Exclusive Interview
‘Finding Mr. Christmas’ Week 5’s Eliminated Hunk Breaks Down His Surprising Exit
What To Know
- The fifth week brought in Hunter King for an acting challenge involving teams of hopefuls.
- The Festive Face-off champ won behind-the-scenes access to his competitors’ camera work.
- Swooon spoke with the eliminated contestant about why he was sent home.
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Finding Mr. Christmas Season 2 Episode 5, “Christmas on Main Street.”]
Instead of having the remaining hunks jump through Five Golden Rings, the best reality show on Santa’s watch list put the remaining quintet to the screen test this week with a guest appearance from, as our eliminated hopeful put it, “Hallmark royalty.”
“You can see in the episode when I find out that Hunter King is the guest judge, I kind of flip out,” Robbie Simpson tells Swooon of his costarring shot with the Holiday Touchdown favorite. “She’s just so incredible, such a good actor, one of my favorites on the Hallmark Channel. So to get to act with her and do this scene, I was feeling really confident going into it.”
So much so that the ebullient Western Massachusetts native was stunned to wind up in the bottom two alongside scene partner Rustin Sailors.
“I had no idea, truly. I guess you should always expect the unexpected,” continues the actor, who has been seen in The Path and General Hospital. “I felt more confident going into that elimination than I did almost any of the other ones, to be honest. Even the talent show [last week] because I thought everyone did so well, and we really didn’t know how the fans were going to vote.”
Hallmark Media / Kim Nunneley
“But as Jonathan started to say things and as other people got complimented for things that they did,” things started to click that the professionally trained Simpson — “I have a graduate degree in acting!” — may have played it too safe to avoid stepping on toes.
“The other group really went off script and started making up lines and improvising and doing all of that,” he explains. “And that can sometimes be disrespectful to the writer. So yeah, a little bit of improv can be fun, but I don’t know, I kind of thought, ‘Oh no, they really took a big risk. I don’t know that it’s going to pay off.’ But it did pay off for that team. I don’t feel like I did a bad job. I don’t feel like I did a poor job. I just feel like the other team took a huge risk. It could have gone either way, and it went positively for them.”
Still, there’s no hard feelings. In fact, he explodes into a smile bigger than the mountains that surrounded the show’s Utah mansion when asked about his experience not only as the season’s only openly gay contestant, but one of its winning-est ones as well. “In terms of challenge wins, if you want to list them, I left with three challenge wins, which I think was the most at the time when I left,” he recounts, adding in the immunity he was gifted from Angel during the talent show (which he handily won anyway).
“That was huge. Getting the immunity from a fellow cast member and forming this brotherhood [with the cast], that was the real win….Angel and I are so close today. We’re just really close friends, and I know that was a big moment for our friendship. And Rustin’s incredible. He is one of my best friends…he’s staying at my apartment right now in New York City, and we just threw the New York City watch party together.”
Given that he’s so upbeat, encouraging of others, and rocks a flannel like a pro, it’s only fitting that the alarmingly handsome Simpson wound up on the network’s unscripted star search. But what is the most Hallmark thing about him?
“Oh, the most Hallmark thing about me is that I love going back home to where I grew up,” he readily reveals. “I grew up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, and every time I go back there, I’m so happy to get in the suburbs. I love my little coffee shop and running into people on the streets.”
He continues, “When I was younger, when I was in high school, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I couldn’t wait to go to ‘the big city,’ to go to New York, to go to L.A. And now that I’ve done both of those big cities and spent time in Chicago and many other places, the only place I want to be is back home in the Berkshires. And that sounds pretty Hallmark to me.”
Sounds like a movie we’d watch, too!
Finding Mr. Christmas, Season 2, Mondays, 8/7c, Hallmark Channel
