RAT 'RACE'
By DON KAPLAN
January 13, 2005 -- 'AMAZING Race" bad- guy Jonathan Baker is getting more than he ever bargained for when he decided to become the show's most memorable villain.
Jonathan, 42, has been at the center of a reality-TV storm pretty much since he jumped out of the latest cast of competitors and developed a reputation as the meanest man on TV.
As the show has unreeled over the weeks, the drumbeat for Jonathan's head has grown louder among fans — and now he has begun to get word out through friends that he was only playing a part.
In fact, friends say, when the part got to be too much for him — the night he shoved wife Victoria Fuller in anger — he tried to quit the show. But producers talked him into staying in the race, telling him the series had "never had a character like him."
Jonathan has conceded to friends that it was originally his choice to "play" a villain on TV because it was a good way to stand out from the reality-show crowd.
Week after week, viewers have watched as Jonathan berates Victoria and taunts competitors.
It's all gone too far now, he tells friends, but Jonathan is restricted by the contract he signed with CBS from talking publicly about how the role-playing got out of hand. The fact that Victoria has been portrayed on the show as an abused spouse upsets Jonathan the most.
"If she hadn't been there [on the show], he would have owned the part [of the bad guy]," says one friend. "He would have been the most infamous character on reality TV ever.
"But how do you own a piece-of-s—t character like a wife abuser? At the end of the day, he's just hoping that the press doesn't crucify him," says the friend.
"They're not like that in real life," says actor Jimmy Van Patten, the son of "Eight is Enough" star Dick Van Patten, and a longtime friend of the couple. "Honestly, I've never heard him speak to her like that."
Van Patten fears he may have accidentally influenced Jonathan by mentioning that playing a bad guy is the best job in a TV show or movie.
"My father always said that the easiest role to play is a bad guy," says Van Patten. "It's the most interesting, the most fun and it's the easiest. Jonathan may have heard me say that or learned that from me because I've played a lot of bad guys and it is more fun."
"He played the game as hard as he could, did it all in fun and took it and himself too seriously," says another of Jonathan's friends. "But the people at CBS knew what they wanted and it's all heightened reality from a storyline.
"As much bad behavior as there was, there was an equal amount of good that didn't make it into the show," says the friend.
Meanwhile, on this week's episode, Victoria for the first time was shown getting in a few licks of her own when she taunted her husband for bobbling a challenge.
source~
http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/38430.htm
