How Kellan Lutz Wound Up Hosting Fox's Reality Show Bullseye
It's an accepted fact that pretty much anything goes on summer TV. But even we were surprised when Fox announced Kellan Lutz would be hosting its latest extreme stunts show Bullseye.
Lutz, best known for playing Emmett Cullen in The Twilight Saga, is still in the prime of his career, recently starring in The Legend of Hercules, The Expendables 3 and making an epic return to The Comeback on HBO. That's not exactly the kind of IMDb resume you'd imagine for the host of a show in which contestants are turned into "human darts."
So how did Lutz wind up as the face of Bullseye? Oddly enough, it was Lutz's love of ABC's stunt competition Wipeout that piqued the interest of Bullseye's executive producers Jon Kroll and Scott Larsen.
"I came to the Wipeout set last year. ... I had always wanted to be on the show and I spent the whole day with the crew just hanging out," Lutz recalls. "I think they were really taken back by, 'Why is Kellan here? What's going on?' And they came up and talked to me and I said 'I love the show. I wanna be a part of it.'"
Unfortunately, the timing with Wipeout never quite worked out before the show went off the air. But his passion for the series inspired the producers to approach Lutz with a sizzle reel for Bullseye featuring the kinds of extreme stunts the show would entail. "After watching the three-minute reel, I was more than excited for the show, just to watch the show," Lutz says. "Then [Kroll] said, 'We want you to be a part of it.' And I said, 'Hell yeah! I want to do these stunts. I want to do each and every one.'"
That's when Lutz was hit with the bad news: They didn't want him to do the stunts. They just wanted him to host. Upon learning this, Lutz's interest immediately dropped. But he told the producers he knew exactly what would get him back on board - if he could do at least some of the stunts himself.
Lutz never wavered on this point and after eventually getting the go-ahead from insurance, Kellan Lutz, Reality Show Host was born. And the action star is loving every second of his new job. "It's been so much fun every day on set," Lutz gushes. "[The challenges are] unlike anything I've ever seen before. Even doing the films that I do, sometimes we use green screen and we use special effects to make stunts look more dangerous than they are."
But everything on Bullseye is extremely real. And unlike on a movie set, these stunts are not being performed by well-trained professionals. Instead, Bullseye features contestants from all walks of life, ranging from Olympic athletes to 70-year-olds and high school students, taking on everything from being dragged by a helicopter while avoiding fireballs to trying to hit targets with a baseball bat while balancing on a careening semi-truck.
But oddly enough, it wasn't any of the laymen who wound up with any serious on-set injuries. In fact, Lutz reveals he was the one who had to get five staples in his head after his attempt to become a human slingshot didn't go as planned.
Lutz tells us the full story in the video below. Bullseye airs Wednesday at 9/8c on Fox.
