‘Destination X’ host Jeffrey Dean Morgan got pissed off at the cast

Any Walking Dead fan will tell you, if there is one guy you don’t want to piss off, it is the dude known for carrying around the barbed wire-covered baseball bat. But that’s exactly what the cast of Destination X did when they got on host Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s bad side at one point during filming.

“I remember there was one episode in particular where I got really pissed off at them,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. Their offense? Playing too nice!

“Something big had just gone down, and I realized that they were just all telling each other everything,” Morgan says of the collaborating contestants. “And I’m like, ‘You realize we’re playing a f—ing game here? This is for $250,000 that’s going to change one of your lives, and you’re all being big p——!”

The new reality show involves 12 contestants traveling around Europe in a bus, which has been blacked out so they have no idea where they’re traveling to. Each week, the players have to guess where in the world they are after visiting tourist attractions turned into game challenges.

Despite his frustration at times with the contestants, the emotion Morgan felt most often during filming was something quite different — pure joy.

“I really had a fun time,” he says, even if it was often at the players’ expense. “There’s stuff that you don’t expect to happen, and there’s hilarious stuff that happens. And there’s hookups on the bus that happen.”

A lot of the drama comes from adults living on that bus. “Imagine being in the Big Brother house,” explains Morgan. “Except you’re on a blacked-out bus. You have no f—ing idea where you’re going with 10 adults and there’s nowhere to go. I mean, you have no place to disappear to! You don’t get to go into a bedroom and close the door.”

Some handled it better than others. Morgan confirms what Big Brother champion and Destination X contestant Josh Martinez told EW about the player’s issue with the cramped quarters and says the certified meatball lover “lost his mind within two days.”

The more the game progressed, the more invested Morgan became with everything going down between the contestants, to the point that he began exhibiting behavior akin to a Big Brother live feed watcher. “I had a link that I could go directly to the bus at any given moment, and then I’d get a folder every night of all of the things that transpired on the bus. And it was crazy. It was the best part of my day was seeing what the f— they’d been up to and who’s doing what!”

And some of what he saw surprised him. “It got me teared up three times in the course of the season,” the big softie admits.  

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But while Morgan may have mastered the art of reality competition hosting pretty quickly, how does he think he would fare as a Destination X contestant? “I couldn’t do the bus,” he concedes. “Maybe when I was 20, but there’s no way I would go on that bus now. It smelled like a locker room after day four. You’re on top of each other.”

Of course, that’s exactly the point. “Whether it’s Survivor or Big Brother, half of the game is you put ’em in an environment that they’re not used to that’s going to make things hard. And I couldn’t deal with that part. I need to come out to my trailer and be alone at my own house. So, for me, there’s no f—ing way. That being said, if you’re single and you’re playing for $250,000, I guess you put up with a lot of s—.”

The s— goes down starting tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.