Jimmy Donaldson — better known on the Internet as Mr. Beast, the content creator who’s become famous for wild and expensive stunts — has always wanted to take what he does on YouTube and make it even bigger. This year, he put that dream into motion with Beast Games, the Prime Video competition series that gathered 1,000 contestants for a chance to win a cash prize in the millions. “With YouTube, it’s harder to tell a story, and to have arcs, within one single 30-minute video,” Donaldson said during a recent THR Presents panel. “We had a desire to have better stories [about the contestants] and to have even bigger cash prizes.”
Donaldson and his executive producer Sean Klitzner assembled a crack team of creatives to bring their vision to life — starting with casting director Katy Wallin, who spent 12 weeks talking to over 100,000 people in her search for contestants. I’ve never worked this hard in my life, but my son is a giant fan and he’s the reason I’m doing this,” she said.
One of those 100,000 people was Jeffrey Randall Allen, a father of two from California who signed up for the competition series hoping to raise awareness about his son Lucas, who struggles with a rare disease called Creatine Transporter Deficiency. “Clearly I’m in, like, the top 10 percent oldest [contestants], so when I got there I was like, what am I doing here?” laughs Allen, who was known throughout the show as Player 831. “But everything stood still during the games, it didn’t matter if you 20 or 60, we were all on equal footing. There was no technology, no concept of time, we were all in it together.”
That is, of course, until the end. After the initial $5 million prize haul doubled during the series, Allen went on to win a whopping $10 million. “I feel blessed to have this platform to talk about my son’s condition, and winning was the cherry on top,” he says. “I got to talk about my son to the world, and then I just so happened to win $10 million, which allows me to do a lot of good not only for my family but for other kids.”
Watch the video above for the rest of the conversation about the making of the competition. This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Prime Video.
