He’ll be there for them. Chris Harrison expects to attend Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s upcoming wedding to Lauren Burnham, but if he doesn’t receive an invite, he has a backup plan in mind.
“I better be sitting front and center at Arie’s wedding,” Harrison, 47, told Us Weekly exclusively during a Bachelor in Paradise set visit in June. “If not, I’ll send them a candlestick or a serving dish … A blender or a trash can. I think I got Trista [Sutter] a trash can. That was my gift to her.”
For those who believe that gift to be odd, the veteran host had a good reason for the purchase. “She wanted it. It was a very nice trash can, and it was on their list,” he explained. “Here’s the thing, I don’t go rogue. If you have decided that’s what you want. It was this nice, automated trash can. You have to remember, like 15-16 years ago, that was cool to wave your hand over the trash can and it just open.”
As Harrison prepared to host season 5 of BIP in Mexico, he also looked back on which romance in the franchise’s history surprised him most. “I think you go, again, Carly [Waddell] and Evan [Bass] just because, if you were here, boots in the sand, there’s no way that that relationship was going to happen, much less getting engaged. And I’m pretty sure they had a baby,” he noted. “So that’s pretty phenomenal because I know Carly pretty well. I knew her better than Evan at the time. And if looks could kill, she would have killed me just for being on the jalapeño date.”
The reality star tries not to predict who the final couples in Paradise will be, but he is proud of the show’s track record of lasting relationships. “I don’t really ever pick favorites to hook up because I never really know who will end up … Could you have ever said Carly and Evan or even Jade [Roper] and Tanner [Tolbert]?” he said. “So I really don’t even know what to wish for or what to hope for because I don’t know if you could ever pick who ends up in Paradise. But I know that our success rate is very, very high. I don’t know what our batting average is, but it’s got to be enough to keep us in the big leagues.”
Meanwhile, the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire host enjoys taking on one role in particular during filming. “I think at the end of the day, honestly, to be cheesy, just friend. I get close to these people,” Harrison told Us. “By the time you are, say, the Bachelorette, with Becca [Kufrin], I’ve known her for a year now. And even with Arie. Arie I knew for what, five or six years before he was the Bachelor? And so you get to know these people. You root for them. You want it to go well, and you go on this journey with them.”
He continued: “For me, Paradise is a whole different animal because I know them all. Some better than others, but I know them all to a certain degree. So now, I feel like you’ve given me enough rope to have some fun. And so that’s why I think Paradise is a … Winter Games is a little bit like this too, where I can be a little rougher on them. I don’t have to treat everybody with kid gloves because they know my personality. They know I’m a bit of a smartass, and we can have some fun with it.”
Bachelor in Paradise airs on ABC Mondays and Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Jamie Blynn
