It’s time once again for celebrities to spin the wheel and solve the puzzle. Celebrity Wheel of Fortune returns to ABC Sunday night, with Snoop Dogg, Amanda Seales and Mark Duplass competing on behalf of their chosen charities.
Host Pat Sajak tells ABC Audio that celebrities aren’t usually the best players, which actually means a little more work for him.
“You know, celebrities are not necessarily loyal Wheel of Fortune viewers. Presumably, they’ve seen the show. We hope that they have. But, you know, they’re not, on our regular show they’re a little more, you know, they’ve studied for a long time. They wanted to be on maybe for decades. They’ve tried out a number of times,” he explains. “So we have to kind of take them by the hand a little bit and show them through the game.”
That’s not taking anything away from the celebs, according to Sajak, who notes, “even if you’re familiar with it, to be thrown in the studio and suddenly have to go with all the rules and everything can be challenging.”
Sajak, who’s hosted the show since 1981, says that in his experience, there’s one group of celebrities that, in his experience, seem to have an edge over the others.
“Probably athletes seem to have the advantage over other celebrities, since they tend to be a little more competitive,” he says. “I mean, because of that winning attitude sort of ingrained in them. But, you know, it’s always a surprise.”
Vanna White, who’s co-hosted the show with Sajak for the past 40 years, thinks the secret to their long partnership is that they only spend 34-days a-year together.
“We hardly see each other,” adds Sajak, joking, “If all marriages were like this, the divorce rate would be absolutely gone.”
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