'MasterChef' Contestant Wayne Lewis Insists He's Not a Villain

Wayne Lewis was this close to making it to the MasterChef Season 13 finale. He got all the way to Top 5, and he was beginning to plan the three-course finale meal he was going to cook for Gordon Ramsay, Aarón Sánchez and Joe Bastianich, and then he just had an off day.

“It’s tough because I really wanted to cook in the finale,” he tells Parade in this exclusive interview. “I think the finale would have given me the opportunity to really cook a whole menu, three courses of my food. Not Mystery Box challenges and that sort of thing. So I missed out on doing that. I’m very proud about how far I got, for sure. I’ll take it.”

Wayne made it through three of the hardest MasterChef challenges: the Restaurant Wars, Tag Team and Wall Challenges, and was eliminated on something much simpler: creating a fresh ravioli dish. Truth be told, his stuffed pasta was fine, it was the sauce that cost him his apron.

“Look, I was definitely in my head a little bit that day,” he explains. “We had just gotten back from the Hell’s Kitchen takeover, and we were all smoked mentally, physically, emotionally, we were just so tired. I had some ideas on what to do but I didn’t end up doing them, and the sauce I made just kind of disappeared on me. Gordon said the pasta was fine, it was good. Yeah, that’s the thing in the MasterChef kitchen, you just make one mistake at the wrong time and there’s no one left to go home, it’s going to be you, so here I am.”

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During our interview, Wayne came across as the nicest of guys, but on the show, he was painted as a bit of a villain, possibly because of his competitive nature and the fact that he came into the competition with a high level of confidence.

“I don’t get the villain thing,” he says. “We were all so friendly together, I guess they needed some kind of antagonist. The real villain on that show is the stress. It’s the stress and pressure of the kitchen. The MasterChef kitchen is the villain, not me.

“Look, we were told, ‘Cook with confidence. You must be on camera with confidence,’ and I took that to heart. I did everything I was asked to do. I’m a laid-back introvert at home. Really, truly. But then you get a camera in front of you and they’re like, ‘Be confident.’ Okay.”

Related: MasterChef’s Lizzie Hartman Predicts the Winner of Season 13

Wayne also shared during our chat the most chaotic moment in the MC kitchen, who he's rooting for to win, how his love of food began, what's next for him and more.

You were so close to the finale—Top 5. Does that make it even harder to turn in your apron?

Yeah, so it’s funny because during the casting process we got interviewed and stuff, and they said, “What’s your greatest fear of being on the show?” I said, “Honestly, getting my apron and going home first.” Being the first person to go home, biggest fear. That did not happen to me, thankfully. I’m very fortunate to have gone all the way to Top 5, it’s more than you can imagine.

I know I came in looking kind of confident and all that kind of stuff, and part of it is because I’m a confident guy. I’ve had some failures but more successes in life, so of course I’m going to be a little confident. But once you get into that kitchen, you’ve got all these other great competitors, you don’t know what you’re cooking next, it humbles you pretty quickly.

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I was going to ask you about being humbled because at the end you said you had more to learn than you thought.

I’d been practicing like probably everybody, practicing for a decent bit before being on the show. I’d wanted to be on the show for two years, and I was going to try out the year before, but they did a “Back to Win” season and I wasn’t able to because it was previous contestants. So, I applied, literally it was almost a year ago, so this has been a whole year journey for me.

But look, when it comes to food, you’re never going to learn it all. Gordon Ramsay’s probably the closest person on the planet to seem that he’s lived everywhere for three or four weeks somehow and literally knows the food, but the culinary hole is so deep. And that’s why you will never, ever hear me in the kitchen saying, “This was perfection.” I don’t believe in that in the kitchen. It can always be better, you can always improve, you can always tweak. I really brought that home with me as an ethos in the kitchen, for sure, from the show.

Speaking of the finale, did you have your three courses already planned? Did you know what you were going to do?

I had started to work on them in the previous days, I did. I was going to do something very Midwest steakhouse elevated. I didn’t feel like I’d really gotten to cook much traditional Midwestern style food the whole season, really. I did some Mediterranean, I did Southern food, I did Tex-Mex, so I thought that was time to kind of bring it all home.

The dish that you and Grant Gillon did for the Wall Challenge was midwestern.

That was close, but no, I was going to do something much better. I don’t even want to say what it is, because in the future I’m probably going to go online and do a series of videos and show people what I was going to make.

MasterChef is based on skill, but a little bit of it is a game and you tried to play that strategically. How much do you think it helped you for the Wall Challenge when your pairing of Brynn and Kolby sent them home?

At that point, really, when we’re down to that number, everybody was a strong competitor. My feeling was that they weren’t going to send both me and Grant from the Midwest home. I just didn’t see them wiping out the Midwest in that episode. And so, I thought it was the strategic pick, to pick Grant, and also potentially we did have the same cooking styles when it came to that dish.

Let me tell you, I have not been asked what the most chaotic moment inside the MasterChef kitchen was, but it was that moment in the pantry, for sure. Because literally we were kept apart, we couldn’t talk about what we wanted to make. We ran in there, we had two minutes to talk about it and then three minutes to shop, doors closed.

We didn’t have that all season, the pantry was open. If they made a bloopers reel, they’d show me running back and forth to the pantry all season. So, yeah, I thought Grant would be a great partner, and he was. He’s a great communicator and we compromised really well.

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I’m assuming since Grant’s also from the Midwest, you’re rooting for him to take the whole thing?

Absolutely. It’s weird because you get to be competitive and friendly with some of the others and so it’s hard. I was rooting honestly for both Grant and Kennedy because I thought what Kennedy had done this season was really unique. I’ve been watching for 12 seasons, and I really have never quite seen someone with her cooking style on the show, and I thought she represented incredibly well. She definitely deserves to be in the finale.

It took you a year to get on, but you’ve been watching for 12 years. Why was now the right time to apply?

For me, my business is running on its own, I’ve got a whole team and a whole staff, so I’m just sitting here all day cooking anyway, and so I might as well go on my favorite TV cooking show and see how well I can do. I’m someone who always hunts challenges, I always need something new and exciting, and boy, this really fit the bill for me.

What’s next then? Are you going to expand your company or are you going to focus more on food-oriented things?

I’ve got a CEO who runs my company and a great team. We’re going to be building an event space, we’re going to be getting into the event business along with our magazines and websites and whatnot. For me personally, I started off with this T-shirt brand, it’s KitchenVibes.US. They’re culinary inspired T-shirts designed to be conversation starters. I started out with three of them so far, it’s doing pretty well.

I’m going to start there, but I’m not going to be jumping behind the line anytime soon at my age to start a restaurant. That’s a young man’s game for sure. But like I said on the show, my overall dream of owning a bed and breakfast in retirement and scratching my cooking itch there, that’s still on the table.

Tell me about how you came to food in the first place. I read you started in college.

Yeah, so I’m from Rochester, New York. We don’t have a really rich culinary history up there, a lot of casseroles growing up, that sort of thing. When I went down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for college, I went to LSU, that’s where I really got turned on by food. The ingredients, the spices, the preparations down there, I got hooked. My first cookbook was an Emeril Lagasse. I still have 25-year-old Emeril cookware that I cook with today. Yeah, I just got hooked then, and I’ve become a foodie ever since and I kind of self-taught, just slowly built my skills over the years.

It wasn’t like a starving student where you needed to cook in order to eat?

No, no, no. I started my first business, I had a business in college. I started in the publishing industry at LSU as a student, starting a weekly newspaper. So, I’ve always been a business entrepreneurial person and food has always been, since then, a real passion of mine. I’m just super fortunate I got to go on one of my favorite all-time TV shows and live out a dream. That was freaking awesome.

Have you ever met Emeril since he was your first cookbook?

No! No, and he was a judge on the Legends season of MasterChef. I knew we had some guest judges this season, so I was really hoping. That would have been super cool. I’ll say not this time, but I’m open to coming back.

MasterChef airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET on FOX.

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