Bachelor Nation
‘Bachelorette’s Peter Kraus Finally Reveals Shocking Reason He Was Never ‘The Bachelor’ Lead
When Peter Kraus finished Season 13 of The Bachelorette as Rachel Lindsay‘s runner-up, it seemed like a no-brainer that he’d be the next lead for The Bachelor. So, fans were quite shocked when, one month after the finale, the show dipped back into its archives and named Arie Luyendyk Jr. as the Season 22 Bachelor star.
Eight years later, Kraus is opening up about what happened and why he was never the show’s leading man.
While many fans were under the impression that Kraus simply turned down the opportunity to star on The Bachelor, he told a much different story on the Almost Famous podcast. In fact, he said he thought he was going to be the lead until the very day before Luyendyk was announced.
“The conversations about it started while I was still on the show, in therapy,” Kraus shared. “The therapist was the first one who ever brought it up. As we were getting to the final couple weeks on the show, the therapist was the one who said, ‘Would you think about being the Bachelor?'”
He said that Lindsay also brought it up during their overnight date, at which point he joked, “They’d have to pay me a lot of money!” At that point, the idea hadn’t crossed his mind, and he said it was something he’d have to think about.
While Kraus was still in Spain following his breakup from Lindsay at the final rose ceremony, producers approached him about being the Bachelor. Because he was still so heartbroken, it wasn’t a decision he was able to make then and there, so they told him they’d be in touch when he got back to the States.
ABC
From there, the conversations “courting” Kraus “started pretty quickly,” he revealed. “Flying me first [class] to Good Morning America in New York. I took a red eye out there and that was the day after the final airing of the show. They kind of walk me around town with another lead producer and said, ‘Would you do this? We think you’d be perfect.’ They took me out to a nice lunch, bought me a nice watch. It was a very interesting experience. Obviously courting me.”
He was then flown to showrunner Mike Fleiss‘ home in Malibu for a “deeper conversation,” at which point Kraus realized that being the Bachelor would have to be “really worth it financially” for him. “I don’t have money,” he explained. “I gave up a lot of what I was doing to go on this show and then ever since then had to kind of pivot.”
Kraus began negotiating, starting with a salary request, which he said was “agreed upon.” He added, “Then there was more negotiations about what I would hope to have done on the show to benefit me and my relationships, and those were eventually all agreed upon.”
He thought everything was squared away, especially when he was brought to Bachelor in Paradise to make The Bachelor announcement. While he was sitting in the trailer for the reveal, the timing kept getting pushed back, and producers eventually told him they weren’t going to do it that night. Instead, he was told it would happen on a talk show the next day, which turned into another day, and so on.
Finally, Kraus was waiting at the airport to fly to New York for a GMA reveal, but a producer sent him home (again) as the flight was boarding. “Right before they left the room, they said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and I said, ‘No, but I’m going to because I think it would be foolish not to. It would be a dumb opportunity for me to miss out on if it’s here for me.'”
After thinking it over for the weekend, Kraus texted Fleiss and assured him he was “100 percent” in, but received a response that said the show was going in a “different direction.” Luyendyk was announced as The Bachelor lead the next morning.
While it appears that Kraus effectively disappeared from Bachelor Nation after that, he said he was approached to be the Bachelor “a couple times” in the years that followed. He was also supposed to be a contestant on The Bachelor Winter Games in 2018, but revealed that before he was “supposed to fly out, they’re like, ‘We decided to go a different direction.'”
Luckily, everything worked out fine for Kraus. He’s been dating Hana Ostapchuk, a host and producer, since fall 2024.
