'The Masked Singer' Runner-Up Hayley Orrantia Dishes On Her Favorite Performance

On Wednesday night, Hayley Orrantia was unmasked as the Ringmaster on season 7 of "The Masked Singer."

"The Goldbergs" actress was the runner-up of the season, losing out to Teyana Taylor, who had performed as the Firefly. For her final performances, she sang "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles and later followed it up with Katy Perry's "Waking Up In Vegas."

Robin Thicke guessed Maren Morris. Nicole Scherzinger guessed Lucy Hale. Ken Jeong doubled down on Hailee Steinfeld. Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg stuck with Hayden Panettiere. None of the judges were able to correctly identify the former "X Factor" contestant, even though judge Nicole Scherzinger was a judge on that show at the time.

Hayley sat down with Hollywood Life to talk about her final performance and what it was like competing on the Fox musical guessing game show, which has just been renewed for its 8th season.

Hayley told the outlet that she had been a singer-songwriter her “whole life way before [she] got into acting.” She said that competing on the show “felt like a really fun opportunity to sort of trick people that maybe only know me from The Goldbergs and showcase myself as an artist because I do continue to release music independently outside of filming the show.”

“It was just something fun to do. I knew nobody was going to guess me, and I just thought it would be great to dress up like a cat in a circus and sing Whitney Houston,” she joked.

She revealed that the Ringmaster outfit was the first costume that she saw. Her response? “I don’t even need to see any more.”

“The drawing they had was just so beautiful,” she continued. “I think what I gravitated towards was, first of all, I just wanted to be able to have a costume that you could still see my shape and I could move around because I wanted to really be able to move around on stage, whether it was choreography or whatever.”

She described the costume as “It was more like a jacket on the top, and the skirt has an opening where you could still see my legs. But the skirt was like 7 or 8 feet wide, so there were these grand aspects to the costume.”

“I also loved, based upon how they built it out, I could move with the skirt and it kind of bounced with me,” she added. “Overall, it had this fun, playful element and I wanted to really showcase my personality as well. It just embodied everything I could have imagined for this opportunity.”

“I feel very lucky because I know there were other costumes where they had to be wheeled out on set because they couldn’t move in it very well,” she added. “With the skirt being the main piece, it was attached to me through a harness that went around my shoulders. When I first put it on, I was like, I can run a marathon in this thing. It’s pretty lightweight. But after a while, it started to weigh on my shoulders a little bit.”

“Navigating around corners was pretty interesting, but I did it fairly well. It’s kind of just like parallel parking,” she continued. “Thankfully, I had some crew members there that helped me move around a little bit. But for the most part, it was just such a fun costume to wear.”

She also said that her last performance of Katy Perry’s “Waking Up In Vegas” was her favorite song to perform “because I did not think to do that song originally.”

“Someone suggested it to me, and I thought that might be a fun one,” she explained. “Once I got it on its feet vocally it was really fun to sing and then the choreography that they gave me I was able to move around. It was just ending on such a high note and with high energy. That was probably my favorite one.”

Hayley called music her “first love” and confessed that her music career “hasn’t necessarily panned out the way that I had envisioned.”

“I mean, acting was something that I did purely because record labels recommended I did a show in order to get signed, and then to have the catch-22 of I’ve never been signed to a label and I’ve been on a show for 10 years,” she explained.

“To be able to do this show and hear the feedback was very validating of like, Hayley, just keep doing it because you love to do it and share it with the people that are going to be resonating with it,” she continued. “It doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to look like in your mind. You love to do it. I think I’m meant to do it, whether people like it or not.”

“It just gave me a little bit of self-confidence back in my music because the amount of times I’ve been like, okay, I think I’m giving up is astounding,” she concluded. “It was just a very validating experience.”