Survivor China: Interview with Erik - "I didn't want to take that risk."

[hepcat]

Leaving the game in sixth place is Erik Huffman, whose bio is fleshed out by such intriguing characteristics as “underwear model”, “virgin”, and “touring band member.” With such a conflicting resume, at the start of the season it was hard to predict if Erik would be laid back or divaesque, but we quickly found he was laid back to the point of lounging -- all with a friendly smile on his face, singing lullabies to the women at bedtime. He may not be the ultimate Survivor, but you’ve got to admit he’s kind of sweet.

According to your bio, you’re 26 years old yet you have achieved success both in music and in modeling, as well has having a college degree. How did someone with your interests end up on Survivor?

I guess the same way I’ve done a lot of other things in my life. I graduated from college – I’ve never known exactly what I wanted to do with my life, I didn’t have any ultimate goal. So with that, I’ve also been open to a bunch of opportunities. I’ve been pursuing music full time; I’ve been doing it full time for about four years now. I try to do modeling on the side. I’ve been in the entertainment world already, and I was approached by someone who asked if I was interested in trying out for Survivor. I’d never even watched the show, and I more or less said, “Well, let me get back to you.” Then I watched a little bit of it, and it looked like a pretty cool thing, so I started getting involved in it – and here I am.

So did you approach it as a physical challenge, or were you studying up on strategy?

I probably spent more time physically preparing than mentally; it’s really hard to prepare—I guess the best way is to just watch other episodes, and really try to get an understanding of how you are, what are your strengths and weaknesses, how might that compare to other people’s strengths and weaknesses. And all you can really think about is the 350 million different scenarios. And you really don’t know when you go out there, and you have to either take it all in, and adjust, or just be really confident in yourself and come out of the gates swinging.

Now that you’ve gone through it, how would you peg the game—is it 50% physical and 50% social interaction? How would you define it?

It’s literally a huge mix of physical endurance—the challenges are really physical at the very beginning, and even without the challenges we were all exhausted from not eating a whole lot, it was really hard on all of our bodies. So the physical affects the mental, because you’re that drained, and you’re that hungry, and that tired, it’s really hard to kind of keep your head in the game. The mental game effects the physical game and vice versa. It’s hard to say if one is more important than the other.

I want to go back to earlier in the game when Peih-Gee and Jaime threw the challenge on purpose to target the two guys who had been kidnapped into your tribe, James and Aaron. Jaime says that not only did you know the plan was to throw the challenge, but that James knew it had been thrown by Tribal Council and all the outrage he showed that night was an act. What is your recollection of that?

Basically the short of the whole story is that Jaime and Peih-Gee and I had all discussed whether we should throw the next couple of challenges or not. We decided we’d try to win the first one, and feel it out and see what happened, and I guess we decided to go ahead and win, and I was out there to win that challenge, and then Peih-Gee and Jaime got spooked by some communication that looked like was going on between James and the other tribe, and they made a last minute judgment call to throw the challenge, but it was too late to tell me. And I wasn’t a part of that. Coming back to camp, I kind of started putting two and two together, and I was a little upset because I busted my butt in the challenge, and didn’t know, but I also trusted that they were making a decision that was in my best interest. I had to trust that, because they were on my team.

As far as James, they did tell James they threw it. But that – it was weird, actually, because Peih-Gee and Jaime did say that they thought they saw [James] communicate with the other tribe, and they got freaked out, so then the only interesting thing is why did we vote out Aaron instead of James, if James was the one who was causing that problem? Well, I guess the only thing to say there is, we just considered Aaron more of an all-around threat at that point in the game, and being the leader of the other tribe, it seemed that he had more potential for several alliances, as opposed to James. At least, James appeared to be more of a simple guy who was there helping out, helping in the challenges, helping around camp. And that was probably his strategy, too—he probably had us fooled a little bit too. He somehow seemed more trustworthy than Aaron as a player. We ended up telling James that we were going to vote out Aaron. James was still upset that we actually threw the challenge, so I think he wanted to let off some steam in tribal council.

Another question I’ve been wanting to ask you since interviewing Jaime – she says that she knew before Tribal Council that the “idol” she had in her possession wasn’t a real idol because you and she had compared it to the ones in James’ pack that afternoon. Did Jaime know the idol wouldn’t work that night?

What happened was, when Jaime looked in James’ bag at nighttime, and felt two of those wooden plaques in there, unfortunately it was really dark, so we couldn’t distinguish them, and we couldn’t see any writing on them, which would have been helpful. So at that time we had no reason to believe that there would be writing on the actual idols. That night, we didn’t know (this would have been one or two nights before the tribal council). So we were pretty sure that James had two blocks that he thought were immunity idols; we weren’t able to distinguish them from the one that we found on the ground, so at that point, we thought “Hmm, it could be a possibility; maybe James has enough clues to know that it’s one of these blocks, but maybe he doesn’t know exactly which one, and that’s why he took two.” So we grabbed the one on the ground, thinking maybe it was possible. Well, when we merged, that first day, Jaime and I noticed there was one and only one plaque missing from the archways at the Fei Long camp. And it did not match the one we had. And we remembered that there used to be one at our camp that looked like the one that was missing. So, all that said, we kind of put two and two together, and we knew there was about a 90% chance we didn’t have the right idol unless James just screwed up. And so, in the last second of desperation I think, Jaime thought there was nothing to lose by trying.

Do you feel like you did everything you could to stay in the game yourself?

I really do. I think like I went in with a certain strategy of laying low at first, assessing everybody’s strengths weaknesses and personalities. Thankfully, I feel like I was more or less able to be myself. I stayed close and aligned with people that I trusted for the most part. From Zhan Hu, and I made it to the merge, and at that point, I tried to maintain those aliances, but Fei Long started taking people off from our tribe. There were points in time where I think I could have chose to change my strategy altogether, and really try to be more aggressive towards pulling strings, but it never felt right, it felt too soon to start doing that; that would have put a target on my back in my mind. I knew that probably everybody else was going to try to do that, and as long as other people were creating a stir and I wasn’t, that made me less of a target. Until the very end, I knew that it was down to the nitty-gritty; I guess I had a choice of being a lot more aggressive, but I really and truly thought, that I proposed a pretty good argument to Denise—Peih-Gee and I sat down with her and said “Look, we’re guaranteeing you”—I guess we didn’t know 100% but, “There’s a very good chance of you going to the top 3 if you go with us. If the vote ties, yeah there still has to be a tie-breaker, but that’s a pretty good shot of you getting at least third place as opposed to only guaranteed fourth, with the other tribe.” I really thought it was a good deal for her, but I guess she thought it was too risky.

The other alliance had already cannibalized its own members (Jean-Robert, James). Why do you think Denise resisted flipping over to you and Peih-Gee when it seemed likely that she would be the first to be taken out of her own alliance once you two are gone?

My only insight is that I think, somehow, she just was scared that—maybe she thought her loyalty to the remaining tribe would pay off. I mean, I’m sure they appreciated it (laughs) especially Todd, which is who Peih-Gee and I voted for—I’m sure he appreciated that, but I just feel like…

It’s not going to get her any farther.

Right. Everyone knew as far as Todd was concerned, he’s out to win. If that was the case, it didn’t seem like she could put a lot of stock in trusting him at the end of the game. That’s why I really didn’t think it was a good choice. And she knew that Zhan Hu had stayed pretty loyal to our tribe the entire time, because we’d had to out of necessity. And I felt like it could have been a really strategic move on Denise’s part to join a strong alliance that had had a history of being loyal out of necessity as opposed to Fei Long, who remained loyal only to keep numbers, and then ended up backstabbing everybody in the end, most likely.

So James didn’t play either of his idols when the chances to play them were dwindling every week. We didn’t get to talk to James, so can you provide us any insight into what happened last week?

Gosh, I don’t know. In my mind, he must’ve just been so confident that he was in such a good place. I wonder if he almost got so comfortable with knowing that he was in a good spot that he didn’t actually use it to his advantage. He kept trying to keep his tribe together, saying, “Stay strong, let’s just keep this to the end.” But he had to know. We told him from the beginning that people were going to be out to get him, because he was an immunity threat, and he had been a dominant force in challenges up to that point. It only made sense, the most dominant person, that also has two immunity idols, you’re going to be a target. (laughs) You know what I mean?

Did you ever consider going to James and telling him that his alliance was about to betray them, and use that to sway him to turn the tables back on them?

Thinking back…(pauses) I could’ve made that move, and who knows, maybe it would have paid off for me to do that. At least it would have mixed things up a bit. I guess I didn’t want to take that risk because I knew that if he didn’t believe me, and he went back to the other people and told them, “Erik’s trying to say this and that,” and they denied it, it pretty much—yes I had immunity that week, so I wasn’t going to go home that week, but I feel like that would’ve put me a much more of a risk than laying low and going with what everybody was saying. Because they did let me in on the plan to get rid of James, and unfortunately that gave them a lot of power over me in that situation, because they did divulge that information. I kind of do wish that maybe I had used that a little more wisely, but you know, I was really just trying to do the smartest long term move. And I just felt like, going along with it for then would have been good, and I really was still convinced that people didn’t trust Todd, and he might be the next guy to go, instead of me.

It also seems like you had Peih-Gee doing the dirty work when it came to approaching the other side. Is that a fair assessment?

Definitely, just based on that circumstance, it made a lot more sense for me to lay low if Peih-Gee was…she was kind of—you’re right, you’re exactly right, she was doing a lot of the dividing and trying to switch things around, so that it didn’t really make it necessary for me to try to throw these ideas into people’s heads. I allowed her to do it, and I was there to hopefully benefit.

Well, let’s move on to other players in the game. What was your impression of Courtney?

Courtney was way out of her element on Survivor. She was very surprised to even have gotten past the first vote. She’s a very, very funny person; very sarcastic, probably offends lots of people, but I think she’s hilarious.

How about Denise?

Denise was very likeable because we got to hear about her family and her whole story was pretty cool. Just the fact that she practices karate is really funny to me and really cool. She’s an interesting person. Like everyone else she was out to win the game, but I think she tried to maintain integrity.

How about Peih-Gee? You were pretty close to her by necessity.

I honestly thought that Peih-Gee would get voted out pretty quickly at the beginning of the game. She was kind of stand-offish and short with some people. She was by no means a physical presence. But after making it through a couple of rounds, she really started endearing herself a little more and she really warmed up to a lot of us and she and I have become friends. I think she’s really, really smart and a nice girl.

And then there’s Jaime.

(with a smile in his voice) Jaime is my favorite Survivor person. She and I have a lot in common. We connected from the very beginning; we just hit it off. Both in the game and in the alliance it really helped because it felt very genuine. It was the one relationship on Survivor during the game that I actually felt was legit. We actually had a real trust in each other. And she’s just a really sweet girl. She was very uplifting to our tribe when we needed it. She makes me laugh.

So when you told her you were a virgin, was that game play, or…?

It was just genuine; we had become really close friends and were just talking about life. You have a lot of time to just hang out. I felt like it was part of my life that I wanted to share. I mean, we talked about everything, that was just one part.

Is there some kind of romance there?

I will say that we are very close and she is very close to me and one of my favorite people in the world. And I hope that she remains in my life.

How about someone who’s not so positive, like Jean-Robert?

Jena-Robert was kind of the local prick. (Both laugh) A lot of these people I haven’t really had a chance to talk to outside of the show. Whether it’s strategy or not, he definitely came across as pretty arrogant; so overly self-confident that it was just like, it was a turn-off, you know? He definitely got under a lot of people’s skin. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with him because it was really only five days because he got voted off pretty quickly after we merged, but he definitely pissed a bunch of people off.

That says something, if you have that impression of him after only being with him five days.

Yeah. And a lot of that comes from other people talking about him too, but I saw enough to understand what they were talking about.

How about someone like Dave? How were you with Dave?

Dave and I—I guess he did really kind of annoy me at times. In my mind I’m pretty tolerant of most people, and I felt like I was pretty tolerant of him. He had a very sincere side, and a nice side, that was very helpful and—I tried to see through the fact that he had his moments where he was just almost impossible to be with. He would have these little spells at camp that would just be, he would have these outrages. She especially didn’t click with Ashley and Sherea, for sure. He and Peih-Gee had their moments. And that was just hard to be around.

If things had been flipped and you’d been on the tribe where they were winning all the challenges so they weren’t picking off the irritating people, do you think that you would have been a quicker target? I’m just thinking in your tribe, you kind of got rid of the people everyone was sick of.

Yeah, who knows, maybe that helped me in the end. I don’t know. It sucked! (Both laugh) It was hard, just losing all the time. At the same time, I was still one of the stronger people. I think out of necessity they had to keep me around for a while, and that allowed me time to develop actual alliances on my team. Going into the merge I felt pretty solid at that point.

Is there anything you want people to know about your time on the show? Anything about your “edit”?

I guess for me personally, I felt like the edits were fairly true to life. I really tried my best to be myself on the show and maintain integrity, but also use all the information, and all the strengths and weaknesses and things to try and win the game, and I think I really came close there at the end to having changed the whole game around. It didn’t quite happen, but I feel good about my choices on the whole, and hopefully I’ve learned a lot from this.

If only Denise could have been persuaded.

If only! (laughs)

Thanks to Erik and CBS for the interview.

[Google]

 

[bbnbama]

Thanks for the interview hepcat. He seems just as laid back in the interview as he did on the show!

On a sidenote...why did we not get an interview with James?

[Mariner]

Originally Posted by bbnbama

On a sidenote...why did we not get an interview with James?

[[If the rumors are true about the next version of Survivor, probably because he was off filming Survivor 16]]

Very interesting interview hep. I feel like we hardly heard him talk on the show so it's good to get his thoughts on what is going on.

[bbnbama]

Ah ha Mariner......thanks for that!

[Nik]

He's a lovely person. And it's not his fault that Denise is a moron. At least he tried.

[xDC3x]

Such a nice guy! I wish Denise would've jumped ship.

[Leo]

Interesting interview. It's almost like he's a bit too nice to be on this show, doesn't he?

Thanks for the interview hep.

[PWS]

Great interview--thanks! But I'm still wondering what he thought of Amanda, his other seeming flirtation and how that was portrayed.