We spoke to 3 former MAFS contestants about what really happens and... goodness.

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It’s back.

Kisses, misses, tears and tantrums.

For the 10 weeks that Married at First Sight fills our screens, Australia is hopelessly hooked.

From fake marriages to fighting contestants, the show never fails to provide car-crash television that captivates over a million metro viewers each night.

Watch: This year’s contestant Amanda says her wedding vows to Tash on MAFS. Post continues below.

But the low-brow show also tends to raise our brow. Because we can’t help but wonder: What actually happens behind-the-scenes of the most dramatic show on television? I spoke to three former contestants of the show and the first answer is: a lot.

The contestants – Nasser Sultan from the 2018 season, Carly Bowyer also from 2018, and Dan Webb from 2019’s season – all told similar stories.

From the casting process to the producers’ involvement, here is what the former MAFS contestants had to say.

The wedding day

“My wedding day was pretty bad,” Carly remembers with a wince, “to the point where my bridesmaids made complaints to the production company for poor treatment.”

The bride, who was matched with Justin Fischer, says her guests were left on the boat on which the ceremony took place for six hours “without food and only alcohol”.

“Before the ceremony, the bridesmaids and I got locked in a windowless room downstairs with no air, and my bridesmaid fainted. My brother yelled at the production company for help, and no one would do anything,” Carly recalls.

“After that, all my friends and family wanted nothing to do with the show, and therefore didn’t come back later on and participate in the show for family visits.”

Dan remembers the wedding day also being an exhausting day, saying "you do your wedding three or four times, so they can get different angles."

"They don't have music [when the bride walks down], it's pretty quiet," he laughs. "I didn't really enjoy my day, it was very stressful."

Carly adds, "It was the longest day of my life. I started filming at 6am and didn't go to bed until 4am, with a camera crew filming us as we got into bed.

"Then we were woken up at 5.30am... and then off on an overseas flight for the honeymoon."

The producers' involvement

Whispers of the producers manipulating scenarios on reality TV is a tale as old as... well, gosh, as old as the inception of reality TV. But the details of the extent of their involvement are nevertheless eye-opening.

"I like to call the producers the 'smiling assassins'," Carly tells Mamamia. "They smile and are lovely to your face, then they manipulate every situation to the advantage of the show. They will do whatever it takes to get you to trust them, so they can get the most out of you.

"I remember one time where they created an artificial fight between Justin and I - they whisked us off in separate directions for a day, confiscated our phones, and fed things in our ear about the other person," Carly recalls. "Then they put us in a scene together to 'have it out'. We're both smarter than that and we could both see straight through it and when we reunited for the 'dramatic scene', we just looked at each other and laughed."

Nasser agrees, saying the producers have "a lot" of influence over the storylines of the show.

"They'll pull you aside if they're not happy with it, and they say, 'Okay, you're obviously angry about what she did. Can you go back and elaborate on that? Can you ask those really hard questions?'"

Nasser recalls a specific time in which a producer rang him, and got upset that he wasn't providing enough entertainment for the cameras.

"'You guys are giving me nothing,'" Nasser recalls a producer telling him. "You've wasted my time, you've wasted my camera's time... This is not good enough. I'm sitting here and I'm bored...'

"That's when the wife-swapping scenario happened [with Dean Wells and Davina Rankin]," Nasser claims. "There's so much manipulation it's not funny. It's not real."

"They also say, 'If you piss us off, we're going to portray you as an arsehole.'"

Dan is still under contract with Channel Nine, which remains for 18 months after airing, and therefore declined to talk about his experience with the producers.

Living together

Nasser talks about how all contestants are given curfews - explaining that during the week their curfew is 8pm and on Friday and Saturdays it is 10pm. 

"You can't do much," says Dan. "You can't go out with the other contestants. You're not allowed to speak to them off-camera. You live in the same hotel... but if you want to go to the gym in the building, you have to pick a time to make sure there is no one else at that time."

Carly adds: "We all went through many weeks of living in 'school camp', being told when to eat, when to go to the toilet, what to say, what to wear, what to think... so we were all incredibly vulnerable and a lot of people had ongoing problems for months afterwards, and they used that to their advantage.

"There was a therapist on hand that we could talk to at any time, but she had a direct line to the executive producer, so anything we said wasn't in confidence," Carly remembers, before adding that "the ill-treatment came from the production company directly, not Channel 9".

As for filming, Nasser says the dinner parties were "massive days".

"We start filming [getting ready for] the dinner parties at midday, arrive at 4pm and leave at three in the morning."

As for the commitment ceremonies, Dan says they "go for about 12 hours, depending on how many couples are there."

"It's a long process the dinner parties and the commitment ceremonies. And they're back-to-back days. So the dinner parties are always the day before the commitment ceremony so that it's fresh in everyone's mind, because usually the dinner parties are where all the gossip comes from," Dan says.

So how much do they get paid for all of this? "All for $150 a day," answers Nasser with a rueful laugh. "We had to pay our own tolls, parking, everything. It's like pocket money."

Listen: Mamamia's daily podcast, The Quicky, look at how much reality TV stars get paid. Post continues below.

After filming ends...

After production finished, Carly began a relationship with fellow contestant, Troy Delmege.

"The biggest challenge for me was the fact that I was forced to keep my relationship between Troy and I a secret until the reunion dinner party," Carly shares. "I got daily calls from the producers bullying and threatening me if I told Ashley [Troy's original partner] that Troy and I were together.

"I was alienated from the rest of the group, was banned from media, told I couldn't talk to anyone or see Troy, and had a massive target put on my back, which made a lot of people turn against me.

"I was threatened with lawsuits and I got told multiple times that they were in control of the editing suite, and they could make me the most hated woman in Australia if I didn't do what they told me to do.

"It was so horrible that I cried on a daily basis and actually felt scared of what they might do."

Nasser calls for this year to be the last, saying it is simply "not believable anymore".

Channel Nine did not respond to Mamamia's request for comment at the time of publication.

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