Roy Orbison Jr. referred to the Below Deck Mediterranean producers as “piranha sharks” who swarmed him like bees when he started drinking on the boat, recalling that they “were jumping out closets” in an effort to capture his every move. Orbison got very drunk during one night on the boat and had to be restrained by another guest in order to avoid having him go overboard. He laughed and waved at the cameras as he retreated to his cabin, but insisted he didn’t break the fourth wall because production swarmed him.
Orbison recalled being intensely followed on the boat. “There was no fourth wall because they were like piranha sharks around me,” he recalled on the Gangplank Report podcast. “As soon as I picked up the first drink that I was actually drinking, they were jumping out of the closets and they have earpieces. They all have earpieces.”
“There’s the main producer,” he continued. “So you could just tell they were just like going ‘primary on the second thing in a back! Primary.’ And I was getting attacked by all the cameramen and they were swarming like bees, zooming in on my nose and my belly and everything. So I had six cameras all around me the whole time.”
“So I walk in there by myself doing nothing and there are six cameras filming me scratch my nose,” he continued. “So you’re going to look at them. There’s real people there and you’ve got to look at them and wink. And you know, we also got to know some of the camera [operators]. So we’d be my cameraman buddy, the one I like. We get would … you know. So, again, I wasn’t really doing it for TV. I was doing people who it was me and this guy having a moment. And there my funniest thing was as I’m walking back, I’m totally by myself. No one’s around. And I go ‘That was a pleasant evening.’ I have so many one-liners.”
Orbison had a few occasions of waving to the cameras or smiling at a production crew member during the episode. He also shared that his drunken night only occurred once during the family’s lengthy charter and lasted three hours. “There was no partying on the first day,” he said. “There was no partying on the second day. On the third day, I started to party after the kids went to sleep. There was zero partying on the fourth and fifth day.”
Orbison was surprised because producers built the majority of his storyline around the few hours he was drunk. “This was three hours out of a total of five days I think,” wife Asa Hallgren shared. “And it was over pretty quickly. Like we went to bed pretty quickly when it went down.”
He revealed the charter was a lot longer than it appeared on the show. Plus Orbison said there were many moments he and his family had with the crew that was left on the cutting room floor. “And from a technical point, I guess they wanted to focus in more on the relationship between Lexi [Wilson] and chef Mat [Shea] and that story arc,” he said.
“So this just doesn’t fit in,” he continued. “You know, they can have too much Mat and not enough Malia and stuff. And so you don’t get to see Beau was there, but it was really Roy III. Roy to be really connected with Mat and they were laughing and making stuff and they made one of the meals. And I really thought they could have fit that in so well. So it turns out I have more fun on the boat. I don’t know what they use or what they don’t. They didn’t use anything we were going to use.”