She tried to play both sides, but eventually, she just got played. Julia Sokolowski’s plan for Survivor: Kaoh Rong was to straddle two alliances. Unfortunately for her, the first alliance suspected her duplicitousness early on and finally acted on it last night, voting her out of the game and onto the jury.
Julia called into Entertainment Weekly Radio (SiriusXM, channel 105) Thursday morning to chat about how it all went wrong, and you can now hear the entire interview right here on the Inside TV Podcast. Here are some highlights:
On whether she thought she had Cydney and Michele on her side when she went to Tribal Council:
“I didn’t think I had Cydney. I really thought I had Michele. So overall, I don’t think it was a blindside, but I was blindsided by Michele voting for me. I was really caught off guard by that. I never in a million years would have expected her to vote me off. So I kind of had some suspicion that it could be me or Jason, just because I really didn’t think Cydney was on board.
“I was devastated in a lot of ways. We saw a little bit of my and Michele’s friendship, but it was a lot deeper than [what] was shown. I was really upset and it was truly a knife to the heart. But, in a way, I have respect for her. She needed to vote me out to prove her allegiance. She did what she had to do to progress her game. No hard feelings now. I love Michele.”
On why she aligned even closer with Jason after the last vote, while Michele tried to get back in the good graces of the majority alliance:
“I went immediately to Jason jut because I wanted to be able to switch things up at this point. I knew Aubry would never work with me. Aubry and I out there were really, really tense, and it started the episode where she crossed my name out, and from then on we had a really hostile relationship. So I knew that I’d never be able to work with Aubry, and I knew since I would never be able to wok with Aubry that I would never be able to work with Joe. So I really had to look at my options and see what was out there. And at the time, Tai was a huge threat. I personally think it would have been a better move for everybody involved to get rid of Tai, get rid of his advantage, get rid of that idol. But Cydney and Michele thought otherwise.”
On her decision to join the guys on the reward challenge a few weeks back and if she worried it would make her a target:
“I was absolutely worried that would put a target on my back. But, at the same time, I was like, ‘If this works, this could be my in. This could be my game.’ [Michele and I] were always on the bottom of the Joe-Aubry-Cydney group at the time. So I really wanted to switch things up. I wanted to position myself better, and I really felt I had a good chance of manipulating Scot and Jason and being able to be the ringleader of that group. It was obviously a dangerous game. I wouldn’t say I played an elegant game by any means, but it was something I felt I needed to do at the time to position myself.”
On what went through her mind last week when she was telling Tai to play his idol, while Scot told him not to play it, and then Scot was voted out:
“I was so blindsided by that vote. I really had no idea that Cydney, Aubry, Tai, and Joe voted for Scot. A lot of people on Twitter said, ‘Oh, Julia’s so smart, she’s trying to get Tai to flush the idol,’ but I really had no idea. I genuinely thought Tai was going home. So I was so, so confused. I was completely caught off guard. And you saw last night when I went back to camp, I was fuming mad. I really was upset. It was a really crazy scene and hard to wrap my head around at the time.”
On why she lied about her age and didn’t tell people she was 18 when the game started:
“I think Michele at the time was 24 and Anna was 27. At the time I was like, if I say I’m 21, 22, maybe they won’t look at me too much like a baby. I think often when you have a teenager on the show they’re easily strung along like, ‘Oh, that girl’s going to be the naïve one.’ We’ve seen it in past seasons. Or, ‘She’s just an easy one, two, three boot because she won’t have any idea what’s going on.’ So I felt that by lying about my age and saying I was a little bit older than I was, I could avoid that baby stereotype.”
Listen to the whole chat — including Julia’s revelation of when she solidified her plan of action and how she felt about being so invisible for the first part of the season — by clicking on the audio player below. (The Julia Survivor interview starts at 43:30 into the podcast.)
But first we begin with a trip to Westeros to talk with Jaime Lannister himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Coster-Waldau breaks down Jaime’s emotional reunion with Cersei from the Game of Thrones season premiere, and tells us what’s coming up next as well as the one character he’d like to share more scenes with. It’s a conversation any Game of Thrones fan will want to hear.
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You can listen to the whole podcast above. Or, since we’re on iTunes, you can subscribe for free and take the podcast with you. To send a question to the InsideTV Podcast team, follow us on Twitter @InsideTVPodcast. And to hear more interviews and television discussion and debate, check out Entertainment Weekly Radio on SiriusXM, channel 105.