‘The Circle’ Winner Frank Grimsley Saw His Mother’s Spirit After the Finale
The reality genre may have been built on the cliché “I’m not here to make friends,” but on The Circle, that’s pretty much the entire goal. And if there’s one thing social worker and child therapist Frank Grimsley was not worried about coming into the social media competition, it was forming connections with his fellow contestants.
“I could build rapport with anybody,” the Alabama-born Baltimore native told The Daily Beast. “I think I could build rapport with a tree.”
As it turns out, he was right. The Circle crowned Grimsley its fourth winner during Wednesday’s finale, a conclusion that felt inevitable by the time it aired. Grimsley has been a frontrunner since the beginning of the season, a player whom fellow contestants both liked and respected even before they heard his exceptional backstory. It’s easy to see why; even through a screen on Google Meet, Grimsley is magnetic. His laugh is infectious, and more importantly—to drop his favorite compliment—his energy is as sunny as it gets.
But Grimsley’s choice to join The Circle was far from easy. His job, a source of stability he’d worked for years to build, would not grant him time off to join the season—so he quit. On the same day he left his job, Grimsley’s grandfather died. Joining the Netflix show meant missing the funeral.
“I didn’t know how my family was going to take that,” Grimsley said. “It felt to me I was turning my back on my family to be on this competition show.” Still, he said, “I knew that I was being tested.”
As Grimsley noted during the season, he lost both of his parents at a young age, a traumatic period that led him to become a therapist. As a child who’d suffered incomprehensible losses, he recalled, “I was so angry. I really didn’t have anyone to talk to.” As an adult weighing career options, he began thinking about the kinds of support he could have used back then: “What space can I step into and give young people something that I needed?”
Grimsley’s time on The Circle directly followed another pair of devastating losses—his grandmother died in 2019 and his uncle passed in 2020, a death the family could not commemorate with a funeral due to COVID-19.
“Sometimes things have got to get really, really ugly before they get really, really pretty,” Grimsley said. Coming into The Circle, however, he had faith: “I knew that if I get there, there’s going to be something on the other side of this loss that’s gonna be worth it.”
Grimsley studied up on past seasons before rolling his suitcases into The Circle’s cheerfully decorated quarantine apartments, so his time on the show came with few surprises—although he does admit he was wrong about one thing. Coming in, he’d assumed a lot of the cooking was just for show and that, in fact, he’d be able to order in at least a couple meals.
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“No, ma’am!” Grimsley said with a laugh. “You cannot—you’ve got to cook.” As someone who’d perfected a meal-planning routine to avoid spending every night in the kitchen, he said, “I was not happy about that.”
As with any player who maintains a resolutely positive vibe in The Circle, some of Grimsley’s fellow contestants initially seemed suspicious that his good energy might just be an innocuous front for clout. Over time, however, any cynicism players might’ve felt toward Grimsley seemed to melt away as they got to know him and heard his story.
That makes sense, given that Grimsley’s main goal was to build genuine connections with each of his fellow players. Perhaps the most fascinating of his friendships came with a professional ghost hunter named Rachel Evans. It was during one of their conversations that Grimsley opened up about a deeply personal moment in which he saw the spirit of his mother after her death.
As Grimsley explained during our conversation, his mother had always been a prankster. One time when he was in elementary school, for instance, he’d been crowned Fall Festival King—a title that even came with a sash. When his mother picked him up from school, he expected a celebration; instead, she took him to a camp for children who’d misbehaved so he could see what happened to kids who stepped out of line. “They had us sweep the cement with toothbrushes,” he recalled with a laugh. “I still had on my sash!”
For months after his mother died, Grimsley said, he’d believed her passing was some sort of prank—some kind of punishment for something awful he’d done. “I was in denial that it was happening,” he said, until one day his mother’s spirit appeared to him while he was singing with a choir.
“She said, ‘Let me go,’” Grimsley recalled. “That was the moment where I had to release the idea that she would come back.”
More than 15 years later, Grimsley said he recently experienced a second encounter with his mother as The Circle inched toward its premiere. “‘I wanted to talk to you for so long,’” he recalls her telling him, “‘but you weren’t ready.’” Describing what it was like to hear his mother’s spirit express pride in him, Grimsley said, “It was kind of an experience where I was not in my body.” The vision brought to mind one of the biggest lessons Grimsley’s mother ever taught him: Whatever he sets his mind to, he can achieve.
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Speaking of which—what’s next now that he’s won $100,000 (plus another $50,000 in Spice Girls bonus money)?
In addition to his work as a therapist, Grimsley has built a significant social media following, although he stops short of calling himself an influencer, preferring the title of content creator. Whatever label one uses, however, the path there has been “stressful.”
“People would wonder why I would start shooting and then I would stop,” Grimsley said of his Instagram content. Between the cost of clothes, photography, and production, he couldn’t afford to keep his content consistent while living paycheck to paycheck. Now, however, “the seeds that I’ve sown have finally come back to me.”
As he looks toward the future, Grimsley doesn’t rule out another stint on the small screen. But really, his goal is simple: “I want to continue to make people laugh, in whatever capacity God allows it to happen.”
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