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He's reported from Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East
and was once detained in Iran for three days, but is former ABC News correspondent Anderson Cooper ready for the
kind of flak that can be directed at the host of a network reality show?
CBS's "Survivor" may have been the year's biggest
hit, but it also made a laughingstock of Jeff Probst, the former VH1-er who ran the tribal councils. And then there
was Julie Chen, the "Early Show" news anchor whose hosting of CBS's "Big Brother" didn't exactly
cover her with glory.
But when ABC launches "The Mole" Jan. 9, Cooper said,
we won't be hearing him deliver the kinds of hokey lines that made Chen sound like an "Entertainment Tonight"
reject.
"Yeah, that definitely weighed heavily on me," said
Cooper. "If I had to claim tribal council was a sacred place or hand a tiki torch to someone, I knew I'd shoot
myself in the head."
Like "Survivor" and "Big Brother" as well
as ABC's hit "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," "The Mole" is based on a concept that has already
been a hit in Europe. The nine-week series, already filmed but still being edited, follows 10 people on an international
quest to find which one of them is a saboteur. Each week, the player who knows the least about the mole is sent
home, with the ultimate winner getting a jackpot worth "up to $1 million," according to ABC.
Cooper, a former foreign correspondent for the classroom-based
Channel One News who resigned as anchor of ABC's overnight "World News Now" in September to host the
series, describes his role as "part tour guide, part observer, part reporter."
"To me," he said, "the big mistake on 'Big Brother'
was treating it like it was some momentous event rather than just this silly show." That's what made Chen
look bad, he said. "If she'd been able to say, 'This is ridiculous,' she wouldn't have gotten into so much
trouble."
"I had full say over what I was saying," he said of
"The Mole," adding that much of the show was unscripted. In fact, Cooper says, he thinks he was approached
to do the show because of his experience at the offbeat "World News Now," in which "80 percent of
what I did there was ad-libbed."
Were there times in the making of "The Mole" when
he thought it was ridiculous?
"There were moments that were uncomfortable, certainly,"
he said. "I'd never want to be in a position where I wouldn't be honest. If I thought something was silly,
I'd laugh about it," he said, but "I really got into the game.
"It was 28 very intensive days, often nights as well,"
he said. "I did not know as the game was progressing who the mole was. I was playing along with the players,
which made it a lot more fun for me."
Cooper does know who the mole is now, but, with the threat of
a $10-million penalty for spilling the beans, he's being careful. He refuses, for instance, to say whether any
of the languages he's studied -- "I can say 'no problem' in eight languages, and I used to be able to say
'don't shoot' in five" -- came in handy, because that might hint at one of the show's locations. (ABC's official
line is that the players and the show's 176-member crew "traveled to two continents, four countries and 34
cities.")
Beyond promoting the show for the next couple of months, he's
not sure of his next step.
"It just seemed like it would be fun. It sounds cheesy
and silly, but ...I wanted a break" from the "soul-sucking" overnight schedule of "World News
Now," he said.
"I'm not looking to host 'Joker's Wild' or anything. "I
like the reality genre, but journalism has always been my passion," he said.
And, while some might dismiss Cooper, the son of heiress Gloria
Vanderbilt, as a guy who can afford to be cavalier about leaving behind a network news career, he says his attitude
actually comes from knowing he can live on next to nothing.
In 1992, he studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi, living
on $2 a day, "including housing," and eating "chicken noodle soup three times a day for six months,"
he said.
"If everything else fails, I'm fully resigned to going
back to Somalia and sleeping on the roofs of houses."
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