PASADENA, Calif.–Those testy Canadians! Dragon’s Den duo Kevin O’Leary and Robert Herjavec were bickering like Jon & Kate at this morning’s ABC press tour session for Shark Tank. The Mark Burnett reality show premieres tomorrow night (Sunday) at 9 p.m. on ABC.
Asked who was the meanest shark in the tank, the other four judges all immediately pointed to O’Leary. “I’m the merchant of truth,” O’Leary insisted, just telling dummies with dreams to wake the hell up and stop wasting his time and money.
O’Leary stuck to his Wall Street shtick, proclaiming greed as “powerful and important.”
“That is such crap,” said Herjavec, who mocked O’Leary’s “blind pursuit of of pure greed and profit,” standing up instead for self-made businessmen like himself.
“You are absolutely wrong,” sneered O’Leary. “The great entrepreneur in the sky is going to get a spatula and just whack you.”
And back and forth it went.
The joke is, when it comes time to sink their own dough into these ventures, O’Leary and Herjavec are often paired together on the deal.
Asked after the session if the rage was real or just hyped for TV, Herjavec said, no, he really does think Kevin is a dick. “We were told after one take by a director that, ‘That was good, but can you get even angrier?’ and I said, ‘What acting? This guy really does piss me off!'”
Read more on Shark Tank’s cranky Canadian judges in the story I filed that is running today in The Toronto Star.
