‘Survivor’ 45 Final 5 Reveals Deleted Scenes They Wish Made It In
Survivor is a unique series in that it’s been running for so long, part of the fun of the viewing experience is analyzing how the episodes are edited.
The show’s editors clearly had a blast cutting funny montages in Survivor Season 45, among other fun sequences and quick cuts. The 90-minute format this season also allowed for more extended scenes showing strategy talks and social bonding at the camps. But even with 90-minute episodes, there is still tons of footage that doesn’t make it into the final edit.
TV Insider asked the Survivor 45 Final Five — Dee Valladares, Austin Li Coon, Jake O’Kane, Katurah Topps, and Julie Alley — to share deleted scenes they wish had been included in this season. Some of the answers were strategy talks, like the planning it took to pull off the Kellie Nalbandian blindside after the auction. Other responses revealed scenes that would have made the cast’s personalities shine even more.
Survivor 45 winner Dee previously told TV Insider about several cut scenes she wishes viewers could have watched, such as a pre-jury pitch conversation she had with Austin and a funny fight she had with Sifu Alsup pre-merge.
In the former scene, she and Austin (this season’s showmance) agreed not to take it easy on each other in their jury pitches just because of their relationship. In the latter, she chased Sifu around camp with a stick because, as she described, he was being a hypocrite. You can learn the full details of these scenes here.
Below, scroll through the deleted scenes that Austin, Jake, Julie, and Katurah wish you could have seen.
Survivor, Season 46 Premiere, Wednesday, February 28, 2024, CBS
Austin Li Coon, Runner Up
Camp adventures:
“Drew [Basile] and I, we had some epic crab-hunting adventures. We would be the ones — Sifu, too — to go around, find crabs. Drew, he’s crazy. He would grab these live crabs from the cracks and he would toss it to me and I’d be the one that had to kill them with a paddle. But we had this whole system going. You grab and toss, I’d paddle it down and we’d bring it over, cook it, eat it. It was so much fun because it helped us get food. We needed the protein, but it was just a moment to get a little bit outside of the game and just have this fun little activity that we’d do together. Drew and I, we were truly best friends out there, and every day we had so much fun hanging out. I can see why they wouldn’t show [the crab hunting], but yeah, it was epic … You got to do what you got to do to survive out there. It wasn’t pretty, but it was fun.”
Kellie Blindside Planning:
“The Kellie blindside vote, obviously the edit really wanted to blindside the audience to make it feel like they were Jake, that they were Kellie and had no idea what was going to happen. But there was so much work that went on behind the scenes to make that happen. That took a lot of conversations and work, especially with Dee, who Kellie was getting really close with, to be able to convince her like, ‘We are here for you. We’re your shields. We’re the people you can work with,’ and just convincing people like, ‘Hey, we got to do this and we got to do this now.’
“Something that made that move possible was at the auction, where the person who has the most amount of money at the end, they lose their vote. So Bruce [Perreault] actually bid $80 on the fish eyes at the auction, and I outbid him $100 just because we wanted a higher chance of someone outside of our alliance losing their vote. And that ended up being what happened. I ate the eyeball partly because I was like, OK, I need to bite into this to make it look like I bid on this because I want to eat it, not because it’s strategic and because I wanted to make sure that he had a chance of losing his vote still. So that ended up happening. Once he lost his vote, we were like, this is the time. We are striking now and doing this blindside. So a lot of the moves and a lot of discussions for that round was kind of left unshown.
“In my eyes, Kellie was always a huge threat that needed to go as soon as she was available. I wanted her gone before Bruce for sure, so as soon as Kellie lost the immunity challenge, it didn’t matter to me if Bruce won. In fact, him winning might have even helped because then we had to scramble and figure out and move the votes on Jake. But that just caused a little bit more of a smokescreen for us operate under the table while everyone’s trying to scramble and get it to go to Jake. We were able to be like, no, no, no. We’re going to do Kellie.”
Convincing Dee to Vote for Kellie:
“I knew how much Dee was getting really close with Kellie, and I really had to convince her that getting Kellie out is not terrible for your game. Basically, what I was saying was like, ‘Listen, the last round I went with you and we voted out Kaleb [Gebrewold]. Kaleb was my shield, but I was willing to vote him out because he was a threat to your game. Kellie’s a huge threat to my game. She has this amulet, she’s going to try getting the numbers to vote me out. We need to get her as soon as possible.'”
Jake O'Kane, Third Place
Jake’s Tribal Council Recaps:
“I did this radio voice probably the last week of the game. I would just make fun of the Tribal Councils and just roast everybody. Not trying to be mean, but everybody’s losing their minds and just recapping the Tribals was fun. It would be framed like a newscaster on a radio show, like watching a black-and-white version narrating to a radio audience. ‘Welcome back to Dakuwaqa Tribal Council. We have Jake running around like a chicken with his head cut off. He’s throwing bombs here, he’s throwing bombs there to no effect. It’s a sad day.'”
Katurah Topps, Fourth Place
Katurah’s Switch to the Reba Alliance:
“If there’s something that I missed [in the episodes], honestly, probably the intentionality that I used when I flipped over to Reba. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’m talking about at the 12-12 split and me deciding to vote out Kaleb. That was me leading up to 12, no, 14 days of having worked with Belo people and feeling constantly excluded and really feeling like I kept trying to make it work and being like, oh, I’m hitting a wall. I’m trying to connect, hitting a wall, and then being like, all right, well, I’m on a new tribe. Let’s try it again. It is what it is. Tribe swap wasn’t ideal for me, but hey, put it to the side and try again. And then it didn’t work again.
“Then at the merge being like, OK, we’re at the merge. We need the numbers, put it to the side, try again. And then Bruce was able to be the leadership voice that I was viewing that he had always been, and people listened. And our core number, Kaleb, was now on the chopping block because Belo was so giving into what Bruce said. I was like, I’ve tried three times with Belo, and it doesn’t work. So then when I approached Reba, it wasn’t me being like, oh my God, I’m emotional. It was like, look, let’s map this out. I literally was like, I will work with y’all. I will make sure I vote with Belo every time. They will not know that I’m working with you guys, and then we’ll get out all the Belos.
“I was thinking — and this is the part I didn’t share with Reba — once we get out the Belos, since I know there’s no way that they’re going to be able to strategically value or include me or give me key information, at some point Reba’s going to turn on itself and then I’ll be there standing and be like, yeah, I’m the one to help you vote out people. I just feel like that maybe didn’t get shown as much, and it might look like I was just spur of the moment, let me flip. But it was very deliberate and it was after calculating for 14 days.”
Her Season-Long Strategy:
“I came into the game saying, it’s not a coincidence that we have 44 seasons and only two Black girls have ever won. I knew my odds of winning were astronomically lower than probably any other dynamic. It just hasn’t happened. I was like, you’re not going to win being big and flashy. I could have went in and said, ‘I’m a big New York City lawyer and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,’ and ‘look how great I can be and look how much I can lead and move.’ But I was like, they’re going to be like, ‘and cut’ immediately. And they were like, ‘and cut’ even without knowing any of that!
“So my goal was to kind of put my dignity to the side and accept that you want people to view you as this lower, non-threatening thing that they can just have floating alone. But then I don’t think I realized how painful that ended up being. It was like I wanted y’all to think I was disposable and invisible, but not this damn disposable and invisible. I felt very excluded and very invisible and not seen as valuable for so long in those first 14 days … It felt better when I executed blindsides against them. That was the best part. I want to be a sweet, nice, good human being, but I was like revenge!”
Julie Alley, Fifth Place
The Reba Four’s Secret Nightly Meetings:
“The Reba Four was really close. We’d always meet at night, and then wouldn’t talk much during the day. That was fun for us all to meet. There is [a scene] I thought that they would show after Kellie and then Kendra [McQuarrie were voted out]. The Reba Four, we’d make the decisions and we just felt like we were taking everyone out. I was gutted [after Kellie and Kendra’s eliminations].
“Dee and I were sitting on the beach, and I’m gutted. You kind of always think that you’re the hero of your own story, right? It’s all about you. So the two of us are there, and we’re just sad but yet when you get to that point where you’re laughing so hard because you’re so sad. But there was this point and I went, ‘Wait, Dakuwaqa. That’s sharks, right?’ [Dakuwaqa is the name of the Fijian ancient shark god.] I’m like, ‘Are we the sharks?!’ We couldn’t stop laughing because of the realization. In my head, I’m Mama J. I’m loving these people. But yeah, I’m taking them out. I felt like I was the closer.
“I still remember Kellie going, ‘Mama J, my gut is telling me something’s up.’ And I’m the one that talked her off that ledge. I was like, you are fine. You are fine. No, no Shot in the Dark. No, Jake’s going. You can trust me. She did, and I did the same thing to Kendra. And so I’m there gutted, and then I’m like, oh, am I a shark? And we laughed. It was just that moment of what is this game? I was like, I don’t want to be the shark. I don’t want to be the villain, but oh my god, what if we are? So that was hilarious.
“I loved everything about my Reba group. I loved it. We had affirmation circles. We went around to talk about what we loved about one another. Meanwhile, Lulu was like, no fire. They’re miserable. And we’re all like, oh, I love you! It was still really, really hard. We didn’t even have rice then, but we were winning.”
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