‘Survivor 50’: Q Burdette Reveals What Ozzy Really Said to Him at Tribal Council

After sowing chaos he couldn’t control in Survivor 46, Q Burdette course-corrected and ended up in a strong majority alliance right off the bat in Survivor 50. The player who was previously written off as a wild character who couldn’t control his emotions was calm and collected this time around, and incredibly likable. The Q chaos made him a target going into Season 50. His new and improved gameplay made his target even bigger once they were on the beaches.

Mike White saw Q as a threat and targeted him immediately once they were swapped onto the same tribe in Episode 3, which aired on Wednesday, March 11, on CBS. Q fell for Mike’s lie about voting for Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick, Q’s No. 1 ally. The Ole Miss alum offered himself up instead, urging The White Lotus creator to vote for him. Q tells TV Insider that this was his way of preventing Stephenie from playing her Shot in the Dark, which would make her lose her vote. Q sold his vote in Episode 1 for camp supplies, so their alliance couldn’t afford to be another vote down.

Q figured that David vs. Goliath‘s Mike, Angelina Keeley, and Christian Hubicki would vote for him, but he didn’t bet on Ozzy Lusth and Emily Flippen flipping and voting for him, too.

Before Jeff Probst snuffed his torch, Q asked Ozzy, “Was this you?” The captions onscreen said Ozzy’s reply was, “Yeah.” Q tells TV Insider that’s not what he said.

“Ozzy actually said no,” Q reveals, adding, “I swear. I asked Ozzy, I said, ‘Was this you?’ He was like, ‘Nah.’ And you can see him kind of shaking his head [no] in the episode. If you go back and watch it, he was shaking his head, nah.”

“The caption said yes, but he said, ‘Nah,'” Q asserts.

He also claims that the edit made it look like Aubry Bracco got her Boomerang Idol from Christian after Genevieve Mushaluk looked through her bag, but it was the other way around.

Q explains these moments and more about his elimination in our full exit interview below. Plus, he shares his thoughts on Probst’s rap.

Q, I’m so bummed about this. You were my winner pick.

Q Burdette: Really?! I am so sorry.

Yes, I was so impressed by you out in Fiji. I really was like, “I think he can do it. I think he has the chops for it.”

And listen, I was doing it.

You were! You were doing so well.

You come into a season, and you’re thinking like, OK, Q’s going to be a target. How will he handle it? How would he handle leaving day one, not being a part of his tribe, and coming back? Is he going to overplay his hand? Is he going to go into … No, I came back. I played that scenario the best way that it could have been played at that time. And I got into a majority alliance in which my voice was being heard, but I wasn’t the one that was really wanting all of the credit. I wanted the ideas. I wanted everybody to think for themselves. I wanted to bring everybody together. So man, listen, I was having so much fun. The game had slowed down a little bit for me. I was starting to see things differently. I understood the process, so the version of me that you were watching over these last three episodes was a better version of me from 46.

It was still entertaining from what people say. It was still cute having these raw, authentic moments, but it was more calm, settled, and likable. That’s what I was in the game, likable. And here we go on day seven, you’re talking about swapping. Listen, that’s like going to the casino and playing roulette, and all of a sudden, all of the numbers on the board disappear, and it’s only three numbers, and I don’t have any chips on them. Then I lose! I’ve lost.

You got a bad hand.

Terrible.

You were very likable. That’s what I observed from you on set. In our interview, you were calm and collected. You had learned from your mistakes from 46, and you had a plan for how to avoid them. And then in those first days, you were so likable. At the camps, I was thinking, “Everybody’s following him. They like him.” And it was after you had come back from Exile Island with Ozzy. I thought, “If he can stay locked in, he can do this.” And then Mike White came for you.

And it’s not even that, Kelli. I tell people, in that scenario, who else do you come for? Who else makes a splash? No one else on that beach right there is really concerning as much as I am. Now, if you give me maybe those same people and we have five, six days together like we did on Vatu, maybe I can change the mind of Mike White. Maybe I can change the mind of Emily and we get to know each other a lot more. But when you say we’re going to swap, we’re going to have a challenge and a tribal council next, there’s no time for it. It has to happen immediately. And now I’m at a major disadvantage because I’m trying to build a relationship and an understanding with people who’ve known each other for seven, eight years, people who play games together outside of Survivor. That can’t work. They’re going to stick to who and what they know. And they don’t know me. I’m a foreign object. Get me out of here.

It’s part of the game, and I respect it. I’m never a bitter player, but I do wish I could have had just one more day with my original Vatu tribe. I wanted to run that last challenge because we talked about throwing the challenge before that. So we would have definitely 1,000% thrown this next challenge, Vatu.

To get Angelina out?

To get Aubry or Angelina out because we knew Aubry had that idol.

In your gut, yeah. You guys knew you had a feeling that she might, and you were predicting the future.

No, no, no. It wasn’t a gut thing.

Oh, you’re talking about later?

We used to keep our bags all in one area, really. One day, Aubry takes her bag and walks out of camp. [She] has never done that. She’s walking in the opposite direction from where we go to the bathroom.

So you think that happened after Christian sent her the idol? In the episode, it looked like you looked in her bag, and then she got the idol.

Well, it was kind of out of order, but no, we only looked after she did that. It wasn’t before. It was after, because Genevieve spotted it, and I was like, “Yeah, that was weird.” When she came back, she put her bag down. We all took it to the beach. We thought she probably had it on her at that time. But we knew. [There] was no convincing me that she did not have it.

Aubry and I had a relationship where, had we gone to the tribal, my name was definitely not being written down. So I at least make it through that one vote. I get my vote back. I told Genevieve and all of them before that challenge, I was like, “My fear is we’re going to have this challenge today. If we don’t lose, we’re going to swap before we get a chance to throw another challenge.” I don’t want me and Colby [Donaldson, who also lost his vote] to go on the same tribe and be sitting ducks down two votes. I don’t want to go on a tribe where I’m by myself with no vote. I’m going to go home. And that’s exactly what happened. Swap the next day.

Genevieve came back. She was like, “Q, I’m sorry. We couldn’t throw it.” And I was like, “It’s cool, because Cila was so bad at this last challenge.” They dropped eight times. We didn’t drop once. We were just slow. And it was like, how do we throw this one? They’re so bad at this one, but the next one was definitely one we could have thrown and would’ve thrown. And we’re not talking today. You’re talking to somebody else and not Q.

You and Aubry had that shared history with Moriah Gaynor [Q voted out Moriah in Season 46 because she said Aubry was her favorite player]. Did you and Aubry ever talk about the Moriah of it all at camp?

We did. The second I got to the beach, me and Aubry talked, we hugged, and it was a moment where I’m just saying like, “Hey, that’s me playing the game.” She was like, “Oh, I know.” She was like, “Can I hug you?” I was like, “Please, let’s do it.” We had a conversation about it, and I felt good again about Aubry. The only thing was once the whole idol thing happened, she didn’t tell me about it. And another thing, Aubry started to do after that, this is crazy, but she was like, “Q, I know something is here. Let’s make sure we’re looking underneath the shelter. Let’s look up.” I had already known Genevieve had found what was there. So how could she be so sure that something is there unless she now knows she has something?

[There were] so many things that happened that I was 120% sure Aubry had it. And it was one of those things like, OK, if she has it, I just need to stay on her good side in case she plays it. It’s not my name that she’s writing down. But we had that conversation, and we were all fine. We laughed, we hugged about it, we moved on. And she was more concerned with everybody else.

 

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You asked Ozzy if he got you out in tribal council, and he said yes, but when did you learn that it was really Mike White?

No, Ozzy actually said no.

Oh, really?

Yes. I swear. I asked Ozzy, I said, “Was this you? ” He was like, “Nah.” And you can see him kind of shaking his head [no] in the episode. If you go back and watch it, he was shaking his head, nah. The caption said yes, but he said nah. And then I was like, “All right, cool.”

So, when did you learn it was Mike?

Oh, just now.

When you watched the episode last night?

Yeah. This whole time, I’m thinking it’s Ozzy because I knew he voted for me, because when I got back to [Ponderosa], I started to replay it. I was like, “Well, Ozzy had to vote for me, or else Jeff would’ve read two Angelina votes.” He only read one. So I was like, “OK, Ozzy definitely voted for me and flipped,” but I’m thinking it was more so the reason of me knowing too much information about him, about his extra vote, about his idol. He lied to me about his extra vote when we were on Vatu. I thought, “Oh, this guy’s lying to me.” I said it in a confessional.

He didn’t have his extra vote anymore, but he didn’t tell you who had it.

Right. He was telling the truth, but he was lying about who he sent it to. I thought he was lying altogether. I’m thinking, you had an idol. So if you had to save yourself for real, you would’ve played your idol, not give your extra vote to somebody, but he actually did give his extra vote to somebody. It just happened to be Cirie [Fields] and not Joe [Hunter].

It was the swap. I pulled the wrong buff. It is what it is. It’s part of the game.

Can you explain your thought process behind telling Mike White to vote for you? That’s something you did in 46 as well. Explain the logic.

It’s always a strategy for me. At the time, Mike White is saying that he’s going to vote for Stephenie. And Stephenie started to say, “Well, if they’re voting for me, Q, there’s nothing I can do. I’m just going to play my Shot in the Dark.” And I was like, “OK, listen, Stephenie, I’m going to get the votes on me that’s supposed to go on you. Will that make you come?” She was like, “Yes.” Because I knew as long as Ozzy and Emily stuck with Stephenie and they vote Angelina, it did not matter if Christian, Angelina, and Mike White voted me, but it mattered a lot if they voted Stephenie, because if they vote me, it’s a tie on a revote. Angelina can’t vote again. Now it’s three, two, boom. Angelina can go. But if they vote Stephenie, now it’s two, two, now they realize I don’t have my vote, or I didn’t vote. They’re going to turn on Stephenie, and I’m going to go the next day anyway.

So I’m thinking, OK, make them vote for me while I don’t have a vote anyway, then force the tie, and then on a revote, three of y’all can vote out Angelina. Didn’t work that way because Emily and Ozzy flipped, but it was just my way of making sure, at the time, Stephenie, being my No. 1 on the beach, was comfortable because I needed her not to play her Shot in the Dark.

And it was a true blindside for you? You had no sense that Mike White had campaigned for you at all?

No, no, no. I knew, like I said, I knew I was going to get three votes for sure. At that time, he had already said he was voting for me. Christian said he was voting for me.

After you said, “You should vote for me.”

Correct. Christian told me he was voting for me and then Angelina, where else is she going to vote? So I knew I was going to have three votes. What I did not know was Emily and Ozzy were also going to vote for me. The more and more I think about, it was the right plan just for the wrong people.

It’s like you said, you got unlucky with the tribe swap. You really had a strong alliance on Vatu, and the new dynamic did not work in your favor.

One of these times, Kelli, this move is going to work, and I’m going to have something in my pocket ready to play, an idol, and I’m going to get to votes on me, and I’m going to protect somebody. But in this moment, it was more so to get the votes on me to protect Stephenie, so we’d have the numbers truly versus her playing Shot in the Dark. That was my thinking at the time. And again, it just didn’t work out.

What did you think of Jeff’s rap? Were people snapping on beat?

For the most part, but out there, I’m not going to lie, it sounded weird because there was no music. When you put the music on it [in the episode], I was like, “OK, maybe it sounds good now.” But out there, I was like, “What? It’s all offbeat. What?” I don’t get it. It was a fun way to do a tribe swap, though. It was Jeff coming in and getting into this new era way of playing, joyful, fun, different, and Season 50, I liked it. Now, maybe we should give Jeff a guitar, and he could do a little country thing, but it is what it is. It was fun when we were doing it, but I was terrified to swap. When I finally picked my buff and saw who was on my tribe, I’m just like, man.

And a lot of people ask me, just so you’re clear, why were you targeting Angelina? Well, A) with the whole thing about not working around camp, but prior to getting to the beach, Angelina used to always tell us, “Hey, I haven’t talked to Mike White in three years. We’re friends, but we haven’t talked in a while. He’s always busy.” And then I get Mike White on the beach, and he says, “I talked to Angelina right before we got here.” I’m thinking, “OK, she’s lying about that. She’s downplaying that relationship. She’s trying to play. I really have to get her out now.”

It makes sense. She is a threatening player. Well, Q, I was really rooting for you. You did a great job regardless of your early elimination. I hope you come back to the show, and I hope you stay on reality TV. You’re so much fun to watch.

Really appreciate you. Thank you.

Survivor, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS