Season three of the reality singing competition The Masked Singer came to a close last night and All My Children alum Jesse McCartney (ex-J.R. Chandler) was revealed as the celebrity who has been going by "The Turtle" during the series.
For those who aren't familiar with the show, The Masked Singer features celebrities in disguise who belt out famous tunes as part of a singing competition. Clues about the celebs' identities are slowly revealed throughout the series. At the end of each episode, the audience and panelists (Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg, Nicole Scherzinger, and Robin Thicke) vote for their favorite performer, and the celebrity with the least votes is eliminated and unmasked to reveal his or her identity.
Last night's episode saw singer-songwriter Kandi Burruss, disguised as "The Night Angel," take home the Golden Mask trophy. McCartney took second place in the competition while actor/rapper Bow Wow, who'd been disguised as "The Frog," came in third place.
It was 🐢ly me! @maskedsingerfox #TurtleMask #TheMaskedSinger pic.twitter.com/taD6vw9J2k
— Jesse McCartney (@JesseMcCartney) May 21, 2020
Says McCartney to EW of not winning the season, "It's okay, honestly. It was such a fun, incredible experience that I'll never forget. Of course there was disappointment on the initial reveal day. When you get that far, when you start with 18 people and then get to the final three, you definitely smell blood. You can smell the end. And yeah, I mean, I was disappointed, but ultimately, it could have been anybody's game. If you told me in the beginning of the season that I was going to finish second, I would have done it again in a heartbeat."
Soap opera fans have been pretty sure all along that "The Turtle" was McCartney, but one official clue was a dead giveaway: it was a photo album that looked exactly like the one shown in the opening credits of All My Children.
Let's find out who #TurtleMask is, shell we? But first, give us your final guesses! 🐢 #TheMaskedSinger pic.twitter.com/DkHDZjbMtF
— The Masked Singer (@MaskedSingerFOX) May 21, 2020
As for the clues that are shown on the The Masked Singer, McCartney says that the celebrities themselves are instrumental in what clues are given, but only partially.
"Well, they interview you every single week. The producers, they do what's called like a mining of sorts, where they sort of probe you with tons of questions and you usually are repeating yourself over and over again," he explains. "Some weeks they have a certain focus, right, so one week I think it was high school education or schooling or something along those lines, and I spoke about how one of the teachers in my life made a big impact on me and was always very supportive of my career, even though some of the teachers weren't. And she was my biology teacher. And so then they actually went to my school in New York and interviewed her, or called her on the phone and did an interview with her. And those are the kind of things that they would do. I would say I was a part of 80% of the clue packaging, but at a certain point, when the show starts heating up, it moves so quickly that sometimes they have to just work on the clues without you, but it's always information that I had given them or quotes that I'd given them. But I generally didn't get to see any of the clues until they do the live broadcast."
In more Jesse McCartney news, the AMC alum has been focusing on his music career lately and just released his latest single, "Friends." However, he teases that he's been eyeing a return to acting.
"Right now the music is kind of in the front seat of everything. The new single came out, which is really exciting. So there's a lot of fun there and I'm going to release a music video for that in the next couple of weeks that I just finished shooting here in my house," he reveals. "Other than that, I'm just going to be releasing another single eventually and hopefully get back on tour, which has obviously been canceled because of all this coronavirus stuff going on. Once this album cycle is done, I would like to pursue some more acting stuff, whether it's television or film or something like that. My fiancée [Katie Peterson] and I have been working a lot on a sketch comedy show called The Quarantine Couple that we've been putting on Instagram and it's been doing well. So maybe something in the comedy world? I don't know."
McCartney got his start in the entertainment business in the late 1990s, playing Adam Chandler's son J.R. on All My Children. While starring on the ABC soap opera, the young actor rose to fame as part of the boy band Dream Street and later went on to establish a successful career as a solo artist. His discography includes the albums Beautiful Soul, Right Where You Want Me, Departure, and In Technicolor.
As Soap Central previously reported, McCartney and Peterson have been dating since 2012 and became engaged in September of 2019. Last season, The Bold and the Beautiful's Wayne Brady won the trophy on the Masked Singer.
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