So I found the issue: The interaction controller spawns in a weird spot in that scene and does not move from it. Tried to manually add it to the player prefab, still spawns in weird spot in that scene. Never had this issue before with it. Especially weird that it only does it in this scene atm, but works properly in the other one.
Band-aid fix: add an update(because start and awake don't seem to work) call as a separate script to move it to the player transform... not ideal.