We’ve told you before how the application form to be on The Bachelor is so long, it requires two coffees, at least three snacks and a whole afternoon blocked out in your calendar to complete.
(It also gets pretty weird, as we discovered…)
But as Bachelor-addicted as we are, we never really stopped to think about what happens after the ‘submit’ button is clicked, when a producer decides to make you the next reality TV star (for a season, at least).
Thankfully, the woman who won Sam Wood’s heart on the show’s third Aussie season, Snezana Markoski, has let us in on exactly what happens before contestants looking for love make their first move out of the limo.
Snezana on the audition process she went through before winning Sam Wood’s heart:
Speaking to Monty Diamond on Show & Tell, the 37-year-old admitted she never even expected to make it past the application process. She only filled out the form as a way to get her sister and young daughter Eve to “shut up” about her needing to find a boyfriend.
“I wasn’t serious about getting on the show, I was just doing it because Eve was like, ‘Mummy you have to find a boyfriend’,” she said.
“There were questions like ‘what are you passionate about?’ and I was like, ‘whopper with cheese’. These were my answers.”
It seems producers liked Snez’s cheeky and down-to-earth responses and, days later, she was invited to an in-person audition in her hometown of Perth.
It was here the show’s host, Osher, gathered potential contestants, locked them in a room and made them promise they would never, ever hurt the precious Bachelor’s feelings or break his heart.
Okay, not really. But Snez did admit things got rather… intense.
LISTEN: Snez and Sam told Kyle and Jackie O they conceived their child on a plane. But is sex on a plane really a thing? The Mamamia Out Loud team discuss. Post continues after audio.
“It was a group audition with a bunch of other girls, and they get you to stand up and do things,” she said.
“They ask you questions like: ‘What would you do in this situation? What would you do in that situation?’
“You’d have to look at the person next to you and give them a compliment, then look at the person on the other side and tell them something you don’t like about them.”
Sounds… fun.
This isn't the first time a former contestant has shed some light on exactly how potential love matches are chosen for the show: way back in 2015, another woman who had auditioned for Sam Wood's season called the experience "one of the most humiliating experiences" of her life.
"They asked us to line ourselves up in order of who we thought was best looking to worst. Then asked us some odd questions about our views on politics and the like," the woman, who chose to remain unnamed, told The Fix.
"Then they asked us to line ourselves up from most intelligent to least intelligent. In the end, I just quit because I didn't want to do any of it."
The woman also alleged the girls were made to compete in a "rose scramble", with flowers being tossed on the ground and women fighting to be the first to get their hands on them.
"[They were] basically clawing each other out of the way to get to the rose. Some of the girls were going really hard," she said.
"It was scary."
Luckily, it was all worth it in the end for Sam and Snez. The couple are engaged to be married and, last October, the pair welcomed their first child together (Snezana's second), a baby girl named Willow.
Former Bachelor contestant Snezana Markoski talks about science, style, and her life as a single mum before Sam Wood.