Kayla Nicole had to take a minute to really process that she passed selection on Special Forces.
“From interrogation, they shoot closing scenes and then they take you back to your hotel. I called my family and everyone’s all excited [that] I made it to the end. But I found myself — I’m not even kidding — rocking on my bed and I didn’t realize how long I was doing. I know it’s a little creepy, [but I was] rocking on my bed, self-soothing for probably 15 minutes,” Nicole, 33, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I looked at my call log and I had talked to my family 15 minutes ago. I was just sitting there rocking while the shower was running. I kind of snapped out of it and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I might be a little traumatized by what just happened to me.’ But once I snapped out of that, I took the longest shower I’ve ever taken in my life. I ordered a burger from room service and a beer.”
The fitness influencer and Brody Jenner were the only two out of 16 recruits to pass the military tests on season 3 of the Fox series.
“I told myself that if I made it to the last day, that there was just no option of going home,” Nicole explained of the 10-day challenge. “There was no concept of time and I just kept telling myself, ‘I’ve made it this far.’”
She then quoted Kim Kardashian to Us: “What’d Kim say? ‘I didn’t come this far to come this far.’ You guys are going to have to really kill me to send me home. I wasn’t going to quit at that point. I’d been through too much.”
As part of the final stage of the show, the recruits are literally made to feel like they might die. For Nicole, that meant having a brick tied to her ankle — after more than 10 hours of being interrogated — with the threat of being pushed into a body of water if she didn’t break her cover story and own up to being part of the Special Forces.
Kayla Nicole. PETE DADDS / FOX
“They prep you [like if you were] a Navy Seal. They say when you go through interrogation, you want to make sure that you’re respectful. You want to befriend the people that are interrogating you. You want to make them like you, so you gotta drop the ego. You can’t be sarcastic, but they also tell you that a part of the task is to know when it’s time to give up your identity,” Nicole explained. “If it’s a life and death situation, that’s when you’re supposed to give it up — anything before then you won’t be able to pass and anything after. Then if ‘death’ were to supposedly happen to you, then you would fail as well, so they do tell you that. You have to differentiate when it’s the right time to give up your identity.”
Nicole noted that the hardest part of the interrogation on the final day was “not knowing when it was going to end.”
“I think that that kind of trips you out. You’re sitting in darkness for so long. I remember at one point, they brought me outside — I think dropped me in the trough — and I saw daylight and I was like, ‘Oh, we might almost be done with this. It might almost be over.’ That was the hardest part for me,” Nicole explained. “And then two, not really knowing who was still left with you. Brody was telling me the other day he found comfort in hearing me cough in the room when he had his headphones off and he was coming back in because he was like, ‘Oh, Kayla’s still here.’ You had no idea who was left. You had no idea what time of day it was. It was just an ongoing, never ending torture process. It was insane.”
While Nicole and Jenner passed, the remaining finalists Alana Blanchard, Cam Newton and Golden Tate failed interrogation.
“People really start to become your security blanket. You look to those people to help you get through. You become a family,” Nicole told Us. “You’re sleeping on cots next to each other, using the bathroom, showering next to each other. So you really become a really close knit group in a really short amount of time.”
Nicole said several cast members even have a group chat. “We’ve kept close. … We watch the shows together virtually, so it’s been great,” she said, adding that Christy Carlson Romano is the most active in the chat. “She’s really good at all the social media things and she’s sending us TikToks that she’s made of us. She’s great.”
Going into the show, Nicole — who dated Travis Kelce from 2017 to 2022 — had a bit of history with Newton. On the show, fans saw her inform Jenner that she once tweeted about comments the NFL player made about women on a podcast. She told Us that the twosome laughed about it while filming.
“Me and Cam talked about it in the washroom one day. A lot of our conversations happened in that room where we dry our clothes because it was warm [and] it was freezing [in Wales], so that was kind of like our little hub to hang out,” she said. “We talked about it, laughed about it and I think he agreed that what he tweeted was ridiculous. Cam, women don’t belong in the kitchen. …. He gets a lot of slack, but he’s such a great guy.”
