Parker Schnabel was effectively born into reality TV stardom, entering the gold mining business as a teenager before inheriting his family’s mine at a young age. Soon after that, he ended up one of the leads on the Discovery reality series that has since made him a star. Schnabel had fun learning how to mine during his youth, he once revealed in an interview. Having gone through his young adulthood in front of TV cameras, Schnabel even spends his free time with “Gold Rush” crew members, as he detailed in an online Q&A session.
While Schnabel may have friends on the “Gold Rush” crew, he still finds the process of appearing on camera plenty difficult. In an interview with The MALESTROM, Schnabel fielded a question about adversity he faced when he was starting off as a miner. “I think it’s very hard to balance the business with everything being on camera,” he said. “It’s all your mistakes being in the spotlight like that.”
His interviewer then followed up by noting that the intensity of gold mining work must be amplified by the presence of a camera crew. “It’s a challenge and it continues to be one, but we’re getting through it now,” Schnabel replied.
As it turns out, however, Schnabel’s job amassing large quantities of gold isn’t the only aspect of his life made more difficult by the “Gold Rush” film crew.
Parker Schnabel had to learn to become a mining boss and a TV star at the same time
Parker Schnabel discussed his trajectory from bored teenager to wealthy reality TV show lead at length in an interview with The Times. Midway through this conversation, Schnabel described his childhood as typical for someone growing up in Alaska, which meant that he learned to hunt at a young age, and was oftentimes preoccupied by his dual interests in hunting and gold mining. When he simultaneously started working as a gold miner and appearing on “Gold Rush,” however, his life was complicated significantly.
“Fifteen to twenty-five. Those are impressionable years of your life,” Schnabel told The Times. “For a lot of that time, I was around nobody my own age. I was up here trying to run a business with a bunch of old guys who didn’t want to be told what to do or how to do it, and a film crew trying to make a show out of that. It was pretty challenging.”
Schnabel, then, not only had to learn to work effectively in front of a camera crew, but figure out how to become an authority figure for his older employees, all while progressing through some of the most pivotal years of his life — not an easy task by any means.