Soccer great Carli Lloyd definitely questioned her decision when she arrived for the filming of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test for Fox. There wasn’t any time to prepare for the extreme heat and effort required to perform quasi-military training exercises for the entertainment of TV viewers.
“I didn’t even understand fully what I was getting into until after the contract was signed,” Lloyd said during a panel with fellow contestants Hannah Brown and Kenya Moore at Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted event. “And then once the little snippets of what we were up against came through, I had a little second-guessing. We literally no idea.”
Fellow “recruit” Brown, a former Bachelorette on ABC, was equally gobsmacked by what was in store for her and her fellow celebrity competitors, a list that included Jamie Lynn Spears, Mel B, Dwight Howard, Mike Piazza, Kate Gosselin and Moore. The show follows the celebrities as they perform demanding training exercises led by an elite team of ex-Special Forces operatives.
“I don’t think there’s any way to really prepare yourself for what we did, even if we did know what was going on,” Brown said. “I was definitely in the dark and I’m kind of glad that I was, because I think I probably would have let a little bit of fear get in the way, for sure.”
Special Forces debuted January 4, marking Fox’s highest-rated and most-watched Wednesday debut in over a year. The show is an adaptation of the British reality series SAS: Who Dares Wins.
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The first episode required the celebrities to fall backwards from a helicopter into the ocean. Landing the wrong way meant serious injury, which led to Gosselin having to bug out of the “competition.”
“That day felt like a week,” Brown recalled. “I’m like, ‘OK, this is gonna be a lot harder than I thought.’ What I thought would be one of the scariest things … jumping out of the helicopter backwards … was just the tipping point for what we were about to endure.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
