When Andrew Savage and I first met in a small cabana in Cambodia, he told me the story about making it onto the cast for the new season of Survivor.

He recounted the anxiety he felt whirling in his gut, sitting next to an equally nervous and apparently nauseous Abi-Maria Gomes, sweating in the CBS Studios auditorium in Los Angeles, hoping against all hope to get the call for Second Chance.

The call arrived, and when it did, he said it was like “someone took a massive hypodermic needle and jammed it into my spine, with pure energy.”

“It was one of the biggest senses of euphoria ever,” he told me at the time.

If Savage entered Survivor with euphoric energy in his system, he left with venom coursing through his veins. Actual venom, in fact. Two days before his final Tribal Council as a contestant on the season, a spider bit him right on the toe.

“It was horribly infected,” he tells me on the phone, the morning after his exit episode aired. “I was very sick. It was not cooperating with the rest of my body. I was having difficulty standing up.”

Savage says the bite wreaked havoc on him mentally as well, causing him not to think straight in the hours leading up to Tribal. He and his allies debated the proper target of the evening; eventually, he was lured away from wanting to vote out Stephen Fishbach, a member of his alliance, but one he did not trust.

Instead, the nine-person super-majority decided to dump all of their votes on Kelley Wentworth of Survivor: San Juan del Sur. There were discussions about splitting the votes as a preventative measure, in case Wentworth was secretly in possession of a hidden immunity idol, but the idea was quickly dismissed; Wentworth playing an idol was an unfathomable outcome.

(Yeah… about that.)

Savage walked into Tribal Council so sure of his place in the game that he didn’t even pack a bag. He didn’t bring his expensive suit, tattered as it was, or his shoes, or his water bottle.

“I didn’t bring anything,” he says. “That’s how sure I was that I wasn’t going home — and that’s the kiss of death on Survivor, of course. I should have known better.”

Poisoned with hubris as well as, you know, literal poison, Savage says his focus faded in and out throughout the Tribal Council.

“I wasn’t as lucid as I normally am,” he remembers, “and I didn’t bring anything. Why would I? I’m not going home. Wentworth’s going home. I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘Come on, Probst. Can we speed this up a little bit? I gotta get back to camp so I can get in my hammock and catch some Z’s.'”

As Tribal wore on, Ciera Eastin, one of three players on the outside of the massive majority, passionately pleaded for the others to “play the game,” a notion that Savage dismissed.

“She was upset, and I get it,” he says. “We’re on the top, and she’s on the bottom. She doesn’t like the old school style of play. She’s frustrated with it. She’s looking for a chink in the armor. But she’s not going to find it.”

And so it went throughout Tribal Council, a longer experience in reality than the 10 or so minutes viewers see at home. “It’s an hour, an hour and a half,” Savage guesses, due to breaks in production to switch film.

During one such break, Savage recalls standing up to stretch, to get some feeling back in his toe. In that moment, he looked through the fire and saw the first member of the jury staring right back at him: Kass McQuillen, who walked into Tribal Council flipping the bird, just as she promised she would in her Ponderosa video.

“She looks me right in the eye and mouths: ‘No effing votes for you,'” Savage remembers. “Then she takes her index finger and runs it across her throat — meaning, ‘You’re dead.'”

Savage says he waved off the gesture in the moment, returning to the business at hand as Tribal Council resumed.

“We vote. We come back. Jeff says, ‘If anyone has an idol, now’s the time to play it.’ And Wentworth…”

Savage pauses here for what feels like forever, as if he can somehow change the past if he doesn’t say the words. Eventually, he says them: “And Wentworth touches her bag.”

What happened next can best be summarized in the form of a GIF:

“That cracks me up,” he laughs, thinking about the look he exchanged with Jeremy Collins, one of his closest allies in the game. “I just looked at Jeremy and the first thing that popped into my mind was, ‘Dude, I am so sorry that you’re going home.’ Because I’m the old guy. Why would anybody want to vote me out? This guy is a division one athlete!”

“But then,” Savage says, “Jeremy’s looking at me, and he says, ‘Oh [expletive], Savage. You’re going home.”

Savage, his eyes swimming with spider venom and the storm of confusion created by Wentworth playing her hidden immunity idol, finally started piecing things together.

“I just thought, ‘Wow. Ciera wrote my name down at the last Tribal. Huh. I could be in trouble.'”

Probst began tallying the votes, and in that moment, Savage felt the familiar feeling of butterflies flying through his system — the cruel twin of the day he was brought up on stage in Los Angeles to begin his second Survivor adventure.

“It’s the exact antithesis of that moment,” he tells me. “It was this spiraling, doomsday depression that’s sinking in with every vote: ‘Wentworth! Does not count. Wentworth! Does not count.’ It’s just spiraling and spiraling to this point where there’s going to be this massive explosion, and it’s the moment where Probst flips the first parchment of the minority vote, and it says…”

He stops again. I can hear Savage’s signature smile (all teeth, Colby Donaldson style) form on the other end of the phone. “It’s just fascinating to me,” he says. “I had this exact same feeling with the Outcast twist 12 years go.”

The parchment, of course, read one name, the same word Joe Anglim uttered when Jenn Brown protected herself with an idol at the exact same point one season earlier:

“It just ripped my heart out,” says Savage. “I was in disbelief, thinking, ‘This cannot be happening.’ And it’s not something I even thought about. It wasn’t even a possibility. Not even a remote possibility. For that to happen was just… absolutely stunning. To the point that I was almost seeing white lights, like Mike Tyson had just sucker punched me. It was… fascinating.”

While Wentworth and her allies Ciera and Abi celebrated uproariously in the afterglow of the idol play, Savage stiffened up, shellshocked, as though the Survivor gods plunged their collective claws through his chest and removed his heart in one graphic act of violence.

“I remember thinking, ‘How could my second chance have just ended in one minute? How does that happen?'”

He did not have an answer then. He has one now: “It happened because I’m a dumb-ass who didn’t split the votes.”

Traditionally, Savage’s next move would be to gather his belongings and leave Tribal Council — but since he did not bring any belongings, he merely gathered himself, as much as he could, and watched as Survivor host Jeff Probst, an old friend of Savage’s going back more than a decade, extinguished his life in the game.

The smoke still fresh from the dead torch, his heart still beating on the floor in front of his fellow players, Savage started walking off toward the “better place” known as Ponderosa — but not before Abi-Maria, the nervous woman he once assured in Los Angeles on one of the most anxious nights of their lives, the person he bonded with on the ill-fated Angkor tribe, tossed six words in his direction, with all the sting of a brand new spider bite: “At least you made the jury!”

“And there comes my infamous bird,” Savage remembers, laughing, about how he responded to Abi’s comment by giving her the middle finger. “I couldn’t help myself. I just couldn’t.”

I understand. “Sometimes you just have to let the bird fly,” I tell him. He agrees: “You do. You have to set it free.”

Free from Tribal Council, Savage went through the standard rigamarole Survivors go through once they are voted out of the game: Recording final words, checking in with the medical staff, fueling up on power bars… and, eventually, heading to Ponderosa, housed on an island a decent boat ride away from Tribal Council, populated by the woman who allegedly gave Savage the universal throat slash sign a few minutes earlier.

Kass and Savage’s first interaction at Ponderosa was… tense, to put it lightly. Watch here, if you haven’t already:

“It took everything in my power, everything humanly possible, every ounce of me, to be cordial,” he tells me about seeing Kass, smiling and standing with a “loser’s lei” and a glass of white wine with Savage’s name all over it. “She had just pulled out Chaos Kass at Tribal, and everything was so raw. I was in a very, very bad mental state.”

But given time — 43 hours, to be precise — Savage was able to look Kass in the eye and have not just a conversation, but a drink.

“I told her very clearly, ‘I don’t want to talk about the game. You have your strategy, you enjoy Chaos Kass. That’s not part of me. We will be okay if we don’t talk about the game. I don’t want to hear one word about it. If I hear it, it’s not going to end well. And she said: ‘Done. Let’s talk about our families. We’re both lawyers. Let’s just enjoy Ponderosa.'”

And so they did. The Ponderosa video ends with Savage and Kass enjoying “jury happy hour,” with Kass owning up to the crush she had on the man back during her law school days, the two of them laughing.

“It’s the way it should be,” he says. “No bitterness. We’re going to lead the jury. We’ll have an impact on this game. Let’s select, at the end, the perfect ambassador for what’s shaping up to be an epic season.”

It’s very likely that there will never be a friendlier interaction between Savage and Kass, especially considering how Kass spoke about the Pearl Islands veteran in her exit press. As one example, she called him a “cantankerous toddler” during our interview; there are other examples, too, and obviously Savage isn’t thrilled about it — but he’s fairly measured when I bring it up.

“I like Kass, but she will not be in my life,” he says. “Chaos Kass is a real part of her, and I don’t like that part of her, but I do like her as a person… but we won’t be corresponding.”

Savage’s feelings toward Kass now strike me as emblematic of how he views Survivor now, versus how he viewed Survivor in the 12 years leading up to his first day back on the beach. When I met him in Cambodia, he swore he wasn’t even thinking about losing Pearl Islands at the hands of the Outcasts, led by the Dread Pirate Burton Roberts and Scout Master Lillian Morris. He then proceeded to talk about Pearl Islands as though it had haunted him every single day of his life since the season ended. Even the way he sat in the cabana conjured up the image of a ghost unaware that he’s no longer corporeal.

It was a profound and surreal sight, one that I will never forget as long as my mental faculties remain intact — but if I were to look at Savage now, as we speak on the phone the morning after he lost his Survivor life for the second and very likely last time, it does not sound as though I would see the same gut-shot ghost. Perhaps the poison still swims somewhere in his system. He acknowledges the wounds he inflicted and earned over the course of his Second Chance experience, but he speaks about them like they’re scars, not scabs — markings that are part of him, but do not haunt him.

He addresses the agitated Andrew we saw many times throughout the season — flipping the bird at fellow contestants and inanimate objects alike, frustrated when votes and twists did not work out in his favor — and he owns it. Take his initial response to switching over to Angkor, for example:

“When Probst asks me a question, I’m not going to lie. When he asks me how I feel about the tribe swap, I’m not going to say, ‘This is great! I love these people. I can’t wait to do manual labor for two days, building a brand new shelter. This is the best thing ever!’ Why would I say that? I felt like someone kicked me in the [expletive] and punched me in the stomach. I’m going to be honest about that. So, cranky pants? Call it what you want. It’s also a very honest answer. And it’s telling the story of what’s going on in my mind and what I’m feeling.”

Savage tells me that if I had interviewed him at Angkor in the moment, he would have been just as “cranky pants” as we saw on television. But now that he’s weeks and worlds away from that dreaded beach, he has a new perspective.

“My favorite memories of Second Chance were on Angkor,” he says. “It’s the times of depravation in life that you cherish, if you step up and conquer them. Some of the times on Angkor were just magical to me. It was absolutely horrible, but we powered through it. We flipped the tribe, Tasha and I. It was wonderful. It was exhilarating. I will never, ever forget those times.”

Whether you believe him or not, the song Savage sings now is a far cry from the one he sang in the lead up to Second Chance.

“I will tell you from the bottom of my heart that I am 100% healed,” he tells me. “I have no wounds. I didn’t split the vote. That’s okay. I own that. I’m not damaged by that. I don’t have this haunting nightmare of not splitting the votes. I got my closure out of Survivor. I did everything I could. I put my heart and soul into the game that we all love, and I did my best. In life, that’s all you can ask. Just do your best. There are a couple of things I shouldn’t have done, and there are a couple of things I should have done. Those things came back to bite me. But that’s okay.”

“Twelve years from now, I’m going to reflect on Second Chance and feel truly — and I mean this in all honesty — truly honored to have been part of that season, and happy for how it played out,” he continues. “I gave it everything I have. No regrets, and no demons. No demons, Josh. My Survivor demons are gone.”

For more about Savage’s specific strategy in the game, listen to my exit interview with him at RobHasAWebsite.com.

NEXT: Kelly Wiglesworth Dives Into Her Side Of The Second Chance Story

PREVIOUSLY: Kass McQuillen On Defying The Laws Of Chaos

Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, Comic Book Resources, Digital Trends and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.

Visit Parade.com every week for exit interviews with the Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance cast, and click here to read all of our preseason and ongoing coverage.



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