Survivor 49's First Boot Says Jeremiah Asked For Water To Be Spat In His Face
The following contains spoilers for the Season 49 premiere of Survivor!
The monster has claimed its first victim.
The new era of Survivor goes hard and fast, and the best way to stave off Jeff Probst's itchy torch snuffer? Win, win, win. For the Kele tribe, that was easier said than done, and in Wednesday's premiere, Team Blue lost all three of the season's first challenges. With Annie and Nicole seemingly on the bottom, Nicole hoped that her connection with Alex and Annie's self-isolation would be enough to keep her safe, so much so that she decided to hang on to her potentially life-saving Shot in the Dark. But instead of waking up at camp on Day 4, Nicole saw Jeff read her name five times, and she swiftly became the first person voted out of Survivor 49. (Read our full recap here.)
Below, Nicole talks to TVLine about spitting water in Jeremiah's face, getting sick on camera, the hardest part of playing the game, and of course, that pesky little shoe bandit.
TVLINE | Someone's got to be first out and unfortunately it was you. How are you feeling about being 49's first victim?
NICOLE MAZULLO | You know, I'll wear it as a badge of honor. I'm pumped that I was on this season. It's a great cast, great season, so like you said, someone's gotta go, and yeah, I just feel honored to have played the game. I've been a fan for so long, my entire life, so it was just great to be out there and play and I'm just grateful and appreciative of all the good things.
TVLINE | You said your family was going to laugh and that you'd be the butt of every joke. What was their reaction to the episode?
I totally am going to be the butt of all jokes. Thanksgiving is gonna be hysterical already. I know there's gonna be a lot of little one-liner jabs, but they are just so proud that I got on the show. Again, I've watched it with them growing up and so they were pumped to just see me on the TV screen, in the buff, on the island, they were pumped. I got big hugs. Everyone was crying, but it was good. It was good, laughing and crying.
TVLINE | Why didn't you play your Shot in the Dark?
Heading into tribal council I was 50-50 on using it. I knew it was between Annie or me, you could tell. That was a palpable vibe, and I think that came through pretty well in the episode, as well. Honestly, I turned to Alex in Tribal, and you can see that this makes the edit as well, I ask him, "Am I good?" and he said yes, and that kind of shifted my mindset from being 50-50 on using the Shot in the Dark to like 30-70. And I ultimately decided to not use it because I felt it was logical, an Annie vote-out. It made sense to me, but yeah, I decided not to. I thought I'd save it.
TVLINE | Who did you feel most betrayed by?
No, no, I don't, because I just met these people three days in. I know everyone in Survivor's like, "We're a family," but I met them three days ago. So no, I don't feel betrayed. I don't feel hurt. It's a game. Someone had to go out. There's a viable reason to vote out any player and the first person that speaks up and points to someone, they're gonna go with that vote. No one wants to be the first one voted out, so it was an easy pick, an easy target, so no, I don't feel betrayed, not at all.
TVLINE | Some of your tribe members perceived you as unathletic and not a good puzzle solver. What's your response to that?
They can think what they want to think. I think it's valid. If I went to try and run the mile around a track against Sophi or Jeremiah or any of them, I probably wouldn't win. But also, it's "Outwit, Outplay, Outlast," not "Outrun, Outrun, Outrun." I know what I was bringing to the table. Again, I had only known them for three days. It's very easy to make assumptions based on how people look and so I don't fault anyone for that. There's probably truth in what they were saying in some regards, so, I don't know. I'm very diplomatic at the end of the day.
TVLINE | When did you find out about the shoe bandit's true identity?
I knew after we got back from the show, someone else actually had told me, not Jake, to kind of give me a heads-up. So I knew before watching the episode that it might have made the cut and it did, and I was just laughing. I thought it was funny. I was like, "OK, whatever you wanna do. Throw it around." [Laughs]
TVLINE | Do you have any regrets or is there anything you wish you had done differently?
Maybe play my Shot in the Dark. Survivor is so unpredictable, It's truly like luck of the draw. One relationship could be your demise, one situation, one strategy. It is truly luck, [that's] how I feel. I just got the bad end of the stick on that one. The only thing I would have changed was maybe trying to form more of a relationship with Annie, and leveraging the fact that we were on the outs, quote unquote, to our advantage to try to cultivate some sort of separate alliance. Then, playing my Shot in the Dark in the hopes that it might have hit.
TVLINE | People were saying that Annie was going off on her own a lot. Was it really that noticeable?
Yes, it was true. She was doing a really good job of trying to build the shelter, and so that was her main focus. She was an old school player in that way. She wanted to make sure we weren't cold at night when we were sleeping, so she put a lot of energy into building the shelter and collecting bamboo and palm fronds, so yes, she went off and was focusing on that a lot and that was palpable. You could feel that separation.
TVLINE | There were some really funny clips in this episode, like you spitting water in Jeremiah's face, but then they also showed you vomiting on national television. What was going on there? Anxiety, dehydration...?
People keep asking me this. The vomit situation was cracking me up that that was on TV. I was dying. That's the s–t my family is gonna be like, "Oh my God!" Honestly, you don't eat out there. I didn't eat for three days and then I took a vitamin on an empty stomach and it was immediate. It wasn't nerves, it wasn't mental, it wasn't stress. It was literally just this vitamin on an empty stomach. So that aside, the spitting in Jeremiah's eye, he asked me to spit in his eye to take the mud out of his eye! I did not willy-nilly spit in this man's eye. He didn't propose pouring the water on him and I didn't even think to pour the water on his eyes. I just spit and it was great because it worked. If you look and see, his eyes were clean.
TVLINE | Everyone seems to have really liked each other, but was there any drama in those first three days, maybe something we didn't see in the episode?
No. In those first couple of days, you're just trying to put your best foot forward, build any sort of connection you can. Even if you don't like someone, you're still trying to build that connection with them and you're focusing on the potential upside, not what you don't like. So, no, I think my tribe was really focused on cultivating those relationships and alliances. I was a proponent of that as well. I was definitely attempting to do that with everyone and so, no, there wasn't any crazy drama. But this season, it's going to be a great watch. I don't know how it's gonna play out, but I think maybe we'll see some of that later on as the game starts to play out.
TVLINE | What was the hardest part about either being in the game or being on those beaches of Fiji?
Honestly, that's a good question. For me, it was kind of being on the outside of this social dynamic. I have never been someone — I'm not saying this in any sort of pretentious way — but I was always in the in-crowd. I had friends, I was funny, people liked me, I was in. And I think it was a very humbling experience in that I wasn't in this crowd. So, that was a good learning experience and a humbling experience of being on the outside and trying to weasel my way in. I would say that it was the most mentally taxing because that has an impact on obviously your mental, which has an impact on your physical and then how you approach the game, how you approach people. So I think perhaps that psychological warfare that I was having internally with that. It might have impacted the way that I approached the game and my strategy going into it. That was definitely the hardest to reconcile from a gameplay perspective.