There’s a classic Survivor challenge called Hot Pursuit. It involves two tribes following each other in a circle, trying to tag someone from the opposite team first, all while wearing weighted backpacks that load you down. Exhaustion inevitably sets in, people start dropping out of the challenge, and their weight gets lumped on the remaining players until one team catches the other. It’s basically a big, lumbering version of Duck Duck Goose — a million-dollar game of Duck Duck Goose, sure, but, you know… details. Kelley Wentworth never played Hot Pursuit during her short stint on Survivor: San Juan del Sur, but she certainly knows what it’s like to slog around in circles with extra weight on her back. She participated in the show’s second and most recent edition of Blood vs Water — a Survivor format where players compete against their loved ones — and while she’s not the only Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance contestant who has played with a family member, Kelley stands out as the one who was burned the worst, the fifth person voted out of her season, thanks in large part to her farm guy father’s rivalries in the game. “It’s like having a 50 pound backpack on, dragging us down,” she told Jeff Probst in the minutes leading up to her demise — and as inevitably happens in the proverbial Hot Pursuit, the weight eventually became too much bear. In Dale Wentworth’s defense, he was a more clever Survivor than he’s often remembered. There’s an argument to be made that his ploy to pass an innocent ornament off as an immunity idol is at least part of the inspiration for the coming season’s new idol twist. Yes, his inability to make peace with Missy Payne and her daughter Baylor was a huge factor in why he and Kelley ultimately flamed out, but ask Kelley to assign the blame, and she’ll own her share. “No, it’s not my dad’s fault,” she told me the morning after her San Juan del Sur exit episode aired. “We both came to the tribe swap with zero alliance members, or maybe half an ally. It’s on both of us. It was our job to figure out a way to make it work, and unfortunately we didn’t. That’s on me. I’m not going to blame him.” Still, you can imagine Kelley’s relief now that she has a second chance at Survivor without a plus one. The relief goes beyond her father’s absence, too. Pre-merge players rarely return to the show, at least not without some memorable (and usually embarrassing) TV moments under their belt. Kelley’s exit from San Juan del Sur was a pretty quiet affair, certainly compared to some of the other early victims on Second Chance, like Andrew Savage and Kimmi Kappenberg. So it’s not just that Kelley is returning to the game without the burden of playing with a loved one — the fact that she’s returning to the game at all, on a fan-driven vote, is honestly somewhat miraculous, and yet another weighted bag off her back. “I knew I had an uphill battle because I’m a pre-merge person,” Wentworth tells me when we speak in Cambodia. “But I worked my buns off to get here!” Kelley hustled as hard as any of the Second Chancers in the two weeks leading up to the cast reveal, pushing out an array of interviews, podcast appearances, social media interactions, and ultimately shoring up enough support from Survivor fans to make the Cambodia cut. By the time Jeff started announcing the new cast live on television, Wentworth felt good about her odds. “It was crazy, because Jeff was going so fast, and when he got to me, I figured it had to be me, because he was trying to get to other people,” she says. “Based on who I was sitting with, and once Monica went, I kind of thought it would be me — but you never know until Jeff says your name.” No offense to her rejected seat mates Natalie Tenerelli and Mikayla Wingle intended, I’m sure, but it’s hard to blame Wentworth for brushing past their feelings and focusing on her own. She knows the odds of her making Second Chance were not fantastic (“Underdog Wentworth all the way!” she proudly proclaims), and she hopes that her cast members are looking at her through that same lens. “I hope so,” she says when I ask if she thinks a low profile will help her out on Second Chance. “When people were asking me to look at the cast and who I would align with and all of this stuff, I kept forgetting, like, Monica. I hope that I’m that same person.” “I feel like Abi, Kass, Spencer, Fishbach — these are the people I’m constantly talking about, because they enter my mind right away,” she continues. “I hope that people look at me as the blonde girl who can’t even vote out her dad. ‘What’s she going to do?’ That’s the ideal situation — that no one would expect that I’m going to do anything necessarily.” Not that Wentworth plans to reinvent the wheel on her strategy (“I want to do something similarly as I did last time, which is have one or two people that I’m super close to, and branch out from there”), but she says she has a dark side that Survivor fans haven’t seen yet. “I’m not calling myself Chaos Kelley — that would be too ridiculous — but I’m not here to sing camp songs, either,” she says. “I want to make these people’s lives miserable. Boston Rob said once that fear keeps people loyal. I want to make things a little crazy. I think that’s all I can do. But I don’t want people to know it’s me. I don’t want them to suspect me.” Kelley is bursting with energy throughout the interview, obviously excited to get her game on, and eager to show off some menace that went unseen last time. As I’m listening to her talk, a scary thought pops up in my head: “What if Drew Christy was right?” ON THE NEXT PAGE: The Christy Prophecy Revisited



Drew Christy, male model and basically a badass, stands out in Survivor history for having one of the greatest exit episodes of all time. It’s called “We’re a Hot Mess,” and throughout the hour, Drew complains about hunger, ogles his friend’s girlfriend on Exile Island while describing his own attractiveness as a curse, tosses “hot fire” at Jeff Probst, throws an immunity challenge so his tribe can vote out his biggest threat — Wentworth — and then proceeds to get knocked out in one of the weirdest, most scatterbrained pre-merge Tribal Councils in 30 seasons of Survivor. Really, Drew’s exit is the stuff of Survivor legend, an all-timer as far as mockable meltdowns go. But was Drew just a Zoolander-ish sitcom character, or was he onto something with his read on Kelley? “My biggest personal threat right now is Kelley,” he said in one of his final confessionals. “She plays very low key, but at the same time, she’s very observant. If you talk to her, you know she has not missed an episode of Survivor.” It’s true that Kelley’s Survivor knowledge was a big deal on her season, since the vast majority of her fellow players were not deep-cut fans of the show. This time around, on Second Chance, everyone has deep familiarity with the game — which is exactly how she wants it. “I’m so excited, and I said this when I was voted out last time: I would rather be voted out by someone’s great gameplay than be voted out by people that didn’t really know the game,” she says. “I know it may be harder this time, but these people will all be scheming.” Christy was afraid of Kelley’s fandom, and based on what she’s telling me in Cambodia, I can see why. Not only does she have deep knowledge of the show’s history, but she also has an eagerness to swing at some fan-favorites, without worrying about their feelings — or your feelings, for that matter. “I don’t give a [expletive] who you are: I want to win,” she tells me when I ask about seeing some of the classic Survivors back in action. “I don’t care if everyone hates me if I vote out Kelly Wiglesworth first. I don’t care. You’re just another player to me.” Maybe it’s all talk. Maybe not. We will see once she hits the beach. If nothing else, she is looking up at the right Survivor role models. For example, in a Reddit AMA held during the Second Chance voting process, Kelley name-checked One World champion Kim Spradlin as the player she would most want to align with — a player considered by many fans, yours truly included, to be one of the show’s greatest winners, if not at the very top of the mountain. “The thing I loved about her is that she always felt in control, but not threatening,” says Kelley. “That’s what I loved about her. People like Chelsea just latched onto her. I think she just had that energy, where people really liked her. I went back and watched some of her season because I really liked her play and I think she’s underrated.” “There’s one confessional where she’s just like, ‘I’m just having fun. I’m doing this, and it’s working,'” she continues. “Last time, I was super serious, because I was afraid of getting voted out, and I was worried about my dad, and all this [expletive] was in my head. I just want to make sure I’m also having fun and just portraying that.” Kelley doesn’t have to look much further than the winner of her first season for an example on how to play hard and have fun at the same time. Natalie Anderson, first of The Amazing Race and now part of Survivor‘s winner circle, settled simmering scores and executed a stunning immunity idol play, all while providing colorful and cutting commentary in her confessionals. For Kelley, though, there’s something else she values about Natalie’s game. “One of the great things Natalie did in the beginning is she got along well with the girls but she also got along well with the dudes,” says Kelley. “Everyone liked her. That was huge for her. Nobody ever thought about voting her out. She made really great moves, but her social game was huge. You can’t forget about that. Between the strategizing and the challenges, you cannot forget about the social game.” For Kelley, then, it’s a priority to get in good with her fellow Second Chancers and avoid running into another Christy catastrophe too early on — but even without the baggage of Drew and her father weighing her down, is the ghost of San Juan del Sur still on her tail? ON THE FINAL PAGE: The Blood in the Water