SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers from “I Deserve All of This,” the ninth episode of “Survivor” Season 50.
It turns out, getting off the couch isn’t so easy after all. Jeff Probst learned exactly that over the summer when he added another title to his “Survivor” resume under host and showrunner: competitor. Variety was on set in Fiji during the filming of Wednesday’s episode, during which Probst took part in his first immunity challenge.
During the competition, he made a side bet with the castaways — if four of them could outlast him, they’d get a bag of rice. Ozzy, Joe, Tiff and Jonathan agree to the bet, so Probst only had to outlast one of them. And spoiler alert: he couldn’t do it.
“My forearms are still sore,” Probst said, two days after the challenge. In this specific competition, the castaways had to hold onto a handle with a rope wrapped around it. At the end of the rope is a bucket that holds a percentage of each contestant’s pre-game body weight. Probst lasted for seven-and-a-half minutes — which is still quite impressive. And after the challenge was over, he rewarded the group with their bag of rice and even signed the bag with a Sharpie.
(It wasn’t surprising that Joe ended up winning immunity this time around. During his season, 48, he set the record for the longest to do it, lasting 52 minutes.)
“It was so much harder than I thought,” Probst told Variety. In fact, before he started, he wasn’t sure he should give it his all. “I had this thought: Don’t outlast too many people, because it’ll seem rigged and no one will believe it. And turns out, I could barely outlast anyone. There was no concern about somebody thinking this was staged.”
Robert Voets/CBS
From the moment he began, he realized the difficulty: “You take the handles and click them back, and instantly, I honestly thought, there’s got to be something wrong with my bucket. Did the art department play a joke on me? Is there a joke that I don’t know about? I asked! I’ll admit I even went to bed thinking: Was my station set up the same as theirs? Even though I know it was because I was making sure of it! But I thought, how can it be this difficult? And I am fit, I work out. I do pull-ups, I have a grip. I gave it everything. I had no more time. That was it.”
After he dropped, he says, he came up with “a litany of excuses” in his head for why he didn’t win. “I was disappointed and surprised, and then immediately, I started justifying. ‘Well, I was also hosting, and I’m very depleted from the last year and a half of trying to produce the show,’” he says. “The truth is Probst, it wasn’t your day. Just admit it and step away!”
It’s been 25 years of “Survivor,” and this was one of the most eye-opening experiences Probst has had yet — and that’s saying a lot.
“Beyond the fun of the twist, it was really informative to me. It’s very difficult to do these things. I happened to pick one that was more strength-based, but even watching somebody just stand on a narrow beam and balance a ball, I will never again look at it the same way,” he says. “And I’m the one saying, ‘It’s so easy to talk about how well you could do when you’re sitting at home.’ I’ve been that guy for 25 years. I finally got off the couch myself, and I will never be the same.”
He was also thrilled that it went the way it did. “I was so happy that the players embraced me and then made fun of me, and gave me what I deserved, which is 25 years of smack talk,” said Probst. “I had a blast with it, and they got rice. They earned it, which is what the fans want.”
