Interview: ‘Survivor’ Casting Director Jesse Tannenbaum on Discovering Reality Icons

Casting Director Jesse Tannenbaum has two Emmy nominations this year across both Survivor and The Amazing Race, representing two very different approaches to reality TV casting.

Tannenbaum also casts the third stalwart of the CBS reality TV lineup, Big Brother, currently in the midst of its 28th season. Indeed, 2026 has been a yearlong testament to Tannenbaum’s casting expertise, as Survivor 50 standouts Rick Devens and Dee Valladares are currently crushing it in the BB house as well.

“You look at Dee and you look at Devens, and they have completely different games,” says Tannenbaum. “I mean, Dee is a social assassin. She is somebody that even in the casting process for Survivor, I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’d be good on any show. She’d kill it on Big Brother.’ And as we see, she is. And then you have the wild card in Devens.”

Devens recently made good on that “wild card” reputation by playing his Diamond Power of Veto on his fellow Survivor alum Dee, a fiery but unsurprising move by the former news anchor, who also delivered one of Survivor‘s most shocking moments in recent memory when he flipped the Mr. Beast coin on Survivor 50.

That kind of fearlessness and charisma is exactly what Tannenbaum and his team are looking for when casting any of their shows, but especially a game as high-stakes and fast-paced as Survivor. Of course, the team had no shortage of such options when choosing which former players should return for season 50. While Tannenbaum shouts out Tiffany Ervin (46) as a castaway whose journey he has been particularly invested in, there are just as many contestants over the years whose exclusion from the cast was a heartbreaking decision to make: Jesse Lopez (43), Rachel LaMont (47), Sophi Balerdi (49), etc.

Tiffany’s journey to Survivor, which culminated in three individual immunity wins on Survivor 50 after a difficult run all throughout Survivor 46, is a worthy anecdote for any aspiring castaway, having made a lasting impression on Tannenbaum all these years later.

“Tiffany’s somebody that applied for the first time after seeing Wendell’s season [Ghost Island (36)]. The video I don’t think was what we were looking for at that time, and I think she would even say at this stage, ‘if I made it on that season that I first applied, it wasn’t the right time for me.’ At that point, she was working a normal job and after that she quit. She decided to become a hustler and become an artist and do what she could to scrape by, going with a passion that she really wanted to lean into, and I think that really showed up in the game that she played.”

So for castaways like Tiffany, who improved their stock but still came up short of the $2M grand prize, or for players like Jesse and Sophi, still waiting for a second chance to correct for their mistakes and claim the title of Sole Survivor…can they expect a call from Tannenbaum and his team anytime soon?

“ I know everybody’s hoping 51 or 52 will be returning players. All I can tell you is right now we are casting Season 53 and 54. We’re looking for fresh faces. But the open era, anything can happen,” says Tannenbaum. “So I think it’s just going to be a well-oiled machine of constantly getting great people that when the time is right, we’ll be able to have another really hard decision to make.”

Check out our full conversation below to hear a few other standout names from Tannenbaum during the Survivor 50 casting process, as well as his assessment of the state of diversity in the show’s casting today.