“Below Deck Sailing Yacht” star Colin MacRae says castmate Gary King gave him the “green light” to pursue Daisy Kelliher on Season 4 of the Bravo reality series.
“He just made it so clear to me that he had zero feelings for her whatsoever,” MacRae says on Pvnew’s “Virtual Reali-Tea” podcast.
“So it was a green light from the get-go.”
But once cameras went up and the Parsifal III set sail, a messy love triangle formed — confounding MacRae, 33, who was certain King, 31, was over his old flame Kelliher, 35.
“We’ve joked about it before, spoke about it before leading up to the season. It even came up, ‘What if me and Daisy hooked up?’” the engineer recalls.
“Jokingly or serious, whatever it was, he was just always like, ‘Go for it, man, go for it. That’ll be funny.’”
In the trailer for the new “BDSY” installment, King notably confronts Kelliher about her budding romance with MacRae, who was single for the first time since joining the show in 2021’s Season 2.
“Did you guys hook up last night?” King asks the chief stew, later stating, “You know you like me deep down and I feel like you’re looking to get back at me, spitefully hooking up.”
On “Virtual Reali-Tea,” MacRae surmises that King accused Kelliher of revenge simply to reclaim her focus.
“Gary enjoys the limelight, he enjoys the attention and for the first time in our ‘Below Deck’ seasons anyway, he wasn’t really getting a lot of attention from the girls,” he says of the first mate. “So he was just trying to get that limelight back a little bit.”
MacRae points out that he and King are in a good place today despite the friction they faced during filming.
“I love Gary,” he assures us. “Like, we’re still great friends and everything.”
While he is quick to clarify where he stands with King, MacRae plays coy when asked about his current relationship status with Kelliher following a flirty season at sea.
“I can’t say too much about that, but we definitely have got a connection,” he teases. “We have this chemistry and we love each other’s company and there were moments in all of our seasons where we confided in each other and shared feelings.”
MacRae elaborates, “It was just kind of like a natural chemistry that we had, but we hadn’t thought of it as a romantic option, I guess, until we started Season 4.”
King, for his part, has come to accept that Kelliher has moved on with MacRae.
“Daisy can do whatever she wants,” he recently told Pvnew. “They make a cute couple.”
“Below Deck Sailing Yacht” airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo.
