Cory Stillman
“I’m a fan first,” says Aubry Bracco, the winner of Survivor‘s seminal 50th season, reminiscing on her early days watching the show’s very first season, Borneo, in the year 2000.
“The colors are jumping out of the screen. The TV is just screaming for me to hop into it and explore this world,” says Bracco. “And then I watched with my family. At that point, it was every Thursday we’d have pizza and Survivor night. And I watched all the way up until I went to college, and I think that happens to a lot of people.”
Indeed, I can confirm that was my own journey with Survivor, which began in 2012 with the show’s 25th season, took a brief respite when I left for college in 2016, and turned into full-on obsession in the decade since. It was therefore a genuine pleasure to nerd out about the best show on television alongside Bracco, who has made a genuine case for a place in the Survivor Mt. Rushmore after not only winning S50, subtitled In the Hands of the Fans, but also finishing as the runner-up on S32 and in fourth place on S34.
Bracco’s most recent appearance before 50, however, came on Edge of Extinction, the franchise’s 38th season. And as she herself would admit, it was not her proudest performance, finishing 16th out of 18 players.
“ I had to grapple with that failure, grapple with having been the robbed kind of goddess, as people said, and then kind of deal with that crash. And I took time away for myself, and then, like it always does, Survivor comes back somehow,” says Bracco.
And for Bracco, that comeback resulted in the $2M grand prize as well as the title of Sole Survivor. Her game was less controlling and flashy than that of her fellow finalist Jonathan Young, but that was by design. Bracco identifies her “restraint” as a key component of her win, as well as another important lesson she took from fellow S38 and S50 contestant Rick Devens (whom Aubry and I are now enjoying on Big Brother as well).
“Something I thought about for playing my game to win in 50 was, how do you hold the space for other players?” says Bracco. “And I’ve been with Rick on 38 and 50, and I’ve watched him mature. He is a showman, but he knows how to hold the space for the pauses and the other players like Angela or Jason to pop off. He’s a mastermind in there when it comes to making TV, and as a player.”
Bracco expertly held that space for all the massive personalities surrounding her on 50, arguably none more so than Ozzy Lusth, who seemed well on his way to rewriting his Survivor story, until he spilled to the season’s eventual winner his entire endgame strategy.
Hours later, Ozzy was voted out with a hidden immunity idol in his pocket. Déjà vu for him and Survivor fans everywhere.
“ When you talk to Ozzy, you gotta slow down, and you gotta listen,” says Bracco. “I had built that rapport with Ozzy, and in that moment when he was kind of spilling the beans, I was like, whoa, he really does feel comfortable with me. This is my opportunity, as painful as it is as a human, to collect this information and then galvanize the other three guys with me to galvanize the final four.”
It was arguably the signature move of Bracco’s game on Survivor 50, which just might be memorialized as the first season of the series to finally win the coveted Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Program. It has been a long time coming, but it would finally pay off the decades of fandom for so many of us, including the show’s most recent winner.
Check out our full conversation with Aubry Bracco below, as we dive deeper into her own philosophy around hidden immunity idols, as well as reflect on her time on S34 Survivor: Game Changers.
Comments
Loading…