How Real Is ‘Are You The One?’ Season 4 Cast Defends MTV Series Authenticity

MTV’s “Are You the One?” kicks off each season with a cast of 10 single men and women ready and looking for love. Throughout their weeks-long journey to find their designated “perfect match,” the reality stars tend to fall for everyone but their hand-picked partners. As viewers begin to watch speculated perfect matches fall apart on Season 4 of the series, some fans may be questioning how real the show actually is.

While some of the hit program’s leads may find themselves on the short end of the stick by series end, the newest cast members tell International Business Times the show, and their feelings, are authentic.

“I have a lot of viewers asking me, ‘The show’s fake, right? It’s scripted.’ It’s nothing scripted. Nobody told me what to say. Nobody told me how to act,” Season 4 star Giovanni Rivera, who found himself in a serious relationship two episodes in with Kaylen Zahara, told IBT in May at the show’s premiere party in New York.

Giovanni said his only guidance from the show’s production team was to follow a specific schedule for filming, but says his emotions were all his own. “I was really allowed to be myself to make mistakes,” he dished.

What you’re going to get from the show is you’re just going to get that authenticity of 20 young people going through it because we went through hell and back. There was a lot of tears. A lot of blood. There was points throughout the experiences where you start to lose hope. There’s points where you trying to be positive and you get dragged down and there’s points where we do something good and it was such a roller coaster ride and it’s draining. Nobody can prepare you for that…. You cannot prepare yourself for an experience like this. It’s just all emotions.

Tori Deal, whose new romance with Asaf Goren will result in some major drama come Monday’s episode, said that the experience even got a little too real at times.

“We all took a physiatric test before going on the show but they definitely made sure people were psychotic enough to put them on the show,” she dished. “People felt like they were in love. People felt like they hated people. Every emotion that people feel that felt to like this times 10 power… It’s really real. It was really real for me.”

Prosper Mbongue-Muna, who at one point believed he had found his true love in Tori, also touted the show’s authenticity. “Everybody really let their walls down. It was definitely real in that aspect ... This season I feel like everybody’s really putting it out there, like raw emotions. You see the drama but you always do see the love connections with everyone,” he said. “There’s a lot of love going around.”

“Are You the One?” airs Mondays at 10 p.m. EDT on MTV.