Of course, prior to Collins might present his brand-new Fab Five to the world, he and his producing partners needed to discover them. And so a search started not simply for one specialist each in the fields of food and white wine, style, culture and way of life, style, and grooming—however for a group of 5 that had a gleaming chemistry with one another.
“It is lightning in a bottle, right? I tell you, casting is a big game, right? it’s crazy. It’s like chess, you move your pieces back and forth and everywhere. Ultimately, it’s chemistry. It really is chemistry,” Collins described. “We generated the top 50 men from worldwide that we had actually limited in each of the 5 classifications and we brought them all to L.A. We had a vacation where we simply played mix-and-match, however I believe the men will inform you…that they all type of discovered each other in the space of 50 and type of determined—and their chemistry and energy was so apparent and palpable in the spaces due to the fact that we did some speed dating [laughs] with 50 gay men in a hotel.”
One by one, the men started to capture his eye. “I remember Tan would really start to shine. You’re like, ‘OK, don’t leave the room, Tan.’ And then Jonathan, you would just be laughing your butt off. You’re like, ‘No, Jonathan, you stay,'” he remembered. “And then room kind of got smaller and smaller and there they were, all five of them lined up. Truly, timing and luck and chemistry—the casting gods really were there with us. It was amazing. Truly amazing.”
