Where are they now? Grand Strand’s first reality TV star still running Conway funeral home
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Nearly 20 years since first appearing on reality television, Marvin Latimer is still chasing bigger dreams while learning to appreciate the life he has.
The Conway funeral home director was a contestant in 2004 on season five of the CBS show “Big Brother,” which is concluding its 25th season this week. He still does commentary about the show on a local news station, but said he hasn’t really enjoyed watching the current cast.
Latimer told The Sun News that he always had “dreams of grandeur,” and he believed at the time that reality television could be his way out of small town Conway.
“I love Conway, I just can’t make millions,” he said. “I have a good life, just no Ferrari (cars). I can supersize at McDonald’s.”
His first television appearance was as a contestant on the NBC game show “Weakest Link,” and then he applied for “Survivor” and “Big Brother,” which he had never seen before being selected.
Coming off the show — where contestants are confined within a house and filmed 24 hours a day, seven days a week — Latimer said it was difficult for him to adjust back to his regular life, and he became a local celebrity for a bit.
“I run a funeral home, and it got to a point where it was kind of embarrassing,” he recalled. “We’re at a funeral, and people are asking to take a picture with me, or for an autograph.”
Latimer attempted to parlay that attention into a Hollywood career, peaking with an appearance on the long running soap opera “The Young and the Restless,” where he played a gym director.
But since those early days, he said, it’s been a series of close calls — a final interview for a Food Network show that never materialized, a Netflix deal that fell apart at the last second, a reality show based on his life that executives decided didn’t have enough drama.
“It’s super difficult to be out of the spotlight when dreams of grandeur are in you,” Latimer said. “It’s like I missed my flight to Hollywood, and now I’m hitchhiking my way there.”
He noted he’s always been driven to think bigger because of the successes of his parents — his dad opened the funeral home where he now works in 1924 and his mom owned a small business in North Carolina.
But he’s learned to enjoy the journey, including helping people grieve when they lose their loved ones. And he hosts a weekly cooking show Saturdays on local television.
“I haven’t gotten that internal peace, that’s what drives me,” Latimer said. “And I always juxtapose that, in the line of work that I’m in, with you could be in a cemetery.”
