Inbetweeners actor Joe Thomas dished the dirt on the foul-smelling interaction he had with Bear Grylls while filming Netflix series.
The 41-year-old appeared on reality competition show Celebrity Bear Hunt earlier this year, hosted by Holly Willoughby, in which a group of clueless celebs have to evade Bear Grylls while surviving in the Costa Rican wilderness.
There’s no doubt that Bear, 51, is one of the most famed TV survivialists around but making it in the natural world is not a task for the weak-willed. Sacrifices must be made such as… personal hygeine.
In a new interview Joe admitted there was one aspect of Bear’s survival guide 101 that he simply couldn’t stomach.
‘He is very smelly.
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‘There was a bit where he blindfolded me using the thing he’d have around his neck, I mean that sounds quite kinky, and genuinely he was like the f***ing smelliest thing I’ve ever… I mean disgusting,’ he recalled to The Sun.
Joe went as far as to pose that the TV personality might not ‘wash at all’ in an attempt to camoflage his odour because ‘if you smell nice that’s when the animals smell you’.
As such, he miserably added: ‘So I genuinely think he might not have washed. That was the smelliest thing I’ve ever smelled.
‘It was like it’d gone beyond like old sweat. It was into a whole kind of new spectrum of smells, so that was a moment.’
The Man vs Wild star certainly takes an immersive approach to life (he would completely dominate a game of two truths and a lie) and has done everything from eating goat’s testicles to drinking his own urine.
During filming for this new series, Bear was bitten by a non-venemous snake in the Bear Pit (a particuarly dagerous part of the rainforest), although he took it in his stride.
As he said at the time: ‘There’s always going to be a risk – we’re in the jungle, there are wild animals, there’s venomous snakes, there’s scorpions, crocodiles. But it’s about managing that risk.
‘A member of the safety team is with each of the cast in the Bear Pit but at a distance, so if they see them getting into a situation they think is going to be dangerous they would step in.’
And he wasn’t the only one to encounter danger while filming.
At one point Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen had to be hooked up to oxygen after almost drowing in shark infested waters.
‘I was struck by what a lovely shade my lips had gone, bluey grey. I might bring that out in a wallpaper. It was a really, really weird thing, because, yes, I could tell that I was quite close to not existing but I didn’t feel panicked about it,’ he recalled to Metro when the show came out.
Despite the chaotic goings-on the show won’t be returning for a second season. Perhaps the only silver lining is that celebrities will be saved from smelling Bear too closely.
Celebrit Bear Hunt is available to stream on Netflix now.
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