Craig Sjodin/ABC
After you watched the premiere, was there anything that surprised you that you didn’t know?
Gabby: Just meeting the guys in general. Our conversations are more in-depth when we’re actually in it, and the producers don’t always show it all. It almost feels so surreal until you’re there, but meeting them in person, you’re like, “Oh, wow, this could work.”
Rachel: Yeah, totally. We’re obviously only seeing our perspective as we were going through filming. So watching it back, it’s really interesting to hear what all the guys were talking about and what their thoughts were. I remember even hearing all them chatter, like, “Oh, I want to talk to both,” or, “I want to just talk to one.” It was crazy to hear them say, “What if they’re both into me?”
Completely. Does it make sense now why some of them were maybe afraid to kiss you? I don’t think they knew what they were supposed to do.
Rachel: Yeah. They were playing it safe. We did really want them to get to know both of us. I don’t think that necessarily means that if you kissed one, you could never kiss the other. Maybe that’s what they were thinking. I definitely see how they were trying to play it safe on night one.
Gabby: In the beginning, there’s such low stakes. Nobody’s that aggressive. We’re all meeting each other for the first time. So I think that’s where Rachel and I were kind of like, “Oh, gosh, it doesn’t seem like these guys are really being as aggressive as we thought they were.” I think there was also an underlying sense of, “We also don’t want to interrupt Rachel and Gabby’s friendship.” They really did realize how close we were and didn’t want to hurt any of us. It took them a little while to gain the security to really take it into their own hands.
I loved that you canceled the rose ceremony, aside from sending a few guys home. Did you talk about that ahead of time?
Rachel: Gabby actually brought the idea to me. I didn’t even think about it. The night went by so quickly. I remember talking to her outside and her being like, “Can we honestly make a decision when we haven’t spoken to more than half these guys?” It made sense for us to cancel it, but we did both get the chance to talk to Joey, Justin, and Roby. And we knew that we didn’t feel a connection, so we didn’t want to string anyone along. That’s where the decision came from. It was on the fly, as a lot of our decisions are this season.
Gabby: We didn’t know how long the first night was going to be. And having two of us, there were true logistical things, and there just wasn’t enough time for double the amount of conversations. We didn’t know to plan for that because we’d never been there before and nobody else had been there before. Sending men home that potentially either of us hadn’t talked to was making a decision before we were ready. So we wanted to try to have as much information as we could.
Speaking of having never done this before, is there anything that you wish you could have told yourself going into night one?
Gabby: Oh, my gosh, my toes were freezing. My feet were so swollen. I know that’s not what you were thinking about, but my shoes were way too skinny.
Rachel: There was this scene that I saw where Gabby was just on the floor in the corner. Did you take off your shoes?
Gabby: I was swelling out of these tight things. It’s like wearing a bra that’s too small.
