It's always the quiet ones. Softspoken Celebrity Mole: Hawaii contestant Erik von Detten swears to TV Guide Online that viewers will be "110 percent positively" surprised when the saboteur is unmasked on tomorrow night's finale (at 10 ET on ABC). But us? Eh, not so much. Although the Dinotopia star refuses to spill the beans, our money's still 110 percent positively on him!
From the beginning, von Detten's reserved personality made him our primary suspect. However, he argues that next to boisterous competitors like Stephen Baldwin and Corbin Bernsen, Roseanne would've come off quiet. "I was surrounded by adults and comedians, so I was a little intimidated," the barely-20-year-old insists. "My shyness was real.
"Thank God Baldwin was taken off!" he adds. "Once he and a couple of the others were [eliminated], I started feeling okay... and realized I could use [everyone's misperception of me] to make it appear that I was the Mole."
The California boy's strategy certainly has us fooled, then. Who else but the Mole would ally himself with Kathy Griffin? Dude, she called you retarded and joked that your low-slung swim trunks made you look like a gay porn star! "You've just got to roll with the punches with Kathy," he shrugs. "Part of her sense of humor is at the expense of others, unfortunately. C'est la vie."
Yep, no doubt about it: von Detten talks a good game. Yet we won't let him convince us that model Frederique Van Der Wal, or anyone else, is really the Mole. ("What was up with Freddie turning down $25,000 to eat a hot pepper?" he asks.) His cast-against-type guest gig as a rapist on Friday's Law & Order: SVU (at 10 pm/ET on NBC) only reaffirms his qualifications as a junior deceiver. And, most telling of all, he's become finicky about the reality series in which he'll participate. "I'd never do Fear Factor," he vows. "Gross things like that aren't worth the money to me." — Ben Katner