MAFS 2024: Surprising strict producer rule revealed

Contestants have to follow this rule or face being edited out of the episode.

Married At First Sight Australia stars have to follow a very strict rule if they don’t want to face being edited out of entire episodes.

MAFS is deep into its latest season, and it’s once again proved to be as controversial as ever with viewers.

MAFS stars have to stick to a very strict rule during filming. Picture from Channel 9.

The Dinner Party episodes have been some of the most explosive yet, and now past MAFS stars have revealed what really goes down behind the scenes.

Alyssa Barmonde has revealed that Sara was heard asking for a glass of wine on Wednesday’s episode because it’s likely she’d used up her allotted amount.

“You saw Sara [Mesa] ask, ‘Can I have a glass of wine?’, because they probably would’ve removed the wine at that point,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle’s Behind The Edit podcast. “If you’re too drunk, they can’t use your footage. So if you’re slurring your words and you’re really messy, they can’t use that footage.”

However, sometimes this worked to MAFS stars advantage, and they’d put on an act to mess with producers if they decided they didn’t want something aired.

Fellow 2023 bride Melinda Willis told Behind the Edit that participants on her season would sometimes act drunk so they could go home without doing straight-to-camera interviews.

“You’re meant to have like, roughly two glasses, but they really just cut you off when you start not being able to do a voxie which is your chat to camera,” she explained.

“So if you didn’t want to do your chat to camera, you would just drink or act drunk and then if you couldn’t string your sentences together they’d be like, ‘Thanks so much’. And you know it’s not going to be used because they can’t use it.”

This year's series has proven to be one of the most controversial yet. Picture from Channel 9.

Willis went on to confess that producers messed up last season after allegedly giving the contestants too much alcohol and leaving them with barely any usable footage.

Melinda went on to share that producers could use very little footage from the final dinner party last season because the cast got too drunk.

“It went so long and I remember them taking away the alcohol and there was no food,” she recalled. “We were getting so tired that we were all sleeping so everyone was talking into their microphones, ‘Alcohol! Alcohol! Alcohol!’. And then they finally brought out one more round hours later, and everyone just went for gold.”

“By the end of it, we were all so drunk. But it wasn’t just one person, it was all of us. So they couldn’t have no footage or no chat to cameras. So I think that night was just really not good,” she added.

Originally published as MAFS 2024: Surprising strict producer rule revealed