When MrBeast rolled out the second season of Beast Games this January on Amazon Prime Video, it felt less like a return and more like an escalation. After a debut season that shattered viewership records, rewrote the rules of unscripted television, and turned spectacle into a business model, season two arrived bigger, sharper, and far more intentional. Behind the record-breaking prizes and city-sized sets is a machine powered by obsessive planning, relentless logistics, and storytelling that is finally catching up with the scale. 

On the back of the new season’s launch, we sat down with Jimmy Donaldson for an exclusive tête-à-tête to unpack what the cameras don’t show, why building cities is actually the easy part, and what it truly costs to keep pushing the limits, including the one outrageous challenge he would love to take on in India. 

What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? 

That what we do is easy. We’ve been doing this at a high level for a while now, so people have become numb to the spectacle. But what my team and I do is genuinely very hard. Hundreds of people are involved, and I don’t think people fully grasp that. 

The biggest challenge you faced while making Beast Games? 

What we show on camera often looks much easier than it actually is. For season one, we built an entire city for the contestants. In season two, we built a completely new, fully functioning city that they lived in. What people don’t see is that to support that city, I had to build another city next to it for the crew. That means infrastructure for a thousand people, food, water, safety, even paying people to make sure snakes don’t get into the set since it was built in a field. 

So, you see this perfect oval-shaped city on screen, but behind it is a massive operation just to keep it running. It’s a huge undertaking, and I now understand why most reality shows don’t build cities from scratch. 

What can we expect from Beast Games season two? 

Season one broke a lot of records. It was Prime Video’s most-watched unscripted show, had the largest cash prize ever, and the greatest number of contestants in history. But in season two, my biggest focus was storytelling. In season one, it sometimes took four or five episodes to really know the contestants. This time, you’ll understand who they are much earlier, their motivations, and what the money would mean to them. The scale is still massive. The sets are some of the biggest ever built for any show or movie, and we break even more records. 

That one video that nearly broke you mentally/physically, but you’d still do again: 

Seven days in solitary confinement. I stayed in a white padded room with nothing for seven days. Solitary confinement is pretty inhumane, and that experience was brutal. 

That said, I definitely couldn’t do it again. 

If you had to pick a favourite episode from season two, which would it be? 

They’re all really good, but it has to be the final episode. Once you see who wins and how it all comes together, the feeling is unreal. Honestly, it might be the best piece of content we’ve ever made. 

One dream challenge set in India:  

One hundred per cent: Virat Kohli versus CarryMinati in cricket. Obviously, we’d have to handicap Virat. I’d film that tomorrow!