Annie Davis has no regrets about how she played Survivor 49. She only wishes that fans saw more of what happened at the camps before her elimination in Episode 2, which aired on Wednesday, October 1, on CBS. (See our recap here.)
In Survivor 49 Episode 2, “Cinema,” Jeremiah Ing said that Annie was telling the Kele tribe how to collect coconuts but wasn’t helping find them herself. He said she enjoyed the fruits of their labor, but didn’t do that labor. Annie refuted this to TV Insider in our exit interview. According to Annie, she explained how to identify coconuts that would have more nutritional value for their starving tribe (in the absence of survival supplies, Jeremiah resorted to digging for worms to feed himself and his teammates).
Annie told the tribe that she’s a musician, but she only told Alex Moore that she’s a doctor and the CEO of a biomechanics analysis company. Annie was speaking from experience when explaining which coconuts to get. “I know a lot about the human body,” she says. But she admits that she came off the wrong way to the tribe because they didn’t have this context.
Watching the episode helped her better understand how she got voted out and what transpired between the Jake-Alex-Sophi-Jeremiah alliance to lead to her elimination in a unanimous vote. Here, Annie breaks down her stint on Survivor 49 and her early departure.
Congratulations on making it onto Survivor. A disappointing ending for you, of course, but I still had fun watching you play.
Annie Davis: It was awesome. I loved the experience. It was great.
You were a serious contender for the first boot in the premiere. How aware of that were you heading into the first Tribal Council?
I actually don’t think I was considered as much as it portrayed through the edits because we all collectively, the five of us, aside from Nicole, decided the vote was going to be on Nicole pretty early, and we needed to use me as a decoy. The plan was, hey, let’s throw Annie’s name around as much as possible so Nicole feels safe, so she doesn’t play her Shot in the Dark. Let’s have Annie isolate herself a little bit. So, some of that was very much by design with the five of us. I actually don’t think my name was really at risk for the first one. I think it was just done as a tactic to make Nicole feel a little bit safer, and it worked. She didn’t play her Shot in the Dark, and she wasn’t out searching for idols and things, at least that we know about. So, I think it worked OK.
Is that what made you confident that you were in a leadership role on the team after Nicole was voted out?
Yeah, I definitely thought that I was secure. I didn’t even know if I really was in a leadership role. I felt like I knew what was going on, which was why I thought I could be in a puppet master role. I was like, I think I understand what’s happening with all these relationships, but I thought my relationship with Alex was super strong, and ultimately, I think he did what was best for his game that night in voting me out because I think that the other three had a very tight thing going on, more than I even thought. Had he sided with me, it would’ve been a three-on-two situation, and then that would’ve been bad for his game. I thought I had a stronger relationship with Alex than I did, but ultimately, he did what he needed to do for his game. It kind of makes sense in hindsight.
Jeremiah said you weren’t helping collect coconuts and you were just telling people what to do. Is that true?
Not even a little bit. That was one of the more disappointing edits for me personally. I came into this game trying to contribute physically because that’s what I had to contribute. I know how to work really hard, so I’ll build the whole shelter if I need to do it. I’ll spend all day finding food. I mean, I was spending all day not hunting for idols. I knew very quickly I was never going to find one. I was like, everything looks the same out here. I don’t know how anybody ever finds an idol. I was like, what I will do is go collect food. I would spend all day collecting food and shelter stuff and all that, and they thanked me so many times for that. So for it to kind of edit to show, oh, Annie’s so bossy — what happened with that particular edit is that those guys didn’t know [about her career].
Alex was the only one who knew. I’m not just a musician. I’m a doctor. I have a running biomechanics analysis company, so I know a lot about the human body. I was just trying to tell them, find the coconuts with the water in them, because then we’ve got the coconut juice and that’s got potassium, and that’ll help our dehydration. I’m sure they were looking at me like, “What? Who are you, and why would you be telling us this stuff?” It comes across as bossy if you don’t have context about why I would be saying that. But as far as me drinking all the coconut water and all that, that is not what happened. I was very much a contributing member of finding food and helping to help around camp and all of that kind of stuff.
Robert Voets / CBS
So, you didn’t tell them about your career?
No, Alex was the only one who knew. I shared all that with him very early because I wanted to tell him, “Hey, I’m not going to share this with the rest of the tribe, but here’s something so you know I’m telling you the truth and you’re my guy.” I wanted him to know, but I didn’t want to show up and say, “Hey guys, I front a rock band, but also I’m a doctor and I have a company and I’m a CEO.” I just wanted to go in a little bit under the radar, and it was apparently a little too under the radar. So maybe in hindsight, not a good decision, but that’s what I was thinking when I was out there.
Did you think that the tribe was without a leader, and you wanted to step into that role? What was your strategy behind presenting yourself as a possible leader for this group?
I think part of it’s in my DNA. I mean, I am a CEO. I’m bossy. I front a band. It’s baked into me to want to lead, especially if there isn’t anybody leading. And Jake would kind of take control, but he didn’t necessarily lead. He would just sort of hand down, “Hey, this is who the vote is today. You’re safe, you’re not,” whatever. And so he would sort of hand down things, but I felt like we needed to do some stuff around camp. We needed to find food, otherwise we were never going to win a challenge, and we needed to build a shelter, and we needed to do all this stuff. So, I just felt like somebody had to step into that role. But you know what happens all the time, you stick your head out and somebody chops it off because you’ve stuck your head out. If I would’ve just sat back and let people tell me what to do, I think I might still be there. I don’t know. But it’s hard to say. Hindsight’s 20/20.
I actually agree with you that players shouldn’t be that afraid to go to Tribal Council. I think it’s more impressive to keep on surviving Tribal Council, but of course, that’s easier said than done. Do you think it was still a smart strategy to try to get Jake out in this episode?
Yes, I do. My strategy, everything that I did, I know it didn’t play out well for me this season, but I think a different tribe, different season might’ve been a different outcome. That particular episode, and really my thought around Jake was, I don’t feel like I could personally trust him to protect me in any scenario. I had a loose relationship with him because I was a stronger female he had to choose from. And so I was like, well, I think he’ll keep me around for a little while, but I definitely think once we get to the merge, he’s going to beat us all in the physical challenges. He’s going to protect Sophi. He’s probably not even going to protect Alex over Sophi. That was my thought. I felt like we needed to split the two of them up.
I thought, let’s do Jake. Because I thought maybe Sophi and I could work together loosely a little bit more than Jake and I could. So that was my thought, but when we lost that challenge so abysmally and Sophi had such a hand in that, I was like, we’ve got to vote her. She’s a great social player. She’s awesome in so many ways, but she’ll be the first one to tell you that physically, that’s not her strength. It was a bad [loss], and the puzzle was just, it was heartbreaking to watch us lose that challenge. And so I thought, we have to vote Sophi tonight, right, everybody? Right. I think trying to split the two of them up was still the right move, and we’ll see how it all plays out for the rest of these guys.
Robert Voets / CBS
I was a little surprised in this episode to see Jake and Sophi come out as the strongest Kele alliance. What did you observe about Jake, Sophi, and Alex, and do you think that Jake and Sophie are closer, or Jake and Alex are closer?
I think Jake and Sophi are closer. My strategy going in was to find the one person I thought I could align with. I found Alex and said, “Hey, let’s build our secret alliance now. Let’s not talk again. Let’s meet up once a day and make sure we’re on the same page, but let’s just not let anybody sniff this out. Meanwhile, let me go see what I can do with Sophi. You go see what you can do with Jake, and then we’re sort of controlling things from the inside without them knowing about our thing.”
Where all that started to go a little bit awry is when I woke up in the middle of the night, I think between day three and four, whatever it was, it was about 2 in the morning. We were all sleeping on the beach, and I saw Jake and Sophi sitting right next to each other, having this very intimate conversation for an hour. I thought, “Uh oh, this is bad.” At the time, I didn’t know they had anything really going on, so I’m sneaking over there on my belly trying to listen in, and they would look over and I would pretend to sleep like an idiot.
That was the first time that I realized there was something big going on with those two. The next morning, I said, “Alex, we have to split those two up because I just saw some stuff last night.” And he said, “Yeah, I know. I’ve been seeing some things, too.” So I think he was starting to worry, but I told Sophi, “Hey, we should think about Jake or Alex.” I had to say Alex because otherwise they would’ve thought that I had something going with him. So I had to throw his name in there, but I would’ve never voted Alex. I really thought maybe we should go Jake. But I just didn’t realize that Sophi would run right back and tell them that because their relationship was so tight.
I misjudged the relationship between Jake and Sophi, and I think Jake will protect Sophi over Alex, but we’ll see.
That would’ve been fun to see you crawling over and pretending to sleep.
It was pretty ridiculous.
Robert Voets / CBS
You went into Tribal Council trusting a little bit that you were safe because you knew Alex had this idol. How would saying “trust doesn’t exist in Survivor” in front of your tribe help your game had you survived this elimination?
[There are] two things about this game that I stand by that I said. One, this stuff isn’t personal. People do not vote you off just because they really don’t like you. They vote you off because they’re trying to play the game and they’re trying to survive one more day. We cannot take this stuff personally. And two, I don’t think trust is a word you can use in Survivor. You can pick people that you think you can align with, but you can’t trust anybody. There’s only one winner. That person will vote against you in the end, every time. There is only one winner. This is a zero-sum game. Jeff [Probst] says it all the time.
You cannot trust somebody in the way that we think about trust in the real world. You can align with people and hope that your voting block works, but you can’t trust ’em. I knew there was an outside chance that I might be going home. I didn’t think it was going to happen, but I didn’t leave stuff back at camp. None of us did. We all packed our bags every night because you never know what’s going to happen on Survivor.
Do you have any regrets about saying that trust line?
I have none because I believe it. One thing about me, for better or worse, I am pretty genuine and authentic to myself. The things I say, I really, truly mean them. And I think that can bite you in this game because I have a real hard time lying to people. I don’t know when people are lying to me. And it doesn’t play well in a game like this. I was very bad at reading when people were lying to me. I don’t regret it. I still feel that that’s true. And it shows! [They proved] my points. I couldn’t trust anybody. Alex wrote my name down, and he was supposed to be in my alliance, so I couldn’t trust him either. And that’s sad, but that’s true.
When Sophi pushed back on that statement, did you realize you were in trouble?
I didn’t realize I was in trouble because I knew she was talking about Jake. I knew that her alliance with Jake was what she was really speaking to, and maybe her alliance with Jeremiah, too, because the two of them are very close. So, I knew who she was talking about, and I understood her perspective on it, but I just didn’t feel like that.
Robert Voets / CBS
When Jake, Sophi, Alex, and Jay were out on their idol hunt, you were by yourself. When Alex came back, you said you suspected something. What were you doing in that moment alone? Were you worried about everyone being gone?
I really can’t remember, actually, what was happening right in that moment when they were idol hunting because there were other times when I was isolated, and again, it was very much on purpose. Like, OK, let’s make [Nicole] feel safe. You go do this and act depressed or whatever. And so we came up with some strategy around that. I think Alex and I had some kind of similar conversation around that. There were so many double-triple-crossing conversations going on.
I think at the moment, we were trying to make everybody think maybe the vote was going to be on Jeremiah, and then get Sophi. We were kind of suspect [about] whether Jake would actually vote for Sophi or not. Alex was trying to feel it out a little bit without me present, if I remember correctly. So that’s how I never isolated myself on purpose. I was never like, “Oh, yeah, you guys go ahead. Let me hang back.” Not unless it was a group decision. I didn’t realize that they were off idol hunting at the time, so it was a misstep on my part.
After I see the episode back, I’m like, had I been the one who wandered down and seen Alex trying to carry a big chain with a ball on it and all that, maybe I would’ve been the one who was part of that whole thing. But they all ended up searching for this thing together, and now they all know about it. I’m the only one who doesn’t, so that’s on me again, for being off somewhere I shouldn’t have been or should have been.
It sounds like watching this episode helped you understand your elimination more.
It definitely did, and it does make me think that Alex really was with me, but then his hand was forced. But it all will keep playing out as we hear more from him and Jake, and all these guys, later on down the road.
What is your take on Jake’s shoe bandit bit?
Dumb. I don’t even know. We all thought it was an animal of some sort. I was sleeping up in the shelter. It was really cold down on the beach, and so I would get freezing at night. And so I would come up midway through the night, sleeping in the shelter, and something was gnawing on my foot in the middle of the night. I thought, “What is that?” I thought [the shoe bandit] was whatever little animal was running around camp. We all kind of convinced ourselves that that’s what it was, but ultimately, I would wake up and find my shoe and put it on and go back to work. So I didn’t really care that much about what was going on. It’s funny now that I realize it was Jake. Of course, it was Jake.
He’s just throwing it a couple of feet away. It’s not like he’s doing something effective with the shoe. So it’s like, what’s the goal here?
It’s really hard to know. But I also will say when you’re out there on the island and you’re just suffering through the day on no food and no water, there’s not much you can do unless it’s a challenge day. Everybody comes up with fun things that they can do. One tribe is doing yoga on the beach, and we’ve got somebody hiding our shoes. People played hide and seek on the show. It’s just people having fun together in a weird experience.
Is there any piece of comfort from your family or a significant other that you carried with you through the game?
I didn’t have anything particularly important in that way with me. It was more just the things that I remembered that they told me, and the stuff that I carried around from an emotional perspective, more than anything physical. And that to me is the best thing you could ever carry around with you, always and forever.
What was something that helped you?
My family. My husband, my stepson, and I always watch Survivor together. I just remember them telling me, “Listen, you just go and be yourself, and if they don’t like you, that’s a them problem.” And I thought to myself, for better or worse, I am who I am and I am being myself on this island. Whether it plays well or not, at least I’m true to myself, and I feel proud, and I really am proud of how I played. Even though I didn’t end up winning and I would’ve loved to make it longer, I still went, and I was myself, and it’s just a game. And I’m going to be friends with these people forever because we have this crazy shared experience. I don’t care that they said bad things about me and voted me out and all that. It’s just a game. They did what they had to do.
Survivor, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS
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