Survivor 47′s Rachel LaMont Explains How Planning Her Own Funeral Set Up Her Endgame
The following contains spoilers from Wednesday’s season finale of Survivor 47.
Survivor fans, let’s have a round of applause for your latest winner!
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In Wednesday’s Season 47 finale, Rachel LaMont secured the bag after defeating Sam Phalen by a vote of 7-1. Despite her opponent’s best efforts to poke holes in her game, Rachel’s advantage finds, idol play, challenge victories and social game spoke for themselves, impressing the jury enough to award her the money over Sam and third place finisher Sue Smey. (Read our full recap here.)
Below, Rachel talks to TVLine about Sam’s intimidating final Tribal performance, playing with an arsenal of advantages and how her stellar social game gave her an edge over her competition.
TVLINE | First off, big congratulations! How are you feeling now that the secret’s out?
RACHEL LAMONT | It’s been a crazy 24 hours, but I am so excited to be here. There’s a bit of you that feels like you’re playing Survivor from the second you get home because you can’t tell anyone where you’ve been, you can’t tell anybody how you did and lying… I only told my husband, so my family, my sisters, my parents, did not know. You’re kind of lying the whole way through the last six months, so it’s a huge relief that it’s out there. Part of you is like, “I can’t talk about it. Did it even happen?” So it’s so validating and I’m so relieved to have it all out in the open. I won Survivor! That’s crazy.
TVLINE | It felt like a tight final Tribal showdown. After the votes were cast, how confident were you feeling?
I would say after the votes were cast was probably the most nervous I’d been in like 5 days. There was a part of me that was saying, “Did I just lose this game at Final Tribal?” I really was so nervous and so intimidated by Sam’s Final Tribal performance. It truly was so good. We have this kind of sibling dynamic and I felt like we just bickered our way through. I remember in the moment being like, “I’m so stressed out, but this is so fun.” I was having a blast, but also just terrified. Sam and I played 26 days together and we were basically never on the same page after Day 3, which is pretty insane to end up at the end together. Very different stories, very different paths, but I respect Sam. He’s such a good player and I’m so happy to have had that showdown with him.
TVLINE | We heard your name brought up alongside Mike Holloway and Ben Driebergen, players who had to win their way to the end, but I never saw your game as only that. Were you surprised to be put in that category?
Earlier that day on Day 26, Sam and I were sitting on the beach and I was like, “It’s pretty insane that I Mike Holloway’d my way through the end of this game.” Whether or not it was the same game, the resemblance is uncanny. Multiple immunities, an idol play, immune from… I think Final 7 for me, Final 8 for him. It was very parallel paths, even if the other stuff shook out a little bit differently, so it didn’t surprise me, no. When Gabe and Andy were talking about the Mike and Ben of it all, I didn’t feel like I had to reconcile my game. I felt like I saw the path that I had to the end and I played a specific way because I had an idol in my pocket and these advantages that I knew I could use. It was never the path I thought I would take, but once I saw it, I was able to execute it, and I didn’t want to have to apologize for that.
TVLINE | What goes down after the After Show, when the cameras finally turn off? How were you feeling?
We go back to Ponderosa and I am a shell-shocked zombie. Even the After Show, someone asked me, “Are you excited to see the After Show?” and I was like, “Yes, because I don’t remember any of it.” After that Final Tribal, that intense pressure and 26 days of deprivation and anxiety, I couldn’t have told you what their jury questions were. I just was not in the present anymore. Once, Jeff reads the votes, I’m like, “Oh my God, I did win. I won Survivor.” It’s all kind of a fever dream. But my Ponderosa… I was weirded out by my bed. I opened my suitcase and was like, “There’s so many clothes here. I have so much to choose from.” It was very overwhelming, the lights, everything around you. It was going from sitting in the dirt with two people for the last few days to then just being a normal person again. It was extremely jarring.
TVLINE | You had some good luck in this game, both with Sol gifting you the Safety Without Power advantage and then finding an idol clue in your auction fries. Were you surprised that Sam tried to use that against you?
I was not surprised. I would like to push back on the fact that I got lucky with the Sol advantage. The second I hit the merge beach, Sol and I embrace, and I was like, “I am so happy to meet you.” He felt the same way and we instantly bonded. I knew I wanted to go with Tuku, he was obviously with Lavo and I couldn’t trust Gata entirely, and we agreed to have this secret alliance where we fed each other information and worked together. Everyone’s like, “Everyone would have sent that to Rachel. Anybody on that reward.” No, they wouldn’t have. You can ask them. Andy, Genevieve and Sam would have never sent me that advantage. It was my social skills, my social relationship with Sol that got me that advantage. Look at the Christian Hubicki stat. It was like 0.2% chance of getting that rock drawn in the first place. So even if you consider some of that luck, Sol finding it luck, I feel like it’s a net zero. And yes, getting the clue in my fries was certainly luck and I don’t discount that at all.
TVLINE | I have to commend you for your acting skills. At the Tribal where you used the Safety Without Power, you were a total boss. It was Oscar-worthy acting! What was that like sitting there knowing you were going to walk right out of Tribal?
I had so much fun that day, Nick! I really did. For once, I felt like I was completely in control. I knew all of the information and it was mine to have a ton of fun with. So if we go back to the Kyle boot, there was not as much suspense there as it seemed on the show. We essentially eulogized Kyle at that Tribal Council and everyone sort of jury-managed him out the door. So that is what gave me the idea for planning my own funeral because I was drawing from that Tribal. “We did this before. Let’s get them to do it again.”
So that allowed that conversation to open up at camp, and got Andy to feed me his game and tell me that he was voting for me. When we get to Tribal, Jeff’s like, “How was your day, Rachel?” I was like, “Well, all these people just told me I’m going home because they can’t beat me.” It forced their hand. They had to now repeat the things that they had said at camp that day in front of the jury. It sold my game to the jury for me and made it so that if I got to the end with anybody left, it was much easier to say, “This person told you they can’t beat me, so how can you justify voting for them over me?” I had a really good time. Watching it back was crazy because I’ve never known if I was a good liar or not. I’ve learned that I’m not good at sussing out other people’s lies, but I’m very good at lying myself.
TVLINE | You’re the fifth woman to win four individual immunity challenges in a season. Has that sunk in yet, and how does it feel to be in such great company?
Chrissy, Jenna, Kim, Kelly… those are big names in this game and it’s such an honor to be amongst them. I never thought that was possible. I went into the game being like, “I think I could win an immunity. I’m pretty good at balance. I’m pretty good at these things.” Four?! Indescribable. Mind blowing. Once I got to three, I was comfortable going to fire-making if I had to, but at that point I was just like, “I want this record. I want to win this challenge so that I can tie this record.” It was so much fun. I had way more fun with those challenges than I ever imagined from being just a superfan of the game watching it.
TVLINE | What was your reaction to Sue’s age reveal?
I was not entirely surprised. I was surprised she was 59. I was not entirely surprised that she was lying. My husband is 41. I did not believe her when she told me she was 45. I thought she was in her early-to-mid-50s. I feel like in that moment, she should have told us she was a pilot! She lied about that the whole game and that was actually very shocking. When she said that after the game, everyone was like, “What?!” I feel like that would have gotten the response that I think she was hoping for with the 59 reveal.
TVLINE | Here’s a very stupid question for you: How does one keep her glasses clean on the island? I’m just at home and these things are always dirty.
We do not keep them clean. They might look clean, but I remember I gave my glasses to someone before that very first challenge when we got marooned, because I wasn’t gonna wear them in the mud. And when I got them back, there were two giant scratches! I was like, “Are you kidding me? It’s Day 1!” They were just filthy. You could use your canteen water to kind of like scrub them a little bit, but no, they were not clean. I think that’s the camera being kind to us.
TVLINE | You had this amazing rivalry with Genevieve which was a blast to watch. What was it like playing against her and what’s your relationship like with her today?
I couldn’t have asked for a more fun rivalry. You have to go back to Micronesia to find two women in contention for the win at the end of the game. It truly is rare, and to have someone that was so smart and such a formidable opponent, and for us to clock each other… we were just on the opposite sides of this game. She was very close to Sam, who I no longer trusted and did not want to work with. And I was close with Sue and Caroline, who she did want to work with, but couldn’t get into because I had beaten her to it. We were on the opposite sides of the battlefield from the merge. [But] it was always just the most respectful… we would clash, we would come back to camp, she would braid my hair. I could not respect her more. That Final 5 challenge, I was like, “I very well may go home tonight and she will win this game and that’s amazing.” I genuinely have so much respect [for her]. We are very close outside of the game and [it was] the rivalry of my dreams. We’re both gamers, we play video games, board games, and we both came in with a very similar mentality. We made jokes like, “Did they make a mistake and cast the same person on the same season?” It was really fun out there.
TVLINE | Any final thoughts or anything you wish was shown on TV?
I would say the only thing that we really didn’t see was how close I was to Caroline. Basically from the night Sierra was voted out, I was with Caroline and Sue, and that threesome was way before the Andy and Teeny one. That’s part of why Operation Italy went the way they did. They couldn’t get me, so they got my No. 1 ally. I felt very sad that there wasn’t a single solo conversation with me and Caroline at all in the show. We were so tight and she was so much fun to work with. We both talk fast and it was just a very fun dynamic for strategizing.
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