It wasn’t long into my FaceTime call with Adam Rippon before I started to feel nauseated.
Training my features into what I hoped approximated my genuine interest, I gazed at the former Olympic figure skater and Dancing With the Stars champion, who, with on-brand emphasis, was energetically gesticulating every conspiratorial one-liner, seemingly oblivious of the iPhone—and me—in his hand. Behind him a window created a fittingly angelic haze, as white wired headphones swung around his face, and within seconds every single one of his angles—none of which, I was able to note briefly, are bad—zig-zagged across my screen.
“It was chaos,” he said of filming the new Fox celebrity reality show Stars on Mars (airing Mondays), as his ceiling fan, couch, coffee table, and dog morphed into a pixelated blur on my laptop. I considered asking him to sit still—his movement was making me dizzier to watch than any of his skating routines. But, as he regaled me with anecdotes from filming (which wrapped before the first episode premiered on June 5), I realized that sitting still doesn’t seem to be part of the athlete and LGBTQ icon’s DNA.
Stars on Mars follows the tried and tested format of other reality TV competitions such as Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, and The Traitors, but with a twist: It takes place on “Mars.” (In this case, Mars is a film set in the Australian outback.) A misfit group of celebrities work together to survive in a pod on the Red Planet, all while completing a series of space-related challenges to avoid being voted back to Earth, like fixing meteor damage, annihilating invasive alien biomatter, or rescuing new cast members (dubbed ‘celebronauts’) from a supply craft crash. Stars on Mars is a fun, if slightly ridiculous concept.
“I think I didn't know what I was signing up for,” Rippon said before adding, “A part of me definitely thought it would be like a vacation.”
That was before the first mission.
For figure skating fans, Rippon is best known for beautiful performances, exquisite costumes, and an exciting late-career comeback that brought him both the 2016 U.S. champion title, and a 2018 Winter Olympic team bronze medal. However it was while at the Olympics that his fame reached beyond the skating world. One of the first openly gay Winter Olympians (and the first openly gay Winter Olympic athlete to receive a medal), he publicly refused to meet with the U.S. delegation leader—and proponent of conversion therapy—then-Vice President Mike Pence, in a series of unabashed tweets.
Rippon was catapulted into global headlines, and after returning from Pyeongchang would go on to win Dancing With The Stars, attend Hollywood red carpet events, and end 2018 named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Rippon now has a loyal social media following, with podcasts, reality shows, and comedy scripts to his name, all of which goes some way to explain his unexpected journey from the ice rink to Mars.
“I’m assuming that you know I’ve never been to Mars. Neither has any human.” Rippon stopped to look directly at me for the first time in the call, to confirm that I know this. “So, I think I thought it would be a little bit more Big Brother-ish, more social. And then within a day—when they had us try to lift this satellite in a dust storm—I knew I was absolutely wrong.”
I know the moment in Episode 1 that Rippon is referring to. Even with heavy editing—and obligatory red filter Mars-ifying the Australian desert—the first mission, led by NFL legend, Marshawn ‘Beast Mode’ Williams as ‘base commander,’ makes for a delightfully messy watch.
“I was standing with [comedian] Natasha Leggero, and we both just stopped doing the mission, because I think we both assumed—I know I definitely assumed—that [production] was going to go, ‘OK, we're going to stop and start over,’ because it was so chaotic.”
With comms headsets cutting in and out, 12 people talking over each other (so that even when they could hear anything… they couldn’t hear anything)—not to mention the “Space Dust” getting into every crevice of space suits that were most definitely not up to NASA code—Rippon began to wonder just what he had got himself into.
“For about 45 minutes I was thinking, I’m inhaling so much dust, and I’m going to die,” he said, with a pause. “If I’d known it was turmeric, at least I would have thought about the health benefits.”
Adding to the confusion of having literal gallons of the reddish spice dumped on them to simulate the storm, Rippon, who had cataract surgery in 2021, found himself effectively blind in any nighttime shoots.
“We would have these LEDs in the helmet [of the space suit] so that our faces would be lit up. But, just like an 80-year-old woman who gets cataract surgery, I don't see well in low light. I might as well have had my eyes closed. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Nothing.”
This presented problems for the Olympian, whose competitive streak has not dissipated in the five years since his retirement.
“We do this mission (in Episode 4) in a dark cave, and at this point, I was like, fuck it, I have to do well. So, I started running. And I ran as fast as I could… right into the wall of the cave. And I fall down. I get up, and I run as fast as I can again… into another wall. And then I just keep doing that. Like five times. And when it was over, [Real Housewives of Atlanta alum] Porsha [Williams] goes, ‘It was like watching The Sims—like watching a video game—you really can’t see!’”
One of the things that makes this kooky show so watchable is the camaraderie between the celebronauts, which only in recent episodes has begun to show signs of fraying. Living every waking (and sleeping) hour together, the group, who were mostly strangers before filming began, initially seemed intent on remaining upbeat. Both in confessionals on the show, and more recently on our call, Rippon spoke positively about nearly all his castmates, noting that he bonded most tightly with the girls.
Yet the former figure skater, who has carved out a name for himself in entertainment following a stint as a judge on DWTS and a recurring role on MTV’s Messyness (a clip series in which host Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, Tori Spelling, and Teddy Ray alongside Rippon discuss the internet’s most debauched videos), said he sometimes found himself straddling the two main cliques that made up the cast.
“I think that sometimes it felt like it was the athletes versus the entertainers. And I think very often I found myself on the side of the entertainers,” he said. When I asked him why, he noted, “Maybe that’s where I’ve always felt more comfortable. Even when I was an athlete, I felt more comfortable as the entertainer.”
He had to confront this dual identity when fellow athlete-celebronaut Lance Armstrong chose to air his views regarding the supposed lack of fairness of trans athletes participating in women’s sports.
Armstrong’s comments, followed by continued efforts—not seen on the episode—to force Rippon to engage on the topic, caused him to question whether he should leave the show.
“This is where I felt like, ‘Oh my God, I am an athlete,’ because LGBTQ causes are really important to me, especially in sports. And it was like, by staying here and pretending like something is OK, does that mean I'm not putting my money where my mouth is? I felt really conflicted,” he said.
Rippon grew up idolizing Armstrong, and vividly remembers the moment the cyclist had his titles stripped from him after his role at the center of a doping ring came to light. But Rippon, who recalled refusing to eat even a poppyseed bagel for fear of any enhancement drugs showing up in doping tests, felt that Armstrong’s comments reveal that he’s learned nothing since admitting to cheating.
“I'm very against having unfair advantages in sports through doping,” he said, suddenly motionless, all traces of the entertainer dropped. “I just think that the point of sport is to be your best, it’s not to be the best. So, I don’t have a soft spot for people who cheat in that way.”
While they did not clash directly, Rippon can be seen later on the episode explaining that the reality of trans women competing in sports is far more nuanced than Armstrong’s incendiary comments let on.
“When we look at the science, there's limited research, because there are not a lot of trans athletes,” he told me. “We’re not talking about a lot of people. But the regulations and the testing that these athletes who compete at the college level, who compete at these higher national levels—it’s very, very intense. So, there’s the propaganda [peddled by anti-trans advocates] of some guy who’s six feet tall, and burly, and has a ton of chest hair and a full beard, saying, ‘I want to compete as a woman.’ But what’s not being told is the intensive process, that a trans woman specifically, will have to go through to be recognized as a woman in a woman’s category.”
Ultimately, Rippon made the decision to stay, crediting not only the support of his husband, but the kindness of both cast and crew, all of whom saw how much the altercation upset him. He shared that shortly after the scene shown in Episode 5, the audio crew cut in, claiming his mic needed fixing. “Nothing was wrong with my mic,” he said. “They just took me out to stand in the sun for 15 minutes. I really appreciated that kindness.”
As uncomfortable as the incident made him, looking back, Rippon recognized how much closer it brought him to the rest of the cast. Calling former Modern Family star Ariel Winter “the strongest woman I know” and describing Williams as a friend for life, he also cited getting to know NFL cornerback Richard Sherman and MMA fighter Ronda Rousey as highlights of his time on the show.
“Ronda really surprised me,” he said, enthusiastic-iPhone-waving back in play. “Because she is one of the nicest people I've ever met. And she's also somebody who could murder me bare-handedly.”
As filming of the show progressed, the celebronauts’ investment in the game intensified, and Rippon found himself having to remind himself and others that they were still, actually, on Earth, and it was just a reality TV show.
“I was having so much fun with everybody, and I totally got sucked into the drama of surviving on ‘Mars’ sometimes,” he said. “But when I could see other people getting more sucked in than me: that’s really when I felt the most joy, because I went, ‘OK. I haven’t cracked as much as they have!’”
How long Rippon stays on Mars remains to be seen. The series is set to run for 12 episodes total and, seven weeks in, he has managed to avoid being voted ‘Not Mission Critical.’ But as we finished our conversation, I realized that the reason Rippon is still on the show lies deeper than the fact that he “brings up our attractiveness average”—as Winter joked on the show. There is a sincerity to him that shines beyond the self-deprecating humor, sardonic superficiality, and propensity for making people on a video call with him reach for the Dramamine.
“You know, you don’t expect, on a silly show like this, to learn about yourself. Or learn how you can be in uncomfortable situations and push through to find a hidden strength that I think exists within all of us,” he pauses, unable to contain himself, “But I’m mostly glad I got to meet William Shatner [who is 92]. I really need to ask him what his skincare routine is.”
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