In an unpredictable game like Survivor, aligning yourself with a strong player isn't always a good move. As long as your partner remains in the game, their strength is an asset, but if the other players are smart enough to vote your partner out, you can be sure you're next on the list.

This is exactly what happened to Charlie Herschel, the openly gay New Yorker. Upon arriving in Gabon, Charlie immediately aligned himself with the handsome, athletic Marcus, and although they brought a few other players into their alliance (which they dubbed "the onion alliance"), Marcus and Charlie seemed poised to go all the way to the final two. Until, that is, a surprise shake-up put them on separate tribes, and Charlie and the rest of their alliance were shocked to see Marcus ejected from the game only a couple of days later.

Even once the tribes merged, Charlie had no idea that former Fang members Kenny and Crystal were quietly plotting to vote him out. At Tribal Council, a racially-charged blowup between Crystal and Randy led Charlie to believe that one of them would be the next to go, only to be blindsided by five votes against him, effectively taking him out of the game and putting him on the jury.

The 29-year-old attorney told us why he was targeted, why he didn't think Marcus deserved to be voted out and why he's happy he didn't see his eviction coming.


The onion alliance was doing so well for the first half of the game and then it all fell apart.
Ugh, it was a mess. You know, things just didn't turn out in our favour. There was twist after twist and all of a sudden we merge and the same night, we go to Tribal and, you know, how could I predict that Kenny was going to make up this lie and target me, someone he didn't know, after three hours of meeting him? And that's what happened and here I am.

You said you'd rather have been blindsided at Tribal Council than to have any idea you were leaving. Why do you feel that way?
For two reasons. First of all, I think it's probably hard to go through a few days there on edge and panicking that you're going to be the person voted out. That could be tough to handle. And second of all, I'm a huge fan of Survivor and I know, as a viewer, watching the blindside episodes are the most fun and so to be part of something that's way more fun for the audience and for my friends who are watching it with me, like, that's awesome.

Why do you think Kenny targeted you?
I don't know! It sounds like he was really mad about my taking the clue at the merge feast and also, I heard when Susie and Randy and Dan joined our tribe around Day 10, they let me know that Kenny had been calling me "homo" behind my back.

Really?!
Yeah. So I knew it was going to be tough to get to know Kenny and to gain his trust. But I didn't realize that he was going to want me and to target me that soon. It seemed like the reason of stealing the clue at the merge feast – which I don't consider stealing because, as far as I knew at the time, I saw it first – that doesn't seem like a compelling reason to have a personal grudge. I'm kind of wondering what his motivation really was.

Did you confront Kenny about the "homo" comments?
Yeah, I actually did bring it up at the last Tribal Council, but I guess at that point, it was too late. I understand that it's a difficult environment that we're all living in; people were saying mean things left, right and centre about people and that happened to be the one mean thing that someone said about me. And I think people say a lot of things that they don't necessarily mean and might regret saying later on, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But unfortunately I didn't have enough time because he targeted me immediately and made sure he wasn't spending even one night with me.

What did he say when you confronted him?
He was very defensive. It was more… I wasn't really targeting that he said that; it was more that I used it as an example when Jeff asked me what I thought about Randy calling Sugar a hooker. And I said, "You know what? People have said things about me and I've let it roll off my back and here's an example of something that someone said about me, but I'm willing to put that aside. I realize it's just part of this unfortunate human nature experience and I'm willing to get to know Kenny even more." And I think he got defensive and uncomfortable; I don't think he realized it was going to come up again.

I talked to Marcus last week and he had this feeling that you and the rest of the onion alliance had this very "high road" direction in the game; that you were going to win without lying or other underhanded tactics. He was angry that people who were using those tactics were winning. Did you approach the game in the same way?
Every time Marcus talks about "high road" versus "low road," I wanna, like, slap him and say, "We're on Survivor! What are you thinking?" I think what he means to say, or at least what I do agree with, is that there's a way to be strategic and sort of friendly about it and then there's a way to be strategic and just nasty. Like, when Crystal wants to vote out Kelly, for instance, because she doesn't like her for whatever strategic reason, you don't have to go to the voting booth and give her the finger and mouth something really nasty. You can do what Corinne does when she went to the voting booth to vote out Dan, someone she didn't really like, and just say, "You know what? I'm sorry, this didn't work out – I don't trust you." That is where I see the nuances. You can do the strategic and conniving stuff with heart.

But many would consider Corinne one of the nastiest people on the show.
Well, that's the thing: when you give a confessional, that's what's going on in your mind. So I don't blame anyone for what they say in the confessionals 'cause that's what they're thinking.

She seemed to get pretty nasty around other people, too – she wouldn't say something mean to anyone's face, but she would certainly badmouth some people to other players.
With Susie, though, Susie had just told her she was going to vote her out. I think it was her impulsive reaction. But when she talks to Susie, she says, "I'm willing to change. I'm willing to work through this. I know you don't think I'm a hard worker, so I want to work through this." And Susie, you know, keeps going: "I still want to vote you out. I think you're lousy; I think you're weak." So Corinne got defensive about that and then, in confessionals, said, "I want to stab her in the face." Which is a saying she uses. But Crystal, on the other hand, my take is that she wouldn't say, "I want to work through this" or "I want to be a better worker." Crystal would say, "I want to stab you in the face." She would say that to people. That's the tactic she's using and that's disappointing.

How about Randy? How do you even get into an alliance with Randy in the first place?
Good question. [Laughs] We needed numbers because once the first tribal switch happened, that only left us with four people from our alliance: Bob, Marcus, Corinne and I. But if we were going to go into a merge with 12, 11, 10 players, four people does not insulate you from any danger. We needed more numbers. So we had Susie, Dan and Randy to work with. Susie was in her own planet; you just cannot talk to Susie logically. She doesn't understand the game. And Dan was, you know, really tight with Matty and kept talking about that. We just didn't trust Dan. We tried to get him to trust us and we tried to trust Dan. And that left us with Randy, which actually was not someone horrible to leave us with because he's actually a really smart guy, like him or hate him. He gets the game. He's a huge fan of the show. We got along with him; you know, you treat him with respect and he'll treat you with respect back. I like diversity in my friendships and he definitely filled that. But he is a character. I've thought about his comments ever since that Tribal Council – you know, the racial comments that people have been talking about – and, you know, it's disappointing. But I think – I don't know, I think Randy's a good guy, at the end of the day.

Aside from Randy's comments at Tribal Council, there was also some controversy over the comments you and Corinne made about how Marcus "didn't deserve" to be voted out.
Yeah, I didn't think Marcus did deserve to go.

But wouldn't you say, on a show like Survivor, the people who deserve to be there are those who convince the others not to vote for them?
No, I disagree. The reason Marcus left was purely because of the twist and he had won 13 of the 15 challenges and he had really won them for the team. He had strategized very intelligently and had a very good strategy – and in Marcus' position, he didn't deserve to have a twist take him out. Just like right now, someone who's playing well – and I don't think anyone's playing well right now – it'd be as if, right now, we say, "We're going to put Corinne, Randy, Bob and Kenny on a team and have them go to Tribal Council." I mean, Kenny doesn't deserve to go in that way. It just doesn't seem fair. So I think that when Corinne said Marcus didn't deserve to go, she meant that's just the production playing with the integrity of the game, and I would say that Kenny would not deserve to go in the example I gave and, similarly, Marcus did not deserve to go in the way he did.

What was going to be your next move if you hadn't been voted out?
I was actually already thinking about that because I was pretty sure Randy was going to be voted out and I had become friendly with Sugar and Matty. I was in an alliance with Corinne and Bob but an alliance of three wasn't going to take me to the end, so I was going to have to switch things up and try and leverage my friendships that I've made - even with Susie – to try to expose Crystal and Kenny for the strategists that they seem to be.

What was your strategy going into the game?
My strategy was threefold. I know I resemble Todd, who was the winner of Survivor: China, and he was kind of sneaky, underhanded and he's gay, too. So I thought people would immediately assume, "Oh, that's the gay guy, he looks like Todd so he's going to be sneaky and stab me in the back." So I wanted to be as non-threatening as possible. I tried to be silly and goofy and smile and laugh and make friends with people. Secondly, I wanted to make really strong relationships, not because I just wanted, like, a pen pal, but because it seemed to be that the people who ended the game in the last few seasons were people who were sitting side-by-side with their friends. Like Amanda and Parvati [from Survivor: Micronesia], Todd and Courtney [from Survivor: China] – they had genuine friendships out there. And then lastly, I knew I had to be flexible and adaptable to any twist, any environmental change, any crazy anything, because you never know what's going to happen to you on Survivor. I just knew I had to be on my toes all the time.


Survivor: Gabon airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on Global and CBS.

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