Chris Harrison put Luke Parker in the hot seat at Monday night's The Bachelorette: Men Tell All, but it seems the controversial contestant was determined to put the host there too.
Fans watching the special were shocked to see Parker challenge Harrison on some of his questions. While speaking with ET's Lauren Zima after the taping, the Bachelor franchise host said he knew what Parker was "trying to do."
"I think being a dad and having a little age and wisdom and doing this for 17 years helped tonight because I needed patience to get through this," Harrison confessed. "It would have been easy to fall for those jabs and to make this contentious and that's probably what he wanted, was there to be a contentious battle between us."
"It would have escalated," he noted, explaining that if he had given Parker what he wanted, "he wouldn't have had to answer the tough questions and have the conversation that we had. So, I didn't really fall for it."
Instead, Harrison kept his cool and managed to get a few important questions in during the sit-down, like when he asked Parker if he wants a wife in a glass case that he can bring down from a shelf. After a long pause, Parker said he didn't want to control a woman -- despite his controlling nature on Hannah Brown's season -- but also said he believes a man should lead and guide a woman. Harrison also asked Parker if he regretted any part of his behavior. Parker said he didn't but later explained that he answered that way because he was glad he was able to learn from the experience.
"I just kept going in the direction I wanted to go, which was to have this conversation with him. I wanted to kind of have this level of debate of religion and belief and how you apply it to your life and how he applied it to Hannah and how he shamed her, made her feel shamed, how he changed the direction of her show," Harrison offered.
Still, the host doesn't think the cast's words of wisdom got through to the Gainesville, Georgia, native. "In my opinion, I don't think he got any of it. I think he needs time. I think in his world, life is black and white. In the real world, there's a big gray area in the middle," Harrison said. "I don't think he's found the gray area of life and I would just say to him, 'Find the gray area, Luke. It's beautiful.'"
While speaking with Zima on Tuesday's episode of the Bachelor Party podcast on The Ringer, Harrison said he considered picking some "low hanging fruit" in retaliation to Parker's comments towards him.
"When he said, 'I still believe in the traditional man leading a woman.' I mean, the first thing that came into my head was, 'OK, let's dabble into the same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships. ... Who is leading that household, by the way, in your traditional world?'" he admitted. "[But] you go down that rabbit hole, that's another four acts of television."
See more in the video below.
Brown's season The Bachelorette wraps up with a two-night finale airing July 29 and 30 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC. Join ET's Bachelor Nation Facebook group here.
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