(Warning: This post contains spoilers for tonight’s “Masked Singer” episode.)
Country music star Hunter Hayes was revealed to be the Astronaut when he was eliminated and unmasked on Wednesday’s “The Masked Singer.” And now that he’s rocketed off the Fox singing competition’s third season, Hayes was finally able to talk to TheWrap about his time on the show, including why he picked his out-of-this-world costume to begin with.
“I signed up for the show as early as I could, so I had the benefit of getting to look at multiple different costumes and masks,” the singer told us. “I was honestly between two, I was between the Robot [which ended up being taken by Lil Wayne] and the Astronaut. I felt like the Robot was kind of part of my past story, but the more we talked about it the more I realized the Astronaut is way more, I’ll say relatable. But what I mean by that is the theme in a lot of my music right now is flying.”
“I’m currently in a three-part album cycle and Part 1 talks a lot about flying,” Hayes continued. “And I felt the Astronaut was the ultimate version of flying. And it’s sort of a limitless frontier and I felt like that’s kind of what some of the show was for me, it was going into new places and discovering new things and trying new things and pushing myself beyond what I thought was my limit. So I connected with the Astronaut costume as soon as I saw it in person, too. It felt like I was already in it, it felt like it was me.”
Hayes tried to clue his fans into his identity even more beyond the “flying” theme of the Astronaut costume by adding a specific, colorful touch to the look.
“The only thing we did was add more blue touches to it, because I felt like it would be a subtle hint to the fans, because Part 1 is called ‘Wild Blue’ and Part 2 is called ‘Red Sky,’” he said. “And I felt like if I threw little hints based on those two colors for the fans, they would immediately get it and be able to follow me along in the process.”
Before Hayes was unmasked tonight, judges Jenny McCarthy, Robin Thicke, Ken Jeong and Nicole Scherzinger, along with guest panelist Gordon Ramsay, had one last shot at guessing his identity. And while Scherzinger hit the nail on the head after guessing Skylar Astin for weeks, the others stuck with either Astin, Ben Platt or Jonathan Taylor Thomas as their answers.
Hayes says he was “flattered” by these very wrong answers.
“I think they were totally off (laughs),” the country music singer said. “After episode, I would just come back to the trailer like, I’m flattered, because a lot of their guesses were people who sing, but also do other things and are multi-faceted performers. And dancing and doing a lot of the choreography and stuff like that, this was my first time doing any of those things. So for me, that was a huge compliment for somebody to compare me to somebody that actually knows how to dance. That was a big compliment, I’ll take that. Even though they were way off, I was flattered.”
“The Masked Singer” airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Fox.