In 2013, Captain Lee Rosbach was catapulted into stardom with the success of his new show, Below Deck. At the time, the 63-year-old was credited as a huge factor in the show’s success.
Almost a decade later — and three spinoffs later — Lee is still at the helm, though many of his costars have come and gone. Now, Captain Lee represents the entire brand.
At the beginning of the franchise, this wasn’t the cast. In fact, Lee was never intended to be on it.
Initially, his job was simply to drop off the superyacht.
“I thought I was heading down to Saint Martin for just a gravy train,” he shared during an interview for the Heart of the Matter podcast, via Showbiz Cheat Sheet. “Drop the boat off, go check on it every three or four days, get paid double pay, sit on the beach, drink foo-foo drinks for six weeks, bring [wife] Mary Anne down, and enjoy life.”
Fortunately (for viewers), things didn’t go to plan. “The captain that they hired… had the certificate, but he didn’t have the experience, so the insurance company pulled the plug on him.”
With a captainless boat, the yacht’s owner presented an ultimatum. “My boss is, like most billionaires, he just really doesn’t… A million dollars doesn’t move the needle much for him, so he [told producers], ‘Either use my captain or we’re out of here,’” said Lee.
Lee then quipped that producers had to hire “the old guy.” According to Lee, however, “they actually tried to shoot around me” in order to appeal to a younger demographic.
“That’s why the release date took so long to get out,” he explained. “Because I was edited out of most of the scenes. So when Bravo got ahold of that, I think we only shot 10 episodes to begin with. And Bravo got it, and they said, ‘Well, where’s the captain?’ They said, ‘Well, we decided to shoot around him and cut him out.’”
Afterward, production was forced to re-edit season one. “[Bravo] said, ‘Go back and do it again,’” Lee explained, while adding, “We didn’t have to reshoot it. But they had to re-edit it in the storyline. So post wasn’t real happy.”
Lee’s new position (‘Stud of the Sea’) wasn’t something he felt ready for.
“I wasn’t totally unprepared for any of this. I really was. It just wasn’t… Well, nobody gives you a handbook on how to deal with this sort of thing,” said the captain. “I’m just a working class guy. I wasn’t ready for celebrity, or stardom, or any of this stuff. And I still consider myself just a captain that gets filmed doing his job.”