Arie Luyendyk Jr. Pokes Fun At His Controversial ‘Bachelor’ Finale On Billboard For His Real Estate Business
Arie Luyendyk Jr. has gone from The Bachelor to The Realtor. ABC’s former leading man has decided to cash in on the controversial ending to his season of the long-running reality dating show by mocking his own indecisiveness on a new billboard for his Arizona real estate business.
In case you need a refresher, on last season’s Bachelor finale Arie Luyendyk Jr. couldn’t make up his mind on who to give his final rose to. Weeks after proposing to Becca Kufrin, the former race car driver dumped her and then hunted down runner-up Lauren Burnham to propose to her instead. Arie’s awkwardly painful breakup with Becca was filmed in its entirety and played back on The Bachelor finale.
Luyendyk Jr., who married Burnham in an elegant wedding in Hawaii last month, is now using his controversial Bachelor past to plug his real estate business in Scottsdale, Arizona. The former Bachelor star is now the star of a new billboard touting his house hunting services as The Realtor.
The tagline for Arie’s advertising campaign is” “Break up with your realtor… it’s okay to change your mind.”
You can see Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s clever new billboard for his real estate business below.
Although Arie’s breakup with Becca all worked out in the end—he and Burnham are now expecting their first child, while Kufrin went on to star as The Bachelorette and is currently engaged to her final man, Blake Horstmann— at the time of the on-camera split, The Bachelor star was poised to become one of the most hated alums of the ABC franchise.
Arie Luyendyk Jr. was able to turn things around by later admitting he felt “100 percent betrayed” by Bachelor producers, whom he claims manipulated him into filming the controversial, 30-minute Becca breakup scene for viewers. According to Vulture, Arie also insisted that the extended scene, which was heavily promoted as the first “unedited” scene in the franchise’s history, was actually much edited. Arie called the whole spectacle “super unfair to me.”
But in an interview with Deadline, ABC senior vice president Robert Mills revealed that after production wrapped on Arie Luyendyk Mr.’s Bachelor finale, it was the ABC star who went to producers to reveal that he wanted a second chance with Lauren Burnham. Mills explained that Bachelor stars make a contract with the audience that they’re “going to show them the entire life cycle of their relationship—good, bad, and ugly. So we did that.”
“This Becca and Arie goodbye was so riveting that we knew we had to play it in real time,” the ABC boss explained. Mills added that he was surprised by outraged viewers who questioned why producers filmed the breakup and aired it on Arie Luyendyk’s Bachelor finale.
