Ask and you shall receive! Dr. Drew Pinsky opened up about his experience as the Eagle on season 2 of The Masked Singer.
“I used to sing when I was a kid. I was actually trained in opera for many years and wisely did not pursue that as a career, but really never did anything with it,” the 61-year-old TV personality explained exclusively to Us Weekly on Thursday, October 10. “I still sing the national anthem at sporting events and stuff like that. And I saw this show and I thought, ‘You know, I should do that show.’ Not only that I’ve known [judges] Ken [Jeong] and Jenny [McCarthy] for years and it’d be fun to kind of screw with them and spoof them and confuse them, and then I just told somebody that I should be on that show. And that was that.”
Pinsky did not even have to audition. “The next day, I was talking to producers,” he recalled.
The path to the stage was not so easy. “Immediately when I started training, I realized there was something wrong with my voice. And it turns out I had a bleed on my [vocal] cords. And then I had a varices and the treatment was supposed to be lasers, but we couldn’t do that,” he detailed. “So I had to get vocal rehab specialists to help me retrain my voice. It was crazy.”
Pinsky told Us that anyone who knew his secret identity — including wife Susan and one of his sons — had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The privacy did not stop there either.
“They have a whole procedure perfected,” he raved of the Fox show. “The moment you leave the house, not one molecule of your skin is showing. You wear gloves, you wear neck gators, you have this shield over your face, a hoodie over your head, and you are not allowed to speak. … Then they lead you by the hand into your trailer and you don’t get to speak until somebody comes into your trailer and then the door has to be shut before you can talk.”
The rules keep contestants from recognizing their competition too. “I have no way. … I don’t know anything. I don’t know who’s coming up,” he admitted. “You’re completely blinded to everything all the time. They go to great lengths to make sure there’s no interaction amongst the talent.”
Pinsky was unmasked as the Eagle during the Wednesday, October 9, episode. Johnny Weir, Laila Ali and Richard “Ninja” Blevins are the other already eliminated contestants this season.
The Masked Singer airs on Fox Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Marc Lupo
