Love Is Blind season 9 star Joe Ferrucci is cringing along with the audience while watching the Netflix show back.
“I’ve cooled down on drinking substantially to where I’m not making a fool out of myself every week,” Joe told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview on Friday, October 10.
In the first batch of episodes, which dropped earlier this month, Joe got into a drunken fight with fiancée Madison Maidenberg in Mexico. In the second installment, he went off about costar Nick Amato’s presumed lack of bedroom skills with fiancée Annie Lancaster in an on-the-fly confessional interview.
“It’s been in the works,” Joe added of scaling back on his drinking. “I think I needed to calm down. That was a very interesting time in my life as well, and with the added stress of the show. … I think I used that as a coping mechanism, which was really the worst coping mechanism you could use. So, yes, I made some comments about Nick, and I did apologize to him.”
Joe noted that Nick actually reached out to him first when he saw the episode, during which Joe said, in part, “I don’t f*** with him too much” and “Nick does missionary the whole time and that’s about it … at least Brenden would switch it up. Throw it back, flip it over, rub it down.” (Joe is close with Annie’s other pod connection, Brenden Guthrie, who was still reeling from how things ended with Annie.)
“I hadn’t seen it [yet],” Joe explained to Us. “I apologized back to him. I think that was kind of out of line. People online might think it’s funny, right? But I wouldn’t want somebody else talking about me like that.”
Madison Maidenberg and Joe Ferrucci. Courtesy of Netflix
“I was very close with Brenden, right? Brenden was a good friend, still very good friend to this day. I kind of felt a little heartbroken for him on what happened with him. I was definitely being too hard on Nick,” he continued. “Nick has a good heart, for sure. Nick is a unique guy, right? And sometimes people just don’t mesh very well, so I’ll just leave it at that. But I think Nick does have a good heart, and I think he means well.”
When it comes to his first blowup fight with Madison, Nick told Us he was watching the scenes with his hands over his eyes.
“It was hard to movie it. In real time, it was cringey. It was not good. I got very inebriated at the rave and ended up having a conversation where I was pretty much still out of it,” he said. “I could definitely tell she was wanting something and to get somewhere that night that I was probably incapable of coming to a conclusion at the end there.”
Since the premiere of Love Is Blind in 2020, fans have wondered how effective the concept of speed-dating without seeing the other person actually is. The show, which has aired eight seasons and spawned multiple international iterations, follows singles dating in pods over the course of 10 days. The kicker, of course, is that they […]
Joe believes that the fight was a “blip” in their relationship and won’t have a long-lasting effect.
“I think what you don’t see is you’re spending all this time in the pods, [and then] 48 hours before you get to go and meet everybody out for the first time. So, I kind of took that as, ‘Hey, it’s time to let loose a little bit. We’re in Mexico,’” he said. “I took it too far. I think that was just a little bit of a blip. I mean, obviously, we got into more arguments after. Our communication styles are completely different. … We try our best. I honestly was trying my best throughout this whole experiment. It was hard.”
Fans will have to wait to see whether Joe and Madison make it to the altar when new episodes of Love Is Blind start streaming on Netflix Wednesdays.
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