Moriah Gaynor reveals what we did not see at that Survivor 46 Tribal Council

She doesn’t like grilled cheese sandwiches that aren’t really grilled cheese sandwiches. She thinks the best Survivor challenge ever is actually the worst Survivor challenge ever. And she is ready to wage a one-woman war against online companies that make you print out return labels. While Moriah Gaynor has plenty of pointed opinions about seemingly trivial topics, her mouth did not get her into trouble on Survivor 46. Her previous tribe’s lie may have, though.

Moriah became the latest victim of a Survivor mergeatory after her team lost the challenge and then folks from the Yanu and Nami tribes worried that the Flock of Siga was way too close and needed to be broken up. Even though Moriah was out of the loop on the previous vote-out of Jem Hussain-Adams, the Siga members had decided to lie to the other teams and say the vote was unanimous to project tribe strength. All it did was make others that much more determined to get rid of one of them, and once Moriah vocalized her admiration for Aubry Bracco — apparently the scariest Survivor player ever — her fate was sealed.

What does the ousted player have to say about being the Siga sacrifice? Could she hear the others celebrating their new buffs at Tribal Council after getting her torch snuffed? And who from the other tribes would she have liked to work with? We asked Moriah all that and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Did Aubry Bracco get you kicked off Survivor?

MORIAH GAYNOR: I mean, apparently according to Q, we're the same person. So Aubry Bracco got herself kicked off Survivor. That's just how it goes.

When and how did you know you had to start battling and breaking off from Siga to stay in the game?

The thing is, when you're on the bottom, you can kind of go either way, right? When you say, to quote a friend, “Take me or leave me,” it will either go, “Great, we have a number,” or it'll go, “Great, now we know who to kick off and not piss off four people.” And that's a really, really delicate line to play.

So going into the merge, I knew that Tim had these ties with Q. He was very open about it on Siga. He even told everyone that he told Q Maria was his number one. We all knew it, so I knew he had those ties. I knew Maria had ties with Tevin from her journey. So going in, I knew I was not only starting on the bottom, but I hadn’t been on a journey. So I needed to manage these other people who might already have connections.

I wanted to go in with a: "You don't want to kick me off. You don't want to piss off these people you actually want to work with because you don't know me.” But you can see in the scene with Venus, I was a little bit like: I'm hoping I'm mind melding here and you can pick up some signs that you can get me. I'm an easy one. You can get me. Don't piss people off, but I'm open to working with you — which is something she did pick up on.

Finally, at Tribal, I knew I was going home. Charlie said he was playing a Shot in the Dark for Venus. It was very open. I had other people from other tribes telling me, “One in six, girl. Good luck!” And when someone on another tribe tells you “One in six, I'm rooting for you,” they might as well snuff my torch. So going into Tribal, I knew it was my Tribal, I could say whatever because I was probably going home anyway. Might as well say my piece and maybe take out some people along the way.

How do you feel about your Siga folks not fighting harder to keep you?  

It's a game. I get it. It was literally probably the worst rock draw I could have imagined. The only people going to bat with me are Tim, who I'd been beefing with since day one. Him and I just didn't really get along that well. And Ben, who I literally wrote his name less than 24 hours earlier. So I got why they didn't go to bat with me. I was actually really pleasantly surprised by how much trepidation there was in even throwing out my name. But ultimately Mergeatory, or merge limbo, is such a tidal wave, and once seven people start piling on and then three more join, it's just not worth it to sink your game.

It's interesting you say that you and Tim were not vibing at all from the get-go because what we saw was just one big happy Siga family. So it seems like that wasn't 100 percent the case. Tell me about what was really just going on at Siga between you and Tim, and just the group as a whole.

I like to call it that we had a very Roston Bob dynamic in that it still had that lockdown presence, but it was under this guise of happy family. So, “Oh, we're winning. Let's just go to the well together! It's so fun!” But it was a very almost suffocating feeling, and especially with Tim and me, where Tim is very methodical. He was a very good encourager. I'm a little bit more boots on the ground logistics. So our mentalities were just very different. And you could see from the beginning he was just like, “These women, you got to get 'em out.” And you can sense that when someone looks at you, and say you're a woman — that's scary or something like that.

Women are super scary. I agree.

Yeah, that might as well be the episode title for me.

What else did we not see at that Tribal Council?

Yeah, so two moments. One of them was, there is a very long almost storyline on this is that by the time I got to Tribal, I was fed up because the entire time it had been like, “You're a strategist!” I'm like, why? What did I do other than look like me? And that was it. It really was that I had invoked someone everyone was already thinking about. I was honest. I look like me, I talk like me, I walk like me, and at Tribal I'm like, “You know what? You are objectively making a bad game decision here. You're letting what you think I should be get in the way of who I am and what I'm playing. You're judging me on how I walk, you're judging me on how I talk, and you're going to lose because of it. I'm more than this box that you have decided I am.”

And that was a big thing that I wanted to come across in that last minute: Unless you open your mind to how people are showing you and what they're doing, you're going to lose this game. The second thing is that I was very open about playing my Shot in the Dark. Everyone knew at camp. So when I went to the voting booth to go vote, I tossed my Shot in the Dark up, caught it midair, and skipped off. So I do wish that that had made the edit to prove to my family I'm that coordinated and I could do that.

Are you surprised then if you were that open about playing it, that Charlie was the only one to throw a rogue vote out, and that Venus especially didn't throw something out there?

I was a little surprised the Venus didn't throw something out there knowing that she was the backup vote, and even seeing the edit now, that maybe she would have thrown a Shot on Charlie. So that really actually did shock me. But again, going back to merge, it's such a groupthink situation, especially in my merge, particularly when you have seven people, a literal majority sitting at a table and then coming back to camp. There's very little wiggle room. There's very little reason or incentive to really do something in this situation.

So I couldn't help but wonder as I was watching the episode, after you had your torch snuffed and you're waiting to record your final words, could you hear your former tribemates cheering when they got the merge buffs?

Yeah. So that was maybe another thing I kind of wish made the edit was that on my way out, Jeff snuffed my torch and other people even mentioned that this doesn't happen very often, but my castmates applauded me. I got an applause from my castmates. I got a “I love you" from Charlie as I'm walking out. That is not something you usually do at a Tribal. And so I'm thinking about my last words and then I'm sitting in the tent and I just hear [imitates cheering and screaming] and I'm like [holds hands to head in pain]. My heart just sunk — like,  the dense gravity I have in my body. So yeah, you can hear them.

How difficult is it to be that close but not make the jury?

I am a fan, and to get that inch away and you have it there and you can see it, you can visualize it on that boat heading over ... And I even knew going out there that I didn't want to get my expectations too high. I knew me as a different player, as a smaller woman, my two pain points are going to be the first vote and the merge vote, because those are the ones where you have the least amount of time to make a meaningful impression.

And I'm someone who takes a little bit more to understand and to be able to understand how you can work with, and I can't do that with 13 people in 12 hours. So part of it was just like, I am devastated. And then part of this was just, this is a game. This is something you visualize. This is something that in a way I knew was a possibility, but that doesn't make all the pain go away.

I want to go back a bit in the game. How surprised were you when Maria and Charlie sided with the Siga men instead of you and Jem?

I was floored. I wouldn't say I was 100 percent locked that this was going to be a surefire Jem vote at camp. I could smell that. There was something a little fishy going on. Maria had come to me and basically said, “Hey Mo, you are not going home tonight. Your name is not out there. You are 100 percent, you are fine. Jem is wigging everyone out.”

So Maria telling me that told me they trust her. There's something she's doing over there that they feel like they can give her that information. So that made me kind of think there might be something going on that I'm not part of. Right after that is when I ran to Charlie and was just like, “Hey man, as a friend, I know this is so difficult.” My reason in doing that was kind of saying, “Hey, I know I'm not out there, but whatever happens, I still want to work with you. We're good. Let's figure this out.” So at least knowing my name's not out there, I would have some path forward in this game.

Yeah, watching that, it was like a Survivor version of a friend check. Alright, so what happened to your chin in that one challenge? It looked like you took some damage to the face.

I swam into a damn corner, Dalton. There's big steps, but you had to climb up. I was so ferociously swimming I literally swam right into the corner. At one point, I was walking away and I'm like, “Hey Charlie, am I bleeding?” And he's like, “It's fine, you're good.” And I'm like, “I am not good, am I? I'm the new Jeanine is what I took away from that.

It’s your Survivor battle scar.

I left my mark on Fiji and Fiji left their mark on me.

Who is someone on one of the other tribes that you tried or would have liked to have worked with?

I would've loved to work with Tevin. Tevin and I were able to just have a very raw connection in that 12 hours of madness of just being able to sit down, talk about our lives, and talk about some of our similarities in our background and our upbringing. And I could tell from that, he's a hard player, but he's an earnest player. And based on that conversation, based on the way that he spoke to me, I'm like: This is a guy that I want to get in with, and I feel like out of everyone, he's giving me that impression as well.

Also, in my pregame, I mentioned I wanted to work with people who I might not get to work with in my real life or who I might not even meet. And to me, having the opportunity to meet all these different people, and especially Tevin, I was like, this is such a special person that I really want to work more with you.

What’s something that happened out there that never made it to TV that you wish we had a chance to see?

There is one day after we got the fishing gear that we took the boat out. As I very clearly stated, I wanted first grab at that fishing gear, and I got it, and I actually caught a fish. When I say caught a fish, I mean on the reef, 10 feet down, speared it right there. So that was the good.

The bad news is it was a boxfish, which for those who don't know, is a cousin of the pufferfish that apparently is not that common. So they didn't feel like they even had to tell us, “Don't shoot this thing.” They were like “They're never going to see one.” And sure enough, I caught a boxfish and there's probably a good two hours of footage of us just going, “I don't know, it's kind of weird. Do you think we should eat it? I don't know. I'm really hungry. Are those scales? Is that a bone? What do you think?” And we ended up not, because we're here to tell the tale, but we got really close to production intervening and being like [makes negative slashing motion across throat].

So will you or will you not get that Siga tattoo?

We're going to have to see. I did get a green tattoo when I got back from Survivor. There's green on it, so maybe we'll just round that one in.

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