The Bachelor star Laura Byrne has some blunt advice for Married At First Sight villains

As Married At First Sight’s villains complain about their on-screen portrayal and “bad editing,” one former reality star has a blunt response.

Having gone through the reality TV machine and come out the other side relatively unscathed, The Bachelor’s Laura Byrne has some words of advice for this year’s Married At First Sight contestants.

“I think that you have to be genuine as a person to who you are,” she told news.com.au.
Don’t be an a**ehole to get airtime because it’s not going to be in your favour. The backlash is not nice, no-one enjoys it.”

Like most of Australia, Byrne is a self-confessed MAFS addict and thinks the show is “super entertaining” as long as you take it “with a grain of salt” but believes some of the show’s villains might be regretting their actions about now.

Married At First Sight has been packed with drama, with Sam Ball and Ines Basic this year’s villains after cheating on their partners.

Byrne, who is an ambassador for Hello Fresh, thinks the excuse of bad editing only goes so far when it comes to behaviour.

Laura Byrne is an ambassador for Hello Fresh

“I do think it’s 50-50 in that the edit can manipulate, however, at the end of the day people still say the things that they say,” Byrne said.

“I can’t speak for MAFS, I think that MAFS is a little bit more edited than The Bachelor, but from my experience on The Bachelor everyone’s personality was presented pretty much the way they behaved for the majority of the show.

“The girls who were nice were actually nice girls, and the girls were mean were actually pretty mean.”

Byrne, who fell in love on The Bachelor with Matty Johnson and is now expecting a child with him, warned that acting out was never worth it.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a villain that’s come out of reality TV and thought that they’ve been really happy about being a villain, even if they played it up for the camera for airtime” she said.

Ines Basic

Sam Ball

“The backlash from it is so strong because people just don’t like nasty people.”

But as Byrne discovered, a backlash can still happen even if you win The Bachelor, as when she emerged as Johnson’s choice over runner-up Elise Stacy not everyone was happy about it.

“It was just relentless — for all of the hundreds of beautiful messages that we got, we also received a lot of hate,” she said.

“I think it doesn’t matter how many times people say, ‘Ah, you’re an amazing couple,’ the people that say it’s never going to work out or they say horrible things, they’re the comments that cut through.”

Matthew Johnson and Laura Byrne are expecting a child together. Picture: Richard Dobson

Fortunately for Byrne and Johnson “things got back to normal very quickly,” and they are now busy preparing for the birth of their child.

Byrne said having Hello Fresh had taken the pressure of preparing healthy meals, especially when she had been struggling with morning sickness.

“In the first trimester it was so hard because I felt so sick all the time, you just kind of feel like you’ve got a hangover and so I wanted to eat carby food a majority of the time,” she said.

“But having Hello Fresh was really good because it meant I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, so that when I was not well I could just go and make what was already ready.”