Survivor 49 star Annie Davis reacts to being called a Karen on TV

Annie Davis is used to bring the frontwoman. She owns her own company and is the lead singer in a rock band. But the woman who thought she was the puppet master of Survivor 49 turned out to just be a puppet in the end.

Annie was the second person sent out of the game after her cursed Kele tribe lost their fifth straight team or individual competition. While Annie thought she was leading the vote against Jake Latimer — and then Sophi Balerdi — in actuality, the rest of the tribe was all aligned in taking her out, and Annie was unanimously voted out after just five days in the game.

How does Annie feel about her abbreviated stay on the island? Does she have any hard feelings after watching everything play back on TV? And does she wish she had toned it down around her tribemates? We spoke to Survivor 49’s second victim the morning after her televised ouster.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Tell me what was going through your mind when you saw you name keep coming up at Tribal Council?

ANNIE DAVIS: Oh man, it was rough because I was completely blindsided last night. I really had no idea that I was going home. And so, you know, your heart breaks. It can’t not. It’s not that I don’t understand it. I really do in hindsight, but it’s rough to see your name come up anytime, and to see it come up over and over again, it gets worse and worse and worse. So, yeah, it was rough.

What was the experience like of watching the two episodes play back on TV and seeing what your tribemates were actually saying about you when you weren’t around?

Oh, that was the hardest part, as I think it probably is for anybody on this show, because you think your own reality is truth, and you really have no idea until you see it all back and say, “Oh my God, they hated me!” I know they didn’t hate me, but “They hated me!” you know?

And so you can spin yourself into a tizzy thinking about all that, but at the end of the day, I also can very much separate gameplay from reality. And so I can be best buddies with all of these people now. The game is the game, but it is kind of crazy and a little bit emotionally wrenching to see people talking about you behind your back in a way that you’re like, “Oh my God, I had no idea that’s what they thought about me.” So it can be tough for sure.

How did you feel about Sophi calling you a Karen in real life?

So, as a cast, we all watched the premiere together. And so I got to see the foreshadowing of her calling me a Karen on episode 2. And there was just this collective like, “Ohhhh, you said that?” The whole cast went kind of crazy. And what we ended up doing is I made a bunch of “Team Karen” shirts for the episode last night. My husband and a lot of my friends were wearing Team Karen shirts. So, you know what? This is a laugh or cry world, and you just have to take that stuff and let it roll off. And I know she doesn’t feel like that now, so it’s okay.

You said it kind of perfectly before, Annie, because that is Survivor. You see it all through your eyes when you’re out there, and then you watch it on TV and you see it through other people’s eyes. What was the most surprising thing for you when you watched the episodes back?

I do think it was the fact that some of my tribemates, especially Sophi and Jeremiah, thought that I was as bossy as they thought I was, and that I was controlling and all these things. I have that in me. I’m a CEO, I front a band, I’ve done Ironmans and all these things that are very much solo endeavors. So if I want to get stuff done, I go and I get it done.

But I, really on the island, went with the intention of trying to help and, “Hey, guys, let’s find the coconuts that have the water inside because we need the fluid,” and, “Hey, guys, let’s build a shelter so we don’t get rained on.” And they perceived it as super bossy and controlling. And all I was trying to do was get out there and help my tribe. And so that was surprising to me. But also not totally unexpected, just a little bit surprising because I thought we were kind of all in that together, and we were not.

I know you pride yourself on being the big boss lady in your real life back home, and that’s just sort of your natural leadership inclination. And it’s hard to sort of curb that when you get out into elements.

It’s very hard. And especially when it comes from a place of love, which mine really does. I’m a benevolent dictator, you know? [Laughs] I’ve always got people’s best interests because I ultimately just want to help. And it isn’t me needing to be in control of everything from the sense of just trying to control for the sake of control.

It’s not that. It’s much more trying to help, and you’ve got to have somebody leading. You can’t have everybody just wandering around with nobody knowing what to do. And so I was trying to help our tribe by taking some of that on, but it ultimately bit me in the ass. And it happens. Not the first time.

We saw you call yourself the puppet master. What made you think you were in such control out there?

I still think maybe on a different season or a different tribe, this strategy would’ve been okay, but my game going in was to find a number one and make that a very secret thing and kind of part ways with that person and stay away from them as much as possible. And so I hit up Alex from day one because I’m looking around the tribe and thinking, “Okay, I can probably use these other people, but Alex is my guy.”

And so we connected, and the idea was we each go split off and find our fake number ones and then we’re sort of controlling things from the inside and we sort of stay away from each other. So that strategy on a different tribe might’ve been okay, but there were a lot of things going on in the background with these other people that I just didn’t know.

And maybe Jake got to Alex first. I don’t know how that all worked or where his head was at. But I liked my strategy. I just think now in hindsight I’m realizing that either Alex didn’t actually want to work with me like I thought he did, or maybe somebody else got to him first. And I just was kind of the odd man out in that whole situation.

We saw Alex tell you he found the immunity idol, but what did he tell you he was going to do with it?

I was sitting in the shelter because we had had our plan for the vote — at least I thought. And he meets me in the shelter and he said, “Guess what? I found the idol.” And I said, “Holy crap, this is amazing.” And he said, “This is for us. I I will use it for you if you feel like you have any inkling that somebody’s going to vote you out. Or we can use it, we can take to the merge, whatever.” So his message to me was: This is for us as a team. Because at the time, I thought we had a really strong alliance.

I think that was a bummer. I would’ve never asked him to use the idol for me. I just wouldn’t have, because I was just happy that he found it because I felt like, “I love this guy and I’ll never write his name down. We, we got this thing.” So it was really exciting to hear he got the idol, and it was a bummer to see how it all played out. But that was kind of what went through my head because that was the message to me.

What was the point of him doing that? We saw Jake say earlier, “Make her feel really comfortable.” Do you think he was just trying to make you feel comfortable? Because otherwise what’s the point of even telling you?

I think that’s exactly what it was. He was doing to me what we did effectively do to Nicole on the first episode. So this whole thing about me isolating myself, and being alone all the time, and all these clips of me laying in the shelter thinking and all this stuff — some of that was the edit because we had decided as a tribe before the Nicole vote that I was going to sort of be isolating myself and thinking that the vote was on me.

I was kind of the decoy so that she wouldn’t play her Shot in the Dark. So it was all part of the strategy and the plan to isolate me a little bit from the group. And so there was that. And so for the second one where I got voted off, I think they just did the same thing to me. And I’m an idiot for not seeing it because I had participated in that the first time around. [Laughs] So I should have seen it for sure, but I didn’t.

There’s that one scene where they kind of made it look like the whole tribe’s going to the water well, and you’re like, “Well, I’m not going,” And then the others are like, “Is she looking for an idol?” And they kind of don’t really show one way or the other if you were. So were you searching for the idol?

Not at all. I figured out in about an hour of being on that island, this girl is never going to find an idol. Everything is brown, everything looks like a leaf. I could spend hours and hours and hours looking for an idol and I wouldn’t find it. So I thought my first best use is to help around camp.

You know, I’m old. I remember old school Survivor where that was something that people kind of valued. And I think we’ve lost a little bit of that in new era. But I thought, “I’m gonna go find as much bamboo as I can.” I worked all day on that stupid shelter on day one. And so when they show my tribe going to the beach and saying, “Hey Annie, do you want to join us?” That was an edit to make it look like I was off by myself. But really, I was just trying to get that shelter built.

I’ve seen so many seasons of Survivor where they are getting poured on at night, and that was my biggest fear. I was like, “We’re gonna be freezing, we’re gonna be wet, let’s get this thing built.” So I said, “I’ll join you guys as soon as I get this last stuff put together.” I didn’t think of it as they’re going off to plot against me. I mean, we were on day one at this point. But here we go! Live and learn.

It looked like your biggest strategic miscalculation was not realizing that Sophi and Jake were as close as they were. Why do you think you didn’t pick up on that, and what was it like then when you saw how close they were in the game?

They did a really good job. I didn’t know what they had going on. I knew they had something going on, but I didn’t know the extent of it. They didn’t show this, but I woke up in the middle of the night a few days in. And I see the two of them sitting there talking on the beach, like kind of real close to each other. And this is supposed to be sleeping time. It’s like two in the morning. And I thought, “Uh-oh.”

So I’m crawling on my belly trying to creep over and listen to what they’re saying. And then they would look over and I’d pretend to sleep. I look like I’m an idiot! [Laughs] But I figured out at that moment they had something going on. And so I woke up the next day and I said, “Alex, we gotta split these two up.” And that was the reason for trying to go down this road of voting out either Jake or eventually Sophi when Sophi was abysmal in that challenge.

Even though originally I kind of wanted to vote out Jake just to split the two of ’em up, that’s because I thought I’d have more control over Sophi than I would have over Jake. So that was my reason for going after Jake. But when Sophi was bad on that challenge, I thought, “We have to eat, so we have to get rid of this girl.” So then I pivoted to Sophi, but I didn’t realize until that night how close the two of them were or I probably would’ve changed my strategy a little bit.

How frustrating was it to keep losing challenge after challenge after challenge?

It was maddening. I don’t know how else to put it other than it was extremely frustrating because I felt like our tribe had a decent balance of strength and body types and all of that. We just fell apart on the puzzles. I mean, you look at that challenge where I got voted out, and we were eight minutes ahead, and Sophi and Alex just biffed on that puzzle. I mean, there’s no other way to put it. They didn’t even have two pieces put together.

So I don’t know how else to spin it. You know, it sounds unkind, but at the end of the day, it was a rough one. We just could not get the puzzles put together. And it was our downfall. I mean, look at what happened even on the fight for supplies with Alex. That just kind of came down to a sort of a puzzley kind of thing. So it was tough to keep losing for sure.

Probst kept talking about how bad the heat was. Did it feel that way to you?

Well, I love the heat. I kind of felt like the longer that I lasted on the island, the better I would’ve been because I could suffer through all of that. Because I love the heat, so to me, I’ll take sweltering heat all day over being cold or rainy or whatever. So I was okay with it. I think it was tough on a lot our players, and if you watch the Tribal Council and you see everybody can’t put a sentence together. And even Jeff was kind of struggling with it too, so it was hot out there, but I kind of liked it. I didn’t mind it.

You’ve already told us a few things that we didn’t get to see on TV. Anything else that happened out there you wish had made it to TV that we didn’t get to see

I think the only thing I was kind of hoping they would show is I had a pretty epic story about aqua dumping. [Laughs] Oh, it’s pretty incredible. And they cut that one. I remember Jeff saying, “For the 8-year-old boys out there, tell us more, Annie.”

Because I had ended up being the first one of our tribe who said, “I’m gonna do it. I’m going in. I can poop anywhere!” And I ended up pooping in our fishing area. And then the tide was coming in and the poop’s, like, hitting me in the chest. And I’m horribly embarrassed because my tribe’s going to come over here and see my poop flying everywhere. So I’m trying to scoop it over the rocks. It was a good story, but it didn’t make the edit.

If you could go back and change one thing about your game, what would it be?

I would definitely have spent more time with my tribe. Even though I felt like I was trying to help and I was trying to do things to benefit the tribe, I realized in hindsight that this is almost an entirely social game. People kind of don’t care about the physical contributions, even really in challenges.

Look at what happened at the one where I got voted out. I was not in any stretch the weak link in that challenge. And Sophi and Alex’s name didn’t even come up. So people don’t care as much anymore about the physical side. I think, knowing that, I would’ve gone in probably with a stronger social game. I knew I was going to be a little bit weak on that because of my personality, but I would’ve done a better job about connecting with my tribemates for sure.