Why Travis Kelce Turned Down Netflix

Travis Kelce is everywhere right now. He's winning his third Super Bowl in four years. He's hanging out in the VIP tent at his girlfriend Taylor Swift's massive, world-spanning Eras Tour. He's doing his own podcast, "New Heights," which he hosts alongside his brother, fellow NFL superstar and former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce. That's why, according to the man himself, he declined to appear in a potential, ongoing Netflix project that already involved his Kansas City Chiefs teammate and real-life close friend Patrick Mahomes, the team's quarterback.

During his (now-viral) appearance on the Barstool Sports podcast "Bussin' With the Boys," Kelce told hosts and fellow football players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan that he won't show up in the forthcoming "Netflix" documentary "Receiver" — Mahomes appeared in a previous iteraction simply titled "Quarterback," which hit the streamer in 2023. "After Pat did it, I did get asked about it," Kelce revealed to Compton and Lewan. "I don't know. I'd rather just play ball, man. I'm already doing enough with the podcast and everything," he admitted, referencing "New Heights."

There's another potential reason, though, that Kelce might decline to appear in "Receiver" — and he was quite clear about that too. "I'm way over the reality s***. I'm out on that s***," he said. So why is that?

In 2016, Travis Kelce had his own reality show — and he'd rather that everyone forget about it very quickly. "Catching Kelce," a dating show that offered up Kelce as a prize for 50 women (one from each state in the U.S.) and let him winnow them down until one "won" him. The super-cringey, "Bachelor-style" show ended up conferring the title of Kelce's girlfriend to Maya Benberry, the contestant from Kentucky, but the two didn't last very long.

Kelce, for his part, is embarrassed about his involvement in "Catching Kelce" — he even mocked it during his 2023 hosting stint on "Saturday Night Live. ("It was kind of like 'The Bachelor,' except instead of roses I handed out footballs, and instead of watching, people did not," Kelce quipped.) Elsewhere, Kelce was much more blunt about why he did the show. 

"I turned down the show about 100 times ... it felt like," he told the podcast "The Pivot" in the fall of 2023 (via Vanity Fair). "I was having so much fun buying whatever the hell I wanted to, going wherever the hell I wanted to. I wasn't financially looking at this as, you know, I need to have money down the line. There were times in the offseason, I was avoiding the rent lady. It was that bad. I heard about this situation where I could make six figures in two weeks, and I was like, Uhhh. And 50 ladies? I'm like, This is actually starting to sound a little better."

Kelce fared much better on the Amazon documentary about his brother Jason, simply titled "Kelce," but at this point, it's safe to say Kelce is all good where publicity is concerned.

Travis Kelce is, at this point, pretty much set when it comes to being in the public eye. When the NFL tight end started dating superstar singer-songwriter Taylor Swift in 2023, Swift suddenly started appearing at Kansas City Chiefs games ... and before long, the two were kissing right there on the field after Kelce and his teammates clinched their third Super Bowl victory in their 2024 game against the San Francisco 49ers. Kelce has been showing up at Swift's Eras Tour stops for months now, but in June, he made his biggest appearance yet — as an actor of sorts.

During Swift's brand-new on-stage "era" for her 2024 studio album "The Tortured Poets Department," she pretends to collapse on-stage before two backup dancers carry her to a couch, revive and re-dress her, and get her ready to perform the album's upbeat yet melancholy bop "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart." Fans at the Eras Tour show in London on June 23 were positively shocked when Kelce, clad in a top hat and tails, appeared with Swift and her dancers Kameron Saunders and Jan Ravnik, carrying her to the couch himself before dancing to perk her up for the next number. According to the July 3 of "New Heights," it was Kelce's idea to join the show, and Swift came up with the perfect way to make that happen.

"You wanna keep things private, but at the same time, I'm not here to, like, hide anything," Kelce told the "Bussin' with the Boys" hosts on the episode that released the day after his Eras Tour debut. "That's my girl. You know what I mean? That's my lady, so it's, like, I'm proud of that."