Hunted Australia 2023 Fugitives Callum and Ben have weighed in on their controversial capture, which saw many fans brand the series as “fake” and “rigged”.
During the July 24 episode, the IT aficionados were assisted by a seemingly kind stranger at a train station.
However, it turned out that the stranger was actually Ground Hunter Kellie‘s BROTHER. Who immediately called the Hunters, informing them that he caught some Fugitives in the wild.
Of course, this seemed far more than a coincidence, a thought many fans voiced on social media.
“Most fixed show of all time,” one viewer aptly put it.
However, the captured Fugitives have rubbished these claims, telling Yahoo! Lifestyle that “what you see on TV is exactly what happened”.
“What happened was not fake, it wasn’t rigged, it was real,” Callum said. “We can’t say more about that, but all we can say is that the chances of what happened are astronomically low, but it did actually happen.
“Nothing was staged.”
Ben added: “It’s a TV show and there is obviously a lot of editing and the season’s made therein, but I can guarantee that that was all exactly as it played out.”
Hunted Australia‘s Callum and Ben says capture was a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’
The duo also admitted they’d do things differently should they get another go at Hunted.
“We had a game plan going in and we wanted to give information overload, which we achieved,” Callum said. “But… we never planned that that’s how that day would end.
“We felt so safe because there were no wanted posters, there was no hotline, there was no way of them getting in contact with the Hunters.”
“What we were doing was working,” Ben believes. “The event that got us caught had nothing to do with what we were up to, it was all to do with wrong place, wrong time.”
Talk of Hunted Australia being “fixed” or “scripted” only continues to mount, even after Hunted HQ’s Chief David Craig debunked rumours.
“A lot of people say it’s scripted or whatever, it’s simply not,” he told Yahoo! Lifestyle. “There are no scripts, there’s nothing to follow. It’s dynamic, and you never know what’s going to happen.”
He also said he believes the show is so entertaining to watch because it’s “authentic” and “as real as it possibly could be”.
“No one knows what we’re going to do as Hunters,” he details. “No one tells me where to send the ground Hunters or what they can do.
“I’ll decide that and I will send them where I want them and that will be based on the intelligence that the Hunters gather.”
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