“Survivor 45” star Drew Basile says he was 'humiliated' and 'mortified'

"'Survivor' was something I wanted to forget about for the rest of my life when I got voted off."

Drew Basile had a lot to say at Tribal Councils on Survivor 45 — constantly supplying Jeff Probst with analogy after analogy of how Survivor was like a sport or a limbo contest or the ancient Greek court of Dionysius. But Drew was strangely silent after being blindsided this week, getting his torch snuffed and walking off without any parting comments to the tribe that had just ousted him.

What was going through Drew’s mind? We asked the sixth-place finisher all that and more the morning after his televised ouster. What was his final three plan? How does he think he would have done had he gotten there? And what happened out on the island that we did NOT see. Read on for answers.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So, first off: Who am I talking to? Is this Drew or is this Basile I have right now?

DREW BASILE: This is definitely Drew, and the funny thing is this, I don’t know if you guys got all that much Basile out there on Survivor, which is, I think, a testament to the way the game breaks you down, it decomposes you. That game makes you go to your insecurities, your deepest worries by day five. So I think out there I was doing a lot of soul searching and I don't know if I was necessarily concerned with representing that extroversion, the outgoing party animal type behavior that might characterize Basile. And there's not much to have a party about on Survivor. There's no beer. All you got is coconut water and no food in your stomach to even things out.

Well, it definitely didn't look like a party when you got voted out to quote Kellie from the jury, you looked pissed when you were voted out. Tell me what was going through your mind.

Yeah, it's funny it projected the anger because I was so humiliated. I was just mortified, and I felt like that demoralization just came through in my final words, which were, I thought pretty soulless — as if it was surveying my life out of body. But yeah, it was crushing.

At Tribal Council, I started to put together from some of the answers that things weren't right. So I was really freaking out. But you sit on the end, you go to this tent, you sit in the chair, and you think: How could I have been so foolish? And then watching it back again, there's that replaying and replaying. And I think that's an experience that, speaking of Kellie, I'm sure she had, and I'm sure every Survivor has.

Did Austin know you were the target or not? Because it wasn't 100 percent clear.

Yeah, so talking with him, I don't think he knew. I'd love to be surprised because it would definitely be some tea as a fan, but he didn't know. And I think that's part of kind of where Dee's move excelled, which is that she pulled the wool over everybody's eyes a number of times — last vote, this vote — and so props where it's due. This is a moment where Austin and I were out of the loop.

After Julie played her idol, did you believe Dee when she said she had not told Julie the vote was on her?

Great question. So I thought at least that Dee had leaked the vote, but we thought the leak happened during that conversation with Austin. I wasn't there, right? Obviously, it was those two talking. They have their alone time together, but it was an extremely emotional conversation. It was a long conversation, and in the middle of it, Julie stumbles into it and is like, “What's going on?”

So I thought basically the vote leaked that way to Julie. And Austin and my impression was that if Julie puts a vote on somebody, she'll put it on Emily, because Emily was going after her the hardest. And if she does that, Emily goes home. That's potentially a safe jury vote. Emily was probably the biggest threat in the game, and so that was an eventuality. We're okay with that happening.

Let’s play it out. Let’s say Austin does not tell Dee and you go ahead and blindside Julie. Do you still go next?

No, I don't. I think Emily was 100 percent locked in with our final three because she appreciated the way that Austin and I treated her, gave her a sense of involvement in the game, gave her strategic agency that she didn't really have prior to that, at least in my opinion. And also, Emily had this amazing relationship with Jake to bring him in again and again to keep him going. And I think Jake really valued Emily's presence. And so I think if she had been there, things would've been very different for me, at least at final six. I don’t know if I would've made it to the end, but yeah, definitely a huge mistake in hindsight, not splitting the vote.

But I have to tell you, Dalton, I know that you're a purist of the game. You've been around the block. I have some very unorthodox views about the way Survivor should be played, and one of them is that splitting the vote is almost always a bad idea. I never want to split the vote. And even watching it back the way it didn't go so well — some of those non-splits I stand by just for more Byzantine game logic reasons. But yeah, obviously Emily going was a problem.

What was your plan for the final three?

I'll tell you, watching the show back is kind of some cold water in a certain sense because at the time I felt comfortable going to the end with Dee and Austin. And I felt comfortable because I believed I would obtain all the strategic credit for the game to that point. I think Dee and Austin would be highlighted physically and socially, but with the jury composition and maybe who they blamed for some of the moves — and I think you saw it in their reactions — I thought that the strategic credit would come to me.

Whether that credit would be a plus or minus, who can say? But I was comfortable going to the end with basically any combination of final three. And I said in the show, if I got past this vote, I'm going to three. From my perspective, based on some of the Tribal Council answers, I started to get really nervous that things were not going my way, which added to some of the mortification because I had been so confident all day. But at Tribal Council, I started to really have some second thoughts and I was trying to project strength, but I didn't have plans with everybody, so it just didn't work out.

Do you think Austin was planning to sit with you at the final three, and how did Dee play into his plans?

I think that Austin was probably stuck between a rock and hard place because he had two people he wanted to be really tight with, and I think Austin's plan at that point was to go to the end with Dee and I.  It’s hard to say what Dee's plan involved, but I'm not sure it involved bringing Austin and I since I got sent home.

You talked about how you were mortified and humiliated and devastated after being voted out. Take me through the rest of the night. When you go to Ponderosa, does that start to wear off a little bit? What was it like when you start seeing the rest of the gang over there?

I love everybody on the jury, to be clear. We get along great in real life. But Ponderosa for me was probably actually maybe the hardest moment of my Survivor experience actually, because I was just so done. Survivor was something I wanted to forget about for the rest of my life when I got voted off. And so I was basically ready to drink margaritas and sit by the pool, but the game was still going.

The thing about Ponderosa is that you have a lot of people whose dreams were kind of clipped short, mine included, and they want to play out what their life would've been like or what their game would've been like, and kind of vicariously still living the game through really meta-gaming the jury. That was not where my headspace was at, so I definitely really struggled at Ponderosa and was happy to be done.

Yeah, well you're not the first person that struggled at Ponderosa. Bruce told me just a few weeks ago he had a really tough time there as well. Okay, you compared yourself and Austin to J.T and Stephen, and Tyson and Gervase. So my question to you is: Who was J.T. and Tyson, and who was Fishbach and Gervase?

Listen, Dalton, I think we all have eyes and can tell that I am not the brawny muscular challenge beast charisma machine that would perhaps epitomize Tyson and J.T. I think I'm more of the Stephen, whether or not being the Stephen is a bad thing in this era I think is a really good question for people who love the meta-game. Jonathan was the greatest physical player, maybe in history, and he was dead. So sometimes now the jury has a little bit more respect for the Stephens. So I don't know if it is a bad thing. And also, runner up! That's a healthy accomplishment.

Oh my God, Fishbach is going to love this. Alright, you had a lot of analogies this season at Tribal Council. Did you come up with all those beforehand or were those done on the spot?

No, so this was the only bit of criticism that really rankled me. People were like, “It's so rehearsed, it's so rehearsed.” That's just how I talk. It was not rehearsed. One thing I did at Tribal Council, and I would recommend people do if they get on, is that every question that's asked — answer it. Any question that anybody gets, come up with what your answer would be because you find that that lays the foundation in basis for similar questions you'll get at a different Tribal Council.

And so the analogies were prepared in that sense because each question I'm like, “Okay, what would I say?” But no, I didn't sit around a camp and come up with witty Tribal Council lines. I actually didn't prepare for those confessionals or Tribal Councils at all, which in hindsight was a mistake because I think potentially I was more honest than I needed to have been just because I didn't care.

The Tribal Councils felt not as a superfluous aspect of the game, but certainly the confessionals did. And I think that the confessionals are, in fact, a really valuable opportunity for reflection, for setting out where you are and thinking critically about conversations that in the moment you might not have had the opportunity to.

What’s something that happened out there we never got to see that you wish had made it on TV?

My favorite story definitely couldn't have made TV, but one of the ones I really liked was crab hunting. And I think Sifu mentioned this somewhere down the line, but we had a great system of crab hunting, and there were these rocks and we would scare 'em. They'd go under and we'd throw 'em into the air and then we would club them in midair with the oar and so they would break apart.

And so obviously there's an element of brutality that PETA would probably object to, but it was a blast, and you just felt like the king of the world doing it. I felt like Robinson Crusoe. I felt like some Survivor guru, like Bear Grylls. It was a great time. It was really cool. I felt like it would've been a great shot of the drone and a smashing in midair, but alas, it didn't make it on.

That sounds like a natural for the “Playing with the Boys segment. We had an exclusive deleted scene on EW a few weeks back of you sleep-talking. How regular an occurrence is that for you and what’s the weirdest thing you’ve done or said in your sleep?

It's never that regular in real life. But out there it was every night, and I remember I would have this repeated one on Survivor that my favorite bookstore closed back in America. I don't know why I would go to my favorite bookstore in the dream. It would be closed, and it so freaked me out. And it happened so many times that when I got back into America that first day, one of the first things I did was I took an Uber to go see the favorite bookstore. Is it still there? Is it still around? Which is perhaps a testament to the effect that Survivor can have on you because I'd been away for a month and I was questioning the fundamental cores of my reality, my relationships — is my bookstore still around? So yeah, that was probably the funniest dream.

We also have an EW exclusive deleted scene of you this week and everyone’s laughing about how grumpy and curmudgeonly you were on the island. Is that an accurate assessment?

At the end of the game, I was pretty grumpy. I think that when you're tall, I've heard the food deprivation hits a little bit differently. It becomes a lot harder. And I was feeling it in a major way. Jake is this wellspring of positivity — “I'm on Survivor!” But for me, “I'm on Survivor” was like a millstone around my neck. It was like, “Oh my god, another day of no food. Struggling man against man.” I'm trying to think of the Thomas Hobbes Leviathan quote. But yeah, I was a little grumpy.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.