Jeff Probst snuffs Malcolm's torch on "Survivor: Caramoan"
Credit: CBS
I seems like I just talked to Malcolm Freberg about his last "Survivor" experience, a near miss on "Survivor: Philippines."
Malcolm didn't fare nearly as well on "Survivor: Caramoan." The X
Factor among the returning Favorites, Malcolm had only two weeks between
his seasons and he wasn't the dominating force he was the first time
around. He also never had the strong alliance he had the first time
around, when he paired with eventual winner Denise from the first day.
Instead, he found himself forming an minority alliance with Alpha Males
Reynold and Eddie, who were outsiders in the Fans tribe from the start.
Still, despite never having a power position or any real traction,
Malcolm made things interesting. Malcolm found two Hidden Immunity Idols
and used both of them in a dramatic move to take Phillip "The
Specialist" Sheppard out of the game. That came one week after Malcolm
got Reynold to hand him another Idol in an ultimately unnecessary
attempt to shake up the game.
Regrets? Malcolm's got a few and, as always, he shares them with good humor.
Click through for discussion of the Three Amigos, The Specialist and his between-seasons conditioning strategy...
HitFix: Hey Malcolm, how you doing?
Malcolm Freberg: I'm doing alright. I appreciate your sad tone of voice, though.
HitFix: I guess I'm just a bit mournful.
Malcolm: I'll take it!
HitFix: First question: If you'd had an Idol to play, would you really not have played it during that Tribal Council?
Malcolm: I don't remember saying that. I saw it
and I was like, "Wait. What? Hold on. No..." I don't know. I think I was
trying to rationalize it in my brain for not finding it. I don't know
what that was and I don't know where that came from. If I had it, it
would have been a much different scenario. Yeah. I don't know what that
was.
HitFix: How frequently does that
happen where you hear something you said in a confessional and have no
memory of having actually said it?
Malcolm: Honestly, it's most of them. Occasionally
I'm like, "Oh yeah. I remember that. I remember being witty that day."
But most of the time, I'm watching it for the first time, too. Sometimes
I say something funny and I'm like, "I don't remember saying that!" And
sometimes I say crass things about women and I'm like, "I don't
remember saying that!" So it's kinda like watching it for the first
time.
HitFix: Going back to what led to
your demise. You took responsibility for Sherri, while Eddie and Reynold
took responsibility for Erik. Who do you think had the harder job and
who dropped the ball?
Malcolm: It wasn't the harder job, it was just the
only job. Erik... I didn't trust Eddie and Reynold to sway anybody.
After playing with them for as long as I did, you learn not to trust
those two with too many responsibilities. So I told them, "Go work on
Erik," but I never really expected them to pull over Erik. Erik's been
in La-La Land for a month. I had no read on him whatsoever. So I went to
work on Sherri knowing it was going to be a tough sell. I was sorta
like, "Hey, you'll make it farther with us" and, you know, I did think
that was true, but it was obviously a sell. I didn't think it was a
great shot, but I didn't think we had a shot. What I didn't know was how
horrible her, Reynold and Eddie were treating each other in the
beginning at the Fans' camp. I'd heard that they didn't get along, but I
didn't know until it came on TV a couple months ago how much they
actually were going at each other's throats those first couple days and I
think that actually played a big part in her decision not to flip.
HitFix: So then is your regret with
not trying to cultivate Sherri as an option sooner? Or is your regret
with the whole Three Amigos thing as your primary alliance in the first
place?
Malcolm: You know, the Three Amigos was just... I
keep saying... It was the dumbest thing. I wanted to punch Eddie when he
called us "The Three Amigos" in the middle of Tribal. It was a fun
little joke for us in the woods, but what worse way to sway people to
come over to your side of the numbers than if you announce, "Yeah. We
have a name." There's three of us, and the name has "three" in the name.
"Yeah. Come on with us. We'll bring you to the end." Awww. I wanted to
elbow him. Anyway. Sorry. We kinda talked to Sherri and I couldn't
really feel her out after the swap, but I talked to her and we had a
good relationship. But I think after we all kinda turned our back on her
on that first vote when we were trying to trash her her after the Merge
and instead Corinne went home, she really took it personally, which was
kinda a shock to me. I would never take a vote against me personally if
I thought it made sense. So she took that vote against her personally.
It's something I could have worked on, but for the original plan, I
never planned on needing her.
HitFix: It doesn't sound like you have a tremendous amount of
respect for Eddie and Reynold [he starts laughing]. What is like being
out there and finding yourself relying on people you don't maybe respect
so much?
Malcolm: I love Reynold and Eddie to death, but as
far as "Survivor" strategy goes... A couple times it was like, "Guys,
what are you thinking?!?" Like, especially with Eddie running his mouth
to Andrea that day. I was shouting at my TV. And then Reynold's the
eternal optimist. If somebody throws an idea his way that could possibly
work, he totally goes for it. It's like, "With allies like these, who
needs enemies?" Right?
HitFix: Do you think that you were
maybe too quick to slip away from the Favorites and ready to be a free
agent? Or was that always your plan?
Malcolm: In hindsight, it's kinda easy to think
that. It crosses my mind from time to time. But you have to go back to
the very beginning and the whole dynamic with me and none of the
Favorites knowing who I am. So yeah, I managed to weasel my way into the
majority alliance, but I was never a core member. I was always just on
the fringe and I was never going to be able to work within that group to
go to the end. So really early on, I knew I was going to have to try to
turn the game on its head and I felt I had to do it early, like right
after the Merge, because we'd voted out so many fans. I couldn't have
planned on the Favorites being so dominant pre-Merge and getting rid of
all of my potential allies that way. So very early on in the game, I
knew I was going to not stick around with Stealth Nonsense until the
end. I don't think it was too early, because if I wait any longer,
there's no one to flip.
HitFix: How about once Corinne went
out and your original alternative alliance fell apart. Was there
anything you could have done in that moment of uncertainty, rather than,
I guess, again... the Three Amigos?
Malcolm: Yeah, I see what you're saying, like
kinda like snuggle back in with the majority and like go kiss Phillip's
butt. I did manage to come out of that vote unscathed on reputation, so I
still thought I could pull it off. I still thought, "If Dawn comes
along..." Now that seems silly watching it on TV, because I didn't know
that Dawn was the one who trashed Corinne at the time. So I still
thought we could pull it off, but obviously not.
HitFix: How do you look, in
retrospect, at the two Idols you played that maybe, in a totally literal
sense, you didn't need to play to survive?
Malcolm: Nothing about any Tribal Council since
the Merge went the way I planned it to go and that one was no exception.
All that move was supposed to be was basically a bluff a la the
Philippines when I did it and then Kent went home, where I pull it out
and make a big show and then just put it back in my pocket. The idea was
just to double-down on that bet, put a necklace around Eddie's neck and
then create enough smoke and mirrors and confusion to get everyone to
vote for Phillip. And it didn't work out that way. So that was really my
worst case scenario, having to play it and I knew that going into it.
It was a risk, kinda a swing-for-the-fences, do-or-die moment and it
just didn't work out.
HitFix: Last week, Phillip wanted to
make it very, very clear to me that the only reason you would have voted
him out was because you viewed him as a threat. So, did you view him as
a threat?
Malcolm: [Laughs.] Well, Phillip said it, so it must be true.
HitFix: Yup. That's how I figured it.
Malcolm: You know, Phillip was handed the keys to
the car. I was doing it to. It was like, "Here, Phillip. Go have fun.
You be in charge." We seceded all power to him within minutes of hitting
the beach. Giving him credit... He was doing a good job out there, but
he didn't get taken out because he was a threat necessarily. We targeted
him because we felt that he was the cog holding all the pieces of the
majority alliance together. He was in everyone's endgame plan and he
seemed like the best way to create a fundamental shift in the dynamics
on the beach. As a threat? He was never gonna win, so I don't know how
much of a threat he was, but he was playing a good game out there. He
went because he was the best way, we thought, to shake the game up.
HitFix: Since we're playing a lot of "in retrospect..."
Malcolm: I know, right? "Malcolm, if you could do it again? If you did this again?"
HitFix: It's the game I play.
Malcolm: I gotcha. No worries!
Malcolm: So in retrospect, would you have targeted someone different, thinking back on targeting Phillip?
Malcolm: If I knew that I was gonna have to play
two Idols to get somebody out and that was already pre-determined that
that was going to happen? [He sighs.] No. No. Because you can get rid of
a threat, but then Phillip's still there and he's still calling the
shots, he's still gonna be there not letting people talk to us on the
beach. He had us on lockdown while he was there, nobody was allowed to
talk to us. Andrea was scared to have conversations with us in front of
him. Phillip had to go because he was doing a good job and he was the
figurehead for the status quo. Getting rid of him, it didn't change
things enough to keep me around, but it did create some sort of shift.
HitFix: Last night we saw some
night-vision fun with the standoff between you and Andrea at the well.
How much of that was editing fun? How long would you say that actually
lasted for?
Malcolm: I was up as soon as there was a crack of
daylight, out there digging again. This was like the day after. I'd
already dug for hours looking for that thing. And then she walked in and
just decided she was going to sit down. We probably sat on the well
for... It was probably half-an-hour. It just happened to be right at
dawn, so they got to have some fun with their cameras. We probably sat
there for a half-an-hour kinda laughing and at the same time, I was
really annoyed with her. At that point, I was already despairing of
finding that Idol, so was like, "Can we just walk away?" And we just
walked off and I ended up bluffing that I had it.
HitFix: Did you give any consideration to starting a digging race and just letting the chips fall for whoever could find it first?
Malcolm: It kinda turned into that at one point
and then I was like, "This is dumb. I've looked everywhere I can come up
with to look. I've been digging for days." So I ended up just stopping
looking and the idea was to give the impression that I did, in fact,
have the Idol, so that they had to split the votes and so that bringing
Sherri over would be enough to get me through the next vote.
HitFix: You mentioned it early, but
you were sorta the great unknown of the Favorites. What was the
advantage and what was the disadvantage of that?
Malcolm: There was an advantage in that no one
knew what to expect. There are two sides to the coin. The advantage is
that no one knows what to expect. The disadvantage is no one knows what
to expect. There was really no way to know how it would play out, but
early on it became a disadvantage, in that as much as I was part of the
majority, I wasn't a part of the majority of the majority. Let's see how
many more times I can say "majority" in a sentence. And then I felt the
need to try to make something happen, because there was no way I was
gonna be able to just be taken to the end, especially because of the
fear of me being the next Russell Hantz or something and nobody knowing
what to expect.
HitFix: What did you tell people about your season?
Malcolm: I told the truth. I gave like 100
percent, all the facts. The first time I started in the Philippines, I
had this whole elaborate lie about my backstory, about where I went to
school and my college football career and all of these lies that I'd
compounded up, to as a story to make me less of a threat. This time I
gave the complete truth and I made that decision as we were hitting the
beach. The idea was that I needed to come off as genuine as possible if
these people who have all the power are gonna keep me around, that if
they sense that I'm lying or they sense I'm being deceptive, they're
gonna sniff the bluff really quick. So they got the full truth. They
knew everything within the first hour.
HitFix: What was the turnaround between the two seasons and how did that impact your physicality out there?
Malcolm: I told myself, "With two weeks off, you
need to eat right and work out lightly and just restore your body." That
two weeks was like hedonism. I was so bad. I wasn't a kid in a candy
shop. I was a grown man in grocery store spending way too much money on
Fruity Pebbles and baked goods. My muscle mass just wasn't the same. I
wasn't in the same spot. Watching myself last night, even looking at
myself with my shirt off, it's like, "That's not lean-healthy, that's
gross-sickly." My muscle-mass was just gone. I had no reserves. I was
not in the same spot on Day 30 in Caramoan as I was on Day 30 in the
Philippines, not even close.
HitFix: And you've now had a bit of downtime. Are you itching to get back out there and do it for a third time?
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