'Bachelorette' Cecile Dishes on Alaska

Thursday, June 27, 2002

It's the era of reality TV, and nothing interests voyeuristic audiences more that watching real people in romantic entanglements. "Blind Date," "The 5th Wheel," "Elimidate" and their peers allow audiences to watch singles on dates, and revel in the accompanying flirtation and humiliation. Then, ABC's "The Bachelor" upped the stakes by adding the dangling carrot of a possible marriage proposal to the winner.

This summer, FOX decided to mix it up a bit and introduced "Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska," where five women choose from 50 single Alaskan men to find a "soul mate." Each week, four new suitors arrive to try to woo the women away from their current men. Each time the ladies are pursued, they receive $2,000 for their "dowry." At the end of the week, the ladies decide whether or not to stay with their "Man on Ice" or replace him with the new suitor.

Viewers have seen the flirtatious Rebekah (FOX has not made any of the participants last names available) make fools of the men who vie for her favor each week, only to end up raising her dowry and getting sent home anyway. The quiet Karen has stayed with her original pick, Kurt, as has the head-over-heels Sissy, who made a love match with Brent right off the bat. Andrea is causing concern by staying with Kristian, who makes it clear that marriage is not on his mind although apparently their physical relationship is going quite well. The youngest, Cecile, was shocked when her first pick, Tim, publicly declared that he just wasn't attracted to her, and has changed her Man on Ice twice in two weeks.

Cecile tells Zap2It that she has not seen the shows in advance, and watching each week is teaching her about herself. "I'm a lot more dramatic than I thought I was, and I really don't think I whine that much, but it really comes off that way," she laughs. Still, she doesn't feel set up by the show. "Obviously, at some point, what you see on TV, I actually did those things, but I'm a very dramatic person by nature, so I'd say I'm represented fairly well." She adds, "There were a few points that were missed that may have justified how I acted."

"You are trying to follow five women's lives over the course of several weeks, and of course you are not going to smash that all into less than six hours of footage . That's probably the hardest thing -- trying to keep the story all together and straight."

As for the behind-the-scenes scoop on her fellow bachelorettes, Cecile says, "Karen is a doll. She is by far, a world funnier than you ever get to see on the show. There's so much more that I learned about her after we finished filming."

"Sissie is so sweet. I learned really early on that there is no time to waste with this woman. She knows what she wants, and she's going to go out and get it. She's funny. We were saying that we were going to write a book about all her little sayings. She had all these southern things, we called them 'Sissie-isms.?"

On camera, Cecile seems to bond most with Rebekah. "She pushes buttons. You either admire her and appreciate her, or you are like, 'Oh my God, she's so obnoxious.'"

"I do believe that people underestimate the fact that she's a really good friend. She has a really good energy, and I definitely gravitated toward that."

Cecile has seen Andrea at least once a week since leaving Alaska. "I felt like she was a relationship mentor for me. Maybe because she lost her first love in a tragic accident, that definitely speeds you along the relationship path."

As for Andrea's troubled relationship with Kristian: "I honestly think that she felt like he wasn't being completely honest in saying things like 'I don't think we are going anywhere.' I think she stayed with him thinking 'You know what, whether or not we are going to end up together, I think that I just want to continue on and have this amount of time that I have with him.'"

The most challenging moment for Cecile came from her very public breakup with Tim. "I'm completely naive to the way that production works, and I don't think that they meant to set me up in terms of, 'Oh, this will really break her heart.' I don't think that anyone would knowingly put anyone in that position, but that was particularly painful."

Cecile admits that it may seem odd to look for a husband on a television show, but her personal philosophy made her open to the idea. "I think that all of the five women were pretty skeptical when we first went into it about the opportunity to actually marry someone at the end of filming. But I was completely open to it." She explains, "I think that you meet people on different levels every day and you never know who you are going to meet. It's absolutely possible to meet and marry someone immediately after the show."

She won't reveal whether or not audiences will see a proposal on the final episode of "Bachelorettes," but says she ended up learning something about men herself.

"They never change, regardless of how old they are."

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