[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Survivor Season 47 finale, “The Last Stand.”]
Survivor Season 47 has its winner, and it’s a winner who played a truly exciting game in the season’s back half. After nearly playing in Season 46 as an alternate player, Rachel LaMont’s second time in Fiji became a million-dollar adventure.
Here, Rachel breaks down her exciting win with TV Insider.
You had some major successes this season: sacrificing your Shot in the Dark to see if you needed to play your hidden immunity idol; tying the record for individual immunity wins by a female player (four); using your Block a Vote advantage and idol to save yourself from elimination when everyone openly said you were being voted out that night; spying on your competitors under a bush at night to gather useful intel; taking the risk of looking for an idol in front of everyone and not getting caught. Can you rank these moves by how influential you think they were to your win? And if I missed any, please include them.
Rachel La Mont: The biggest move has to be the way that I played the idol, but that also ties directly into the eavesdropping. Those two are together at the top because I think without eavesdropping, I don’t know that Teeny has turned, and that makes that next vote much more precarious. If I think that it’s 3-3 and I have the Block of Vote, I very well could have gone home. And so me spying and understanding that it was Sue and I against everybody else, truly gave me the knowledge to play my idol in the way that I did and set up that whole thing with the “funeral” and getting everybody to sell my game for me. So that truly has to be at the top of my list.
The immunities second. Obviously, they were very influential. You could probably put them first. Without them, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to the end of the game. But I think as far as jury votes and what that kind of did, I think that that was probably second in line. I mean, I had to win a few of those. That Final Five immunity was a clutch immunity. The Final 4 one was truly just for fun. That was a, “I want this record.” I believed I could have gone into [the fire-making challenge] and confidently walked out alive, but I didn’t want to have to do that. I wanted to be able to say that I set my mind to this thing and I was able to achieve it. So that’s got to be the next one.
And then the Shot in the Dark play, which in hindsight, much bigger impact, but at the time, truly a very reactive moment of saying to myself, I am 100 percent sure Gabe is not going tonight, and how do I go back to camp without having written his name down when I don’t know who else to write down? I was like, oh, I can play my Shot in the Dark. I don’t have to write any name down. And then as I’m digging it out of my bag, you see me doing it. I was very in the moment trying to figure out what I was going to do. I realized that if there’s a big reaction, I probably should also play the idol. So I think because that wasn’t something that was intentional and it was something that I figured out on the fly, it didn’t occur to me. I knew it was clever, but it didn’t occur to me that it was going to have this kind of longer-range impact.
And I did not even bring it up at final tribal, because it didn’t feel like something that was that remarkable. You’re very close to it. It’s very hard to see the forest for the trees when you’re in it. And so it just to me felt like there were so many big things that my game had to it, and it felt like drawing on this very macro moment, which as important as it is, I have a lot of those moments and I’m excited to talk more about that in the future when I can. But I had a lot of those moments where I set myself up for success, but those weren’t moments that I felt like would resonate at final tribal when I was very much sparring with Sam in this kind of arena, bringing up this tiny moment felt inconsequential a little bit.
The Shot in the Dark moment might’ve been more effective for viewers than it would be in a jury pitch, in that it was the first big moment that showed viewers that you were someone to look out for.
I felt like I could easily see the jury be like, “You’re calling that a move?” I think the moment when you see it and you understand the long-term impact of something like that, where you’re like, oh wow, maybe in the future you will never think about it the same way if somebody is playing their shot in the dark, I think that is a little bit different.
CBS
And the idol advantage from Sol that he sent to you in secret, you had to use it that night, right? So that’s more of a Sol move?
He had to use it. It expired that night, so it had to be used by someone on the other side. But I will push back on the fact that a lot of people are like, anybody at that reward would’ve sent it to Rachel because they all wanted to target the Tuku. It wasn’t true. Sam, Andy, and Genevieve would not have sent me that. You can ask them that. They were not interested in helping me out in that scenario, so my relationship with Sol, when I got off that boat, he was the second person that I hugged and we were connected immediately. We wanted to work together. We wanted to do an undercover thing where we were passing information. He was kind of on the Lavo and dipping into my Gata side, and then I was trying to get in with the Tukus. That was an instant connection, and that is why he sent it to me. So as lucky as it may have felt watching it, it was definitely more attributed to our relationship than anything.
And the moment where you tried to steal some rice by sneaking it into your pocket, did you see that as a move? Or were you just really hungry and trying to be sneaky?
I was just hungry! Sam was puking up coconut. I was like, our strongest guy can’t eat. My calculus in that moment was, I have to dump my pockets out at the end of this challenge, or I get to go back to camp and be like a hero for my tribe. I sneakily got us food. I never in a million years thought Jeff would call me out in front of everyone. Days five to seven, eight are the hardest days physically where your body is truly in shock going, what’s going on? We’re truly not eating. We are struggling. Our legs feel like anchors. You’re sluggish. You’re lethargic. It was horrible. And then day eight, day nine, you get over that hump and you’re just kind of done. It’s fine. For me at least, that was my experience. And so that was the height of the body panic.
It reminded me of one of my favorite seasons, Pearl Islands, when Rupert stole the shoes from the other tribe on the first day. There’s no rule saying you can’t steal stuff from other people on Survivor.
I’m a rule follower, but I like to, when there aren’t explicit rules, push my boundaries and apologize after. So I tried. I get away with it.
A big part of your game was about reacting to things as they happened and not trying to manufacture big moves that would take so many things with so many people going right. Did you want to make big group plans like Operation Italy (which was ultimately successful) but had to act otherwise? What was your mindset there?
My mindset was truly that after the Sierra vote out, I basically looked around and every single person left on the beach had burned me. I had essentially no allies. I reconnected with Caroline and Sue very shortly after, and the three of us were very tight for the rest of the game until Caroline was voted out. And then Sue and I all the way to the end. But I very much felt like because I had the idol and then I got the advantage pretty soon after, I could play my game a little bit differently. I knew I wanted to rise towards the end and become enough of a threat that when I played my idol, it would be impactful. We saw that sometimes when you play an idol and you don’t get any votes, it doesn’t really have any impact. And so I wanted to make sure I had some impact there, and I felt like it was just the ability to peak at the right time.
With the five, my move, it wasn’t a flashy move. I have two alliances of three, and I’m bringing that five together to give myself a better shot at the end. And I’m othering Genevieve and Sam and Kyle to get this group to target them as a whole. And it sort of worked. Obviously, Operation Italy disrupted that, but we did ultimately get Kyle and Genevieve out. And so to me, I was more into the subtle, I just want to have more of a pack mentality to control the votes versus this flashy move. Not that I wouldn’t have done that. I mean, I feel like my idol play was relatively flashy.
Oh, the biggest.
I just felt like as far as the group goes, if I’m trying to convince us all that we are these underdogs, it seemed like we should keep our attention over there. Don’t look at me, don’t look at the other people in this group. I’m like, let’s get rid of these guys. And I just had the trinkets in my pocket to ensure that I could get to the end and I could probably elevate myself along the way compared to the people that I was with. So yeah, it is not that I was against flashy moves, it was that I felt like the game that I was playing and the situation that I found myself in just kind of was easier to have a subtle touch.
Robert Voets / CBS
The edit made it look like Sue didn’t speak much/wasn’t asked many questions and that it was a much closer game between you and Sam. Was that what it was like during filming?
It was definitely longer than that. I feel like Sue actually got a ton of questions at the beginning, and then towards the later half, it was mostly questions directed at Sam and myself. Although she still got opportunities to answer, it was just pretty clear that they were focusing on the two of us.
There is a lot you don’t see, but I think Sam knew he was coming in punching up. But also he’s a reporter so well-spoken, used to this kind of dynamic of battling back and forth. And I’m not, so much as I love a good debate and we have a good dynamic in that regard, I was very intimidated by his final tribal council performance. And while obviously I still got the majority of the votes, there was a moment there where I was really unsure of what was going to happen.
Can you elaborate more on what you meant when you said you don’t really care about what your Survivor legacy will be? I got what you meant, but I would love to hear your perspective on it.
When I said that, I meant I was not playing my game in a way to curate a specific type of legacy. And it is not that I don’t care about the legacy I leave on Survivor, of course I do, everyone cares. But I was saying that I wasn’t trying to be anything that I wasn’t or trying to pigeonhole myself in some way to be like, I’m going to be this legend of this. It was that I was just playing the game that was put out before me. I was finding the path to the end where I felt like I had the best shot, and I executed on that. And how that will be received in the long term is out of my control. And I don’t really care. I do, of course, but it wasn’t something that I was conscious of in the game while I was playing it. So comparing me to people like Mike Holloway or Ben Driebergen, I feel like I agree with them on paper. It is very similar of those types of games, but I think that there’s a lot of nuance there. I think that there’s a lot of things I did that set me apart, but ultimately we can’t control that.
Totally. And you were just saying it didn’t affect your decisions in the game. You weren’t thinking about what’s going to happen after Survivor. You were thinking about the game while you were in it.
I can’t even begin to be that meta anyway. There were people in the game that were like, it’s Episode 4 and this episode is going to be awesome! This episode’s going to be boring. And I was like, how are you thinking that? That is not on my mind at all. So it is interesting how different people kind of digest it. And so I understand how some people are like, how will this be perceived by an audience at home watching this back? And I just couldn’t. My brain was at capacity. I could not also do those mental gymnastics.
Survivor, Season 47 Streaming Now, Paramount+