Tristan Gange was behind the till working at a local grocery store on New Year's Day when he noticed two people staring at him.
"They were in the next aisle and I was like, 'Why are these guys looking at me?'" he says. "I was getting freaked out."
Eventually, they made their way to the checkout and asked, "Were you that guy from that show?"
Gange was surprised. A year earlier, he and his sister Bec had been in five episodes of the Australian reality TV show called Instant Hotel, but it had only aired on TV in Australia for a short time—or so Gange thought.
"They were like, 'We just binge watched it on Netflix!' It just got uploaded and it started from there. I had no idea it would be on Netflix," Gange says.
That interaction kicked off his 15 minutes of fame. Since the program was added to the streaming service around the world, Gange has received no fewer than four marriage proposals, 20 to 30 messages a day on social media and regular requests for selfies.
His Instagram account, for one, has skyrocketed from 1,000 followers to 5,000 in the last month.
"Every single message has been positive," he says. "We haven't had one negative message yet. They're all pretty similar like, 'Hey, I just started watching (the show) on Netflix. I don't usually send messages like this, but me and my husband, or me and my friends, or me and my crew, we love you and your sister ... I've replied to every single message saying, 'thanks or cheers,' just saying thanks for the message, I appreciate it."
Bec—a professional wakeboarder who spends half the year in Florida—first received a call from the show's creators who had perused Airbnb for interesting rentals. Their parents had purchased a houseboat dubbed Class Act a few years earlier and they occasionally rented it out to people who wanted to meander down the Murray River in Mildura, Victoria.
"My sister said they just called her one day out of the blue," Gange says. "They must've found it on Airbnb and discovered my sister was a pro wakeboarder and thought, 'That's a cool angle.' They said, 'Do you have a boyfriend or family member who'd want to be on the show?' She said, 'I've got my brother.'"
Gange, who was working picking "rock melons" (or cantaloupes as they're known in Canada) in 40 C heat, jumped at the chance for such a strange experience. "I was like, 'Hell yes. I always wanted my 15 minutes of fame,'" he says with a laugh. "Now I'm getting it. Yesterday I took three selfies at the grocery store. It's crazy."
The premise of the show is all the Airbnb owners travel to each property to spend the night and assign a rating. An accommodations expert also visits and rates the listing. We won't spoil the outcome of the show except to say that Tristan and Bec are amongst the most laidback and likeable of the bunch.
"I was living in my van for a year and I've couch surfed my whole life," Gange says. "I've lived in hallways and under stairs; I did a whole season under stairs once in France—a mattress on the floor. To stay in these nice houses, we were scoring them all eight out of 10, nine out of 10 because we loved them. Everyone else was strategically scoring and scoring low."
In the end, he says he was satisfied with how he was portrayed—and with the overall experience. "I'm 100-per-cent glad (I did it)," he says. "I'd do it again if Netflix called me up and said, 'Do you want to do another show? I'd do it.' It's fun."
Well, there's one caveat. He's received a few weird comments online since his rise to reality fame. "One guy was like, 'What size are your feet?' I was like, 'ummm 11,' thinking I'm going to get some nice Air Jordans. A couple messages later he's like, 'This might sound a bit weird, but can I get a picture of your feet?'"
Gange politely declined. "I went on Google and I found a picture of some chicken feet and sent it to him," he says, laughing.
The overarching takeaway from his experience, though, is a life lesson we should all heed. "You be nice to people on the show, they'll be nice to you," he says. "It's kind of paid off. They say nice guys finish last, but at the end of the day, be nice and you'll get treated nice... and you'll get guys asking you about your feet."
Instant Hotel is streaming now on Netflix. To check out the Class Act, visit http://tsunamihouseboat.com/.
