Spilling the tea...

Bachelor Nation got to know Sam McKinney as he looked for love with Jenn Tran on Season 21 of “The Bachelorette.”

Sam famously ruffled feathers with other men on his season and became one of the season’s “villains.”

Now, the Bachelor Nation star is getting ready to give love another shot on the beaches of “Bachelor in Paradise” Season 10!

This week Sam stopped by the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast to catch up with Bachelor Nation and revealed the real reason why he decided to go on “BIP” this summer.

He shared, “I think I owed it first and foremost to my family and my friends. I owed it to my community, and also owed it to myself. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t easy for me, but it really wasn’t easy for my family either to listen to what I had to say whenever I first got back [from “The Bachelorette”] and then to watch it all unfold on TV.”

Sam continued, revealing more about his experience after being on the show and how it affected not only him but his loved ones as well. 

“I’m sitting there like, ‘Holy sh-t, I don’t know what to do right now.’ So I think to be able to watch that, it definitely hurt,” he admitted. “It hurt watching my mom lose sleep at night, my brother-in-law lose sleep over night. We’re the type of people that are very protective, we all know who we are. We all know where we come from. I think just to watch it all get destroyed on TV, it was super tough and you don’t know what you don’t know. And the filming aspect of it was a lot of fun. And that’s what I think I felt bad for was that nobody else but me got to experience that. All they got to experience was the hate and the backlash.”

Sam then shared how he hopes his experience will be different this time around and revealed some of his goals going into “Paradise.” 

“I feel like this will be a time that America gets to see the person that I actually am and not what they think they know,” he expressed. “My goal was to find that person. There were some people that I was really excited to meet on ‘Paradise’ and I think that’s where my head had to be at first. And then whatever happens from there, I can also control my emotions a little bit more. And ‘Paradise’ as you both know, it’s a different vibe out there.”

He went on, saying, “I think first and foremost [my goal] was meeting the people I wanted to meet. And then second was remembering that my friends and family back home, they didn’t support me going back out here. I just wanted to make sure I did my best to make things a little bit easier on them this next go around.” 

Check out the rest of Sam’s conversation in the full episode of “Bachelor Happy Hour” below, and don’t forget to tune in on July 7 for the premiere of “BIP” Season 10!