Beauty and the Geek's New Champs Share the Love

Thanks in part to the nearly universal dislike of one half of their competition, Alan "Scooter" Zackheim and Megan Hauserman were awarded $250,000 in last week's Beauty and the Geek Season 3 finale. But the Harvard grad from Montana and the Playboy model from Florida don't owe everything to Cecille, or to Nate's surprising move to convince the other teams to vote for Scooter and Megan. When they called TVGuide.com last week, the two giddily sang each other's praises, finished each other's sentences and interrupted each other (in a nice way), proving they're still a solid team who overcame their initial prejudices and became real friends. Aww. We can feel Ceci rolling her eyes from across the country.

TVGuide.com: Congratulations! It must have been really hard to keep your winning a secret for this long.
Megan Hauserman: It was hard, but we didn't want to tell people, because we wanted it to be a surprise.
Scooter Zackheim: It was, in a perverse way, very cool to have this secret that you knew and nobody else did. To watch their reactions.... It was an interesting experiment for me.

TVGuide.com: Did people guess that you won?
Megan: No, we were like the underdogs! We didn't even think we were going to win.

TVGuide.com: Have you received your money yet?
Megan: We're still waiting. I think they lost our addresses.
Scooter: It might take up to a year, we don't know.

TVGuide.com: What are your plans for the money?
Scooter: Mine is going to go to some pretty boring things.
Megan: Calculators....
Scooter: A new computer. And I'm going to call up Drew for investment advice.
Megan: ...Star Trekconventions.... He is an amazing actor, so he is going to support himself while he pursues an acting career in Hollywood.
Scooter: That's true, actually.

TVGuide.com: Is this a new development? I did read that you were in theater at Harvard....
Megan: He has a huge theatrical background.
Scooter: I was working up in Montana, but yeah, I just moved down here a few weeks ago, and....
Megan: He's done several plays, Broadway quality.
Scooter: [Laughs] Megan's never seen any of my plays.
Megan: I've seen private performances, and I was very impressed. He played a wide variety of roles.
Scooter: You may have seen me in such movies as Brokeback Mountain, with Niels costarring.

TVGuide.com: How about you, Megan? Where are you living?
Megan: Actually, I just got engaged! And I have just moved down to Florida to pursue housewifeing and suntanning and online shopping. I'm in Jupiter, Florida, home of Tiger Woods and many other celebrities.

TVGuide.com: I love hearing you guys talk now. You sound like such a team who have been together for a while.
Scooter: We've gone from not talking to bickering like a married couple.
Megan: At the beginning, he wouldn't even talk to me. I chased him around. It was like a joke. He didn't want anything to do with me.
Scooter: I was kind of afraid of her.
Megan: Also, he really thought I had nothing to offer, that he could learn nothing from me. He's very smart, but I am smart in my own ways. Once he realized that, it changed our relationship.
Scooter: It's true. Then we became passionate lovers.

TVGuide.com: Don't tell Megan's fiancé!
Megan: He has a girlfriend, as well! On the show he told me in secret that he was in love with her and missed her a lot.
Scooter: We weren't together during the show, though.
Megan: And then they got back together, and now they are in L.A. together living the dream.

TVGuide.com: Did the show help you in your love life?
Scooter: Oh, yeah. I was able to reevaluate how I felt about relationships in general, what kind of person I was looking for. It helped me accept [my girlfriend] and our differences. I think before I had been looking for someone who was just like me or would be my best friend as well as companion. Afterwards, it was like, "We can have differences," because I became friends with all these girls who were way more different than [my girlfriend] and I are.
Megan: The opposite happened for me. I went home and broke up with my boyfriend at the time because of the show. I was with him for a year and a half, and I just got used to the way he was, thinking that it was normal, how critical he was of me, unaccepting and not happy with me the way I am. Just being around all these people in the house who were nice to you and did like you for how you are.... I got home, and the second I got in the door, I kicked him out of my house.

TVGuide.com: Good for you! Are you still working for Playboy?
Megan: I'm doing a lot more stuff for them now. I'm going to Playboy's Spring Break down in Cabo. And I was just at the mansion the other day for their Mardi Gras party. And on Playboy radio.

TVGuide.com: I'm so fascinated by the way you present yourself and the fact that you are a college graduate, with a degree in accounting.
Megan: I am! Six years!

TVGuide.com: Do you try not to seem smart?
Megan: I think I just may be out of practice. There was no use for it in my lifestyle. My vocabulary, due to [not] reading, is very limited. I can't really express myself properly, so I might as well just use smaller words.

TVGuide.com: You're expressing yourself well now. Did the show help you with that?
Megan: Absolutely. Even being around people like Scooter and some of the other guys who talk about things that I would never talk about with my girlfriends. Just to give you different ideas and viewpoints on different types of things — it was really eye-opening and expanded my way of thinking, just being around them.

TVGuide.com: What do you think Scooter needed to learn from the show?
Megan: I think he was very judgmental toward me and the other girls. Maybe judgmental is the wrong word. He didn't seem interested in anything from us, or our opinions. We were supposed to work together, but at the beginning it was more like he thought he should do his own stuff and study and prepare on his own, and that I should do the same. For instance, in the comedy challenge, he went off and wrote his own comedy thing, and I couldn't understand a word of it. I didn't get it. I was like no, that is not going to work at all. It was very intellectual, and I'm sure his friends would have thought it was funny. But for the average person, I didn't even know what the words meant!
Scooter: I'm definitely used to solo intellectual pursuit. I was not used to working with people in teams to begin with. Particularly with somebody who was so different. We had a hard time even carrying on a conversation, let alone helping each other study.
Megan: I was judgmental as well. I didn't really want to talk to him. I just wanted him to follow me around and massage me.
Scooter: I think your version of studying was that you wanted me to read all of your material and summarize it for you.

TVGuide.com: What was your favorite challenge?
Scooter: The most rewarding challenge was the farm challenge.
Megan: Also we got to work together on it. And because we worked together, it really showed our teamwork. We started out in last place. And then we got into the cow-milking part, and I was a natural. She just gave me her milk.
Scooter: It might not have seemed so fun if we hadn't won.

TVGuide.com: Megan, you were so close to winning the beach challenge. Drew told me that it was Scooter's fault the two-way radio didn't work.
Megan: It was. I want to set the record straight right now that Scooter was pushing the wrong button! They made me look stupid, when I was way ahead. I was literally 10 minutes ahead of everybody else. They didn't want to make the geek look like an idiot; they wanted to make me look like an idiot.
Scooter: I'm not a tech-geek. It was embarrassing.

TVGuide.com: For the first few weeks you were pretty safe in the competition. No one considered eliminating you.
Megan: Because Cecille and Nate kept winning, and they were good friends of ours. So we knew that they weren't going to send us in there.

TVGuide.com: Did the finale cause a rift between you and Ceci, Megan?
Megan: Not at all. I'm actually staying with her. I've seen her and talked to her more than anyone else on there.
Scooter: On the other hand, she despises me now.

TVGuide.com: How did you feel about her attitude toward the other teams?
Megan: I think everything was exaggerated. I don't think they showed all the different sides of her. She is very nice, and I'm good friends with her.
Scooter: At the same time, she is unabashedly self-centered. Most people, when they sent someone to the elimination room, it was a very sad thing. She was one of the few people who would get really excited when people left.

TVGuide.com: Do you owe Nate some of your prize money after he talked everyone into voting for you instead?
Scooter: I'm going to take him out. But I want to do that for all the geeks. It's such a strange thing. We did come a long way, and we played the game right...
Megan: ... but we still owe them. They voted for us. And throughout the entire thing we couldn't have done it...
Scooter: Yeah, people helped each other out. We all helped other teams study. It was a weird thing, because you set up this competitive challenge where people are going to get eliminated, and then you get a group of people where pretty much everybody wants everybody to stay.
Megan: It was very emotional. You spend so much time together, with nothing else to do but talk to each other.

TVGuide.com: But can you imagine talking people out of giving you all that money?
Megan: I don't think that's what it was about. I think he really enjoyed his time there, and that's what was worth it for him.
Scooter: I also think he could see which way the wind was blowing. People were asking him, "Why should I vote for Cecille?" and he really had no answer. He answered honestly. Integrity is the best way to describe him.
Megan: We love him.

We do, too, so check back on Thursday for our interview with Nate.

Send your comments on this Q&A to online_insider@tvguide.com.