Interview: "Expedition Impossible"'s Dave Salmoni is Just a Big Pussycat.
Dave Salmoni
If you didn't know much about Dave Salmoni, the host of ABC's new adventure reality show Expedition Impossible, beyond the fact that he's a wild animal trainer who once actually faced down a charging lion on the African savanna, it would be understandable if one expected him to be a brash, cocky, intimidating kind of guy.
In fact, he's quite the opposite. Salmoni not only has a sense of humor about himself, but during a phone conversation, he comes across as self-effacing, soft spoken and easy-going. He also cares passionately both about the animals he works with and the natural world, all of which makes him the perfect person to host Expedition Impossible, which Salmoni states quite unequivocally is not another The Amazing Race.
While Expedition Impossible does involve teams racing against each other in exotic locales, all of the action takes place in the Kingdom of Morocco, and the challenges the competitors must face involve tasks more closely related to actually navigating through the wilderness. Additionally, the races in ABC's show live in tents for the duration of their journey. This stands in stark contrast to The Amazing Race which has competitors jetting around the world, staying in hotels and doing challenges that often involve doing tasks and solving puzzles based on local traditions and themes.
AfterElton.com recently caught up with Salmoni, who hails from Canada, to discuss his gay fanbase, Expedition Impossible's gay teammates and much more.
AfterElton: You've trained lions, so you're used to tremendous pressure. You've now got 60 seconds convince us to watch Expedition Impossible and tell us how it’s different from The Amazing Race. Go!
Dave Salmoni: Expedition Impossible, in my opinion, is probably the biggest most epic adventure you’ve ever seen on TV. The Amazing Race is great. It’s a fantastic fun scavenger hunt but this is an expedition. This is 13 teams of three ordinary Americans doing the extraordinary. And what I mean by that is we’re literally pushing these guys to their physical and mental limits. They get pushed over on sand dunes, they get to the top of mountains, they cross the desert. They take camels and mules and everything else, trying not to be eliminated so they can eventually finish their expedition.
AE: You’re obviously a very handsome fellow. At what point in
your career did you realize you were attractive to both men and women
and start to play on that a little?
DS: I certainly didn’t grow up in a place where I
thought I was attractive to anybody. In my circle of friends, I’m
certainly not considered the good looking one. It was only when I
started doing photo shoots when someone said, “Hey, I’d like to you take
your shirt off” and I’d say, “Why the hell do you want that?” Or some
magazine says, “Hey, I’d like you to be one of our bachelors!”
That’s when I recognized that I had that kind of fan base and people
were interested in me instead of just as a conduit to the adventures I
go on. It’s super flattering. I don’t know how else to deal with it than
be extremely flattered by it.
Here is one example!
AE: At what point did you realize you had a growing and vocal fan base among gay men?
DS: Luckily, the gay fan base, or my gay fan base,
seems to be very vocal. I knew immediately when they started to
recognize me because they were the first ones to compliment me. They are
very open about it. In the last few years, I started to see it online
and with some of our viewers and we welcome that. We know there are gay
websites and gay magazines and a whole culture and social networking out
there of people that like to watch television and we reached out to
them and said, “Hey, we embrace that.”
Hmm, why do many gay men find him appealing?
AE What made you want to do this show? And how did you come to be involved with it?
DS: I felt like this show was tailor made for someone like me. I’ve been doing adventures like this for 15 to 20 years. The adventurous stuff and being out in the middle of nowhere is sort of what I’ve always been drawn to. So you have that, and add the physical element and the competitive element of this being a race and that’s the other side of my life, which is fitness.
So when I heard that Mark Burnett was doing something like this for ABC, I kicked the door down and said, I’m the guy for you. Luckily, Lisa Hennessey and Mark both wanted someone that was believably a guy who could go out there and do what these guys were doing. And have me act as a little bit of a teacher, a little bit of a guide for their journey.
AE: Team Fab Three is a favorite with our readers. Now without any spoilers are there any thoughts you can share about them?
DS: My favorite thing is that I think they played on
the fact that they were underestimated. When you first meet them, and
you see the trailer, there are a couple of moments and someone says,
"I’m not going to get beat by people in knee high socks." Because you
have this beautiful girl and her brother and her brother’s ex-boyfriend,
and you look at them as the good-looking team. And possibly think, “Oh
they just want to be on reality TV.” What you don’t know is that they
are super athletes and they are such a strong group. They push hard and
they broke down some pretty serious stereotypes for some people who
didn’t expect it from them.
A.J. Gibson, Kari Gibson and Ryan Carrillo
AE: Looking back at your career, having sort of broken through as the guy who went to South Africa and was working with lions, are you surprised to now find yourself hosting a reality show like this?
DS: You know it’s funny, because I’ve had so many crazy turns in my career I guess the surprise is going away. Am I shocked when I look back? For sure. I’ll even go further back. I used to look at pictures of lions and tigers [as a kid], and that was my fascination and I never expected that to be a job, and then it became one.
And then for someone to come to me in television and say, “Hey, we’ll pay for you to do any animal adventure that you want to go on and in any country you want to be in,” that shocks me. And that lifestyle continues and I’m into 12 to 15 years of zipping around the world in the darkest jungles and the highest mountains. The fact that I’m hosting a network television show for Mark Burnett really doesn’t sound like me at all, but then when you have a look, oh, it’s an expedition show in the middle of Morocco and people are pushed past their limits and are living in tents. That’s totally me.
AE: What most surprised you about doing the show?
DS: That because reality TV has this stigma of testing people and showing people at their worst, we didn’t do that. I can tell you that the contestants of this show are amazing people and when they were pressured they came together. The common enemy happened to be the terrain that we put them on and the challenges that we made them face, yet they actually bonded together. So instead of around the camp screaming and yelling and pointing fingers and hating each other, we had our leaders cooking dinner for the guys that were slower so they got home to a warm meal. We’d have firemen racing up to save the California girls when they were in trouble. We saw the best of humanity, which is not usual for reality television.
AE: Did you look at any of the teams and think, “Oh good grief, what are you doing here? You don’t know what you’re in store for?”
DS: Oh my god, how could you not look at a blind guy and think, what the hell are you doing here? I know, and you know, you will be pushed and tested and you can’t see. You can’t see the course. I was shocked and horrified, and I almost thought this is mean spirited to have people dragging this blind guy across Morocco. Obviously, within 10 seconds that got turned upside down because he’s really one of the toughest and baddest dudes you’re going to see in this expedition.
AE: I’ve been watching some clips of your past TV shows and appearances and I have concluded two things. First, you might be slightly mentally imbalanced, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. But watching you have a lion charge you and you confronting him, makes it hard to think otherwise. What were you thinking in that clip and how much danger were you actually in?
DS: That moment of time I was in the most life threatening danger you can imagine. The lion could have possibly wanted to attack me and I had to show him he wasn’t allowed. My aggression was based on what I thought I needed to do to stay alive.
AE: Do you look back at that and think, I was out of my mind? Or is that something you would go back and do again?
DS: It certainly was the first project I was ever on where I almost gave up. I did almost call my boss and say, I may have to quit. I may be killed out here. I need you guys to know you might not get a television show out of this because I’m not willing to die over this stuff.
But it was my love for those animals and knowledge of those animals where I knew that if I left, I was basically giving up on them. Those lions were going to be destroyed. So they let me try one more thing and in the end, three years later, there is a happy and healthy population of lions there because of the work that we did there. Then, yes, of course I would go back. I’d be a little smarter, a little older and hopefully avoid that charge before it happens.
AE: I’d hope so because that made me nervous watching that.
DS: You and me both.
AE: You also have this cheeky ironic sense of humor about yourself. I saw you on E’s The Soup making fun of that lion charge. Have you always had a good sense of humor about yourself?
DS: I think some people are just born with it and I’ve always used my sense of humor as a way to socialize and integrate with a group of strangers. So my sense of humor is just something I’ve grown accustomed to and it’s just part of my personality. You can either take yourself uber seriously and try to sue people for teasing you, or you can take part in it and say, yeah, I’ll happily do a segment where you tease me and call me an idiot. I mean if you can’t laugh at yourself no one will laugh with you.
AE: Now for the tough questions. If you and Phil Keoghan from The Amazing Race are dropped in the outback of Australia, what chance do you give Phil of outlasting you there?
DS: Zero. No chance. The only chance he has of surviving is if he makes friends with me and I take care of him.
AE: I’ll tell him that next time I see him. Now, Bear Grylls just announced that Jake Gyllenhaal will be on an upcoming episode of Man vs. Wild. Two questions here: which male movie star would you take in the wild with you? And why?
DS: Movie star? I don’t know I’d have to pick someone who has a good sense of humor. Zach Galifianakis I think is really funny, but I have a feeling he’d be pretty difficult to take care of in the bush. I’d have to try and find someone who is super fit and also fun. Maybe, the Rock because he’s funny and he can also lift heavy things.
AE: Have you ever met Bear and is there any kind of hosting rivalry there?
DS: Yes, I have met Bear. I’ve worked for Animal Planet for over ten years and Animal Planet and Discovery are owned by the same company, so I have been to events with Bear and he’s a fantastic guy. He being a survival guy and me being an animal guy, yes I have to survive in my show, but that’s not what my shows are about. Mine are more about the adventure I’m on and he’s actually showing people how to survive. I think there are enough differences there that the two of us don’t have a professional jealousy there.
AE: Thanks for talking with us and good luck with the show.
DS: Thanks!
Expedition Impossible airs on ABC on Thursdays at 9 PM.