to him and pretty much dumped him then and there.”
4. MADELEINE GOES MIA
Following her abrupt exit, Madeleine Maxwell, 30, was the only cast member not to receive an invitation to the reunion.
While Nine tells Woman’s Day she was “unavailable” on the night, our sources insist “she was too unpredictable that it wasn’t worth the risk of bringing her back and having her derail the whole reunion. Her casting left a sour taste in production’s mouth. They thought she’d be TV gold but ended up causing the biggest headache.”
Sources have since claimed Madeleine has become “a ghost” since leaving the show and hasn’t spoken to any of her former co-stars or even logged into her social media accounts.
5. CAST AT WAR
By the time the reunion was filmed, things had become so toxic that producers endured a “logistical nightmare” trying to separate the different cliques into different hotels across Sydney to stop them fighting.
“Sara had to be kept away from Cass [Allen, 29]. Lauren [Dunn, 32] and Tori couldn’t be anywhere near each other. Timothy [Smith, 51] and Tristan [Black, 30] refused to go near Jack. Ben [Walters, 39] didn’t want to be near Lauren. Natalie begged to be nowhere near Collins. It was so messy,” says the source.
Meanwhile, it’d been over three months since Collins Christian, 28, and Natalie Parham, 32, left the experiment – and he was so apprehensive about seeing her “producers had to physically walk him onto the set to stop him from doing a runner”.
