Silver Spring twins Dominic and Greg Perrin thought they had a natural advantage when they were chosen to vie for the attention of self-made Internet star Tila Tequila. After all, there were two of them.
But what had been so successful in getting them attention – and dates, they said – led to their swift undoing last month on MTV reality television show ‘‘A Shot at Love 2 with Tila Tequila.”
‘‘That was a tough one. I really like them, but it was just kind of weird having brothers. ... I mean, who dates brothers?” said Tequila, whose real last name is Nguyen, on the first episode of the reality dating show, moments before sending Greg back to Silver Spring.
‘‘I wasn’t shocked, or offended. ... No hard feelings,” Greg said in Silver Spring earlier this month. Dressed in a black T-shirt with ‘‘Twin 1” on the chest, Greg is the more playful of the two, laughing as his brother Dominic describes his failed attempt at finding love on the show.
Greg admits that he always considered the ‘‘other opportunities” such as acting and television appearances that came along with appearing on the cable music network. The twins, both graduates of the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore and Montgomery Blair High School, already have an agent and are working on a premise for a talk show.
Dominic, wearing a black T-shirt that reads ‘‘Stunt Double” and a matching New York Yankees hat – the twins were born in Brooklyn – calls himself the more sensitive twin, and was described that way by Tequila.
‘‘Dominic was the sweet guy, and Greg was a little more of a bad boy,” Tequila said on the show.
The dating show, which aims to pair the bisexual Tequila with her perfect male or female match out of 30 contestants, premiered in its second season April 22. Tequila is best known on social networking site MySpace, where she boasts more than 3 million friends, and is often credited as a pioneer in using the site to launch a career in television.
The 23-year-old ‘‘Super Twins,” as they were nicknamed on the show for wearing a cape and tights during the first episode, came across the casting call for ‘‘A Shot at Love 2” while surfing the Internet one afternoon. The process that followed included a lengthy application in which producers tried to ‘‘figure out who we really were,” Greg said, with questions like: ‘‘What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”
‘‘I said I had never done anything crazy,” Dominic said.
And then, Dominic said, ‘‘things just kept rollin.’ ” Before they knew it, they were explaining the premise of the show to skeptical family and friends.
‘‘[Our mother] wasn’t really too happy about it at first. But they sat down and talked to her, and let her know that good could come out of this,” the twins’ 21-year-old brother Tim Perrin said. ‘‘We all wish they could have stayed a little longer.”
Dominic made it until the third episode. He was taken aback by the rejection, he said.
‘‘Why wouldn’t you be upset? You have a chance, a shot, at love with Tila, and you didn’t get it. So honestly, I feel like I wasted my time,” Dominic told producers in an on-camera interview following his exit.
In an interview with his brother in Silver Spring, he seemed less distressed. ‘‘Of course I was there for love,” Dominic said. ‘‘But it is what it is.”
The twins said they looked forward to more air time in June, during a reunion special with Tila, her chosen contestant, and those who didn’t make the cut. Still under contract with MTV, the twins were unable to comment on their thoughts about how the show played out and what made them unhappy about the editing, but they said that as with all reality television shows, ‘‘don’t believe everything you see.”
‘‘You want to be famous. ... You do stuff that’s out of the ordinary, that you may not usually do,” Dominic said, adding that he probably wouldn’t date on television again.
‘‘I would do it again,” Greg said, laughing.
