She won the show in 2003.
Adrianne Curry hasn’t tried modeling or acting in years and she doesn’t have any regrets about leaving the business. The inaugural winner of America’s Next Top Model seemed to be an unlikely success in the modeling industry to the common eye, but Tyra Banks and co. saw superstardom. But Curry has been living life outside of the spotlight after finding peace in Montana and she recently revealed she has no plans on returning to Tinsel Town.
Curry, now 41, says winning the competition didn’t prove to be an easy road to success. After being crowned the winner in 2003, she assumed she’d be set up for success, but says she “betrayed and lied to by the show,” as reported by PEOPLE. In fact, she says the prizes she was promised as a winner never even came to fruition.
“They told us every day whoever was going to win was going to be a big Revlon model, and then they dubbed over voiceovers when it aired on TV because they never intended that,” she recalls. “They lied to us because none of us would’ve fought as hard as we did for some half-ass prize. We’d be like, that’s stupid.” She later revealed in the Zoom interview that she felt she was used as a “guinea pig” because of her careless personality in comparison to the other competitors on the show.
She learned quickly that the business sets people up for failure. “That’s the industry. That is what it is. It is cutthroat. It is lying. It is predatory,” she continues, before going on to explain how the veil was lifted. “[America’s Next Top Model was] a polished jewel that prepared me for the awful truth that I couldn’t trust anybody, even people that I thought I could, and even knowing that I still got screwed over.”
Eventually, she participated in other reality programs like Surreal Life where she met and married her now ex-husband, The Brady Bunch staple, Christopher Knight. They landed their own VH1 spinoff. Despite her broken promises, Curry says she learned a lot from her seemingly failed modeling career.
“I’m grateful that things didn’t pan out the way they were supposed to because I don’t think I would be a very good person if I had found major success in modeling,” she said. “I just don’t think my young brain would’ve been able to wrap itself around that in a good way.”
Her breaking point in the industry came when she was suggested to get plastic surgery. “I felt that I was on a cusp. I was 32 years old and I got offered a job for face fillers, and it was a huge payday with free face fillers and one up to my contract and all this stuff. And I remember sitting there, and that money was so good that I considered it. Then I thought, I am willing to deface, to mutilate myself for money?” she noted, adding, “I had to really start to question like, ‘Okay, where is this path going to take me if even for a second I considered injecting something in my face for a payday?’ At 32 years old, you don’t need that.”
