For a while, things were going pretty well for Josh Canfield on “Survivor: San Juan del Sur — Blood vs. Water.”
The savvy and likable player had won over his tribe mates just as he had hoped.
“My whole starting out strategy was to get everyone on my tribe to want to work with me; to be the person that everyone came to, to be in an alliance with,“ Canfield, 32, says over the phone from New York. “Which ended up happening.”
The idea, once in an alliance, is that “nobody thinks you’re on top, because they picked you.”
But his hapless tribe Coyopa kept losing and once they got to the merge and were on the verge of voting out his biggest threat, Jeremy Collins, Julie McGee quit, depriving them of a needed vote.
When Jeremy won individual immunity and the wildcard couple Jon Misch and Jaclyn Schultz went to the other alliance, Canfield knew his fate was sealed before they ever got to tribal.
“Reed and I said our goodbyes already,” he says of his boyfriend Reed Kelly, whom he left behind.
Now he’s the first member of the jury, with 10 remaining as they go into tonight’s episode.
On screen, Jaclyn said she was annoyed by the males of her alliance ignoring her when Jon was off on Exile Island. But Canfield says what people didn’t see
What they didn’t show, is right after that I said ‘Jaclyn, you said ‘all the guys’ – you’re including Reed and I in that. What have I been doing the last three days? I’ve been talking with you. I’ve been hanging out with you.’ I was like: ‘How are you grouping me with that?’ Then she said, well fine, everybody but Josh. I thought, ‘Oh great, so you’re still going to vote me out. Wonderful.’”
How did Jon (who lost the flint for his tribe the first day out) and his former Miss Michigan girlfriend suddenly become the power couple?
“They weren’t in any strong alliances,” Canfield said. “They were swing votes. Which meant everyone was trying to grab them and say ‘Be in our alliance.’ Which is a bad position to be in. Because there’s already two alliances formed and you’re not in either in them. And they both want you but you’re going to be on the bottom, because they already made their alliance.”
Once the merge happened the polar opposites seemed to be Jeremy and Josh, in part because they had similar game, Canfield said. “He was a force,” he said. “He was a strong competitive challenge as far as strength goes, and then people listened to him and wanted to be in his alliance and be part of it.”
It was possible they could have worked together, especially after they landed at the same tribe after the swap. But, “he saw I was calling the shots in the alliance, which is when he said, ‘Josh needs to be taken out.’”
It was possible he could have worked with him, Canfield said. But, he added, “the problem with working with Jeremy, I don’t think any of our alliance members wanted to work with him. He was pretty negative around camp. Everything that he was talking about was usually something negative. He wasn’t he kind of person we wanted to continue on with in general because I think in a survival situation, you want to have people who are positive, especially when you’re not eating and going through something difficult.”
The quitting of Julie, whom he called “dead weight around camp” “ended up really messing me up,” Canfield says. Had she stayed instead of quit, they would have had enough votes to oust Jeremy that week.
“It was horrible for my game, and it was just horrible for the game in general,” he said.
But asked to identify his one regret it was that he and Reed did not throw the dragon puzzle challenge they won when they were at Hunnahpu.
“We talked about throwing that challenge multiple times because it was like: we have the numbers, if we lose this challenge we can go to tribal council and get rid of Jeremy. And then we don’t have to worry about it,” Canfield said. “If we would have done that, Jeremy would have gone home and Dale would have stayed in the game, and Dale was one of my huge allies so then at the merge, we would have had the numbers automatically.
“But as ‘Survivor’ fans we knew: This never goes well, something always horrible happens when you throw challenges and it’s just predictable. And Reed and I are extreme competitors. It was like: I just don’t want to not try. I want to try and win so we ended up going with our gut and being who we really are and try to win this thing, and we did.”
Canfield, an actor and playwright who was last seen off-Broadway as Anatole in the off-Broadway production of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” said he’d be happy to come back to “Survivor.”
“I absolutely loved the experience and if they asked me back, I would love to go back,” he said.