The cast of The Bachelor usually has to wait until Fantasy Suites with the final four to get a coveted overnight date, but the third episode of the current 27th season saw lead Zach Shallcross and Kaity Biggar enjoy an intimate sleepover at Los Angeles’s Natural History Museum.
The after-hours date included a romantic dinner beneath dinosaur bones, after which Shallcross invited Biggar to stay over. Soon the couple were running through the galleries in matching pajamas, enjoying the dioramas and fossil displays all by themselves. When bedtime came, they settled down at a fake campsite, complete with a tent and a faux fire pit.
“I’ve never done anything romantic in my life and to go zero to a hundred like this is unreal,” Biggar said.
Following the popularity of the Night at the Museum movies, some natural history museums began hosting overnight events. In New York, tickets to sleep under the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History ran $350 at the 2017 sleepover party.
The Bachelor has a history of taking its cast on intimate museum dates. Last year, Clayton Echard went to Immersive Van Gogh with Sarah Hamrick, who dubbed a serenade by string quartet amid the animated projections “the most romantic moment of my life.”
In his season on The Bachelorette, Shallcross got to go to the Rijksmuseum with Rachel Recchia. The couple didn’t seem to get much out of the experience—in a later episode, they reminisced about it and Recchia asked if the artwork was European, and if the 1600s was the Renaissance.
Zach Shallcross and Kaity Biggar at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of ABC.
“I really like history. But I don’t know, like, time periods. All I know is, I look like every kid in those pictures,” she said. “I was reincarnated from a Renaissance child!”
The Rijksmuseum had previously been scouted as a location for Hannah Brown’s season in 2019, but production chose the Mauritshuis in The Hague instead, to the tune of a $10,000 rental. (Brown ended up dumping her date for the evening and spent the evening crying in front of the Dutch Golden Age masterpieces.)
Rachel Reccia at the Rijksmuseum. Photo by Cary Fetman.
“When they called us they said, ‘The Rijksmuseum is nice, but the Mauritshuis is better,’” a museum spokesperson told New York magazine. “It has never happened before that a couple rented it out. It’s quite expensive and quite glamorous.”
The Natural History Museum does not currently offer overnight stays to the public, making Shallcross and Biggar’s date a one-of-a-kind experience.