Following the insanely quick yeeting of Ben Ungermann from MasterChef, which finally occurred in last night’s episode, more details about the utter on-set chaos that the announcement left in its wake are starting to emerge.
Despite Ungermann’s departure from the series – due to an as-yet undetailed off-screen arrest over a “personal issue” – being known for quite some time, the series only got around to writing him off last night, in a very short statement from judge Jock Zonfrillo at the top of the show.
If you thought that announcement seemed a little abrupt, you’re absolutely not wrong.
With Hayden Quinn now off the show and doing the media rounds today, the picture of what the set was like following that announcement is a little more clear.
Speaking to HuffPost Australia, Quinn stated that “It was a real shock for us because we had no idea, obviously,” claiming that the cast was kept more or less in the dark about the situation, and was not made aware of the decision to remove him from the series until arriving on set. “We turned up and Ben wasn’t there and there was a bit of confusion, and then we heard exactly what you heard on TV last night and that’s pretty much it, that he’s not coming in,” Hayden said.
More to that, Quinn subsequently told Now To Love that he hadn’t “seen or heard from Ben since” his abrupt departure from the show.
Ungermann, for his part, only issued the briefest, cheekiest comment on the matter after it became a matter of public record, stating “don’t believe everything you read” in a buried Instagram comment back in April. Ungermann turned his Instagram comments on ahead of what we now know to have been his final week on the show, though he continues to post and promote his non-MasterChef business interests as normal.
Little detail is known about Ungermann’s arrest, and at this point it seems unlikely that it ever will be.
One of the all-time great mysteries, this one.
