Kellyn Bechtold was the 14th player voted out of Survivor: Ghost Island during the May 16 episode, but she didn’t go out without a fight. Although Kellyn was the surefire castoff before tribal council, the seven votes wound up being split evenly between her and Donathan Hurley, with one vote (Donathan’s) played for Domenick Abbate. After a re-vote, though, Kellyn’s fate was sealed and she was sent home like she originally thought — but there was one brief moment at tribal council where she thought maybe she could pull off a miracle.
“As tribal kept going and [Dom and Wendell Holland Jr.] started whispering, they were kind of talking loud where I could hear them,” Kellyn tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “They were openly talking about splitting the vote, so I did the math in my mind, and I was like, wait — I shouldn’t just emotionally vote for Dom just so he knows how it feels to get a vote against him….if i switch my vote to Donathan, then the vote can tie and we’ll see what happens. So I had that little golden sparkle in my eye of maybe pulling it off!”
Of course, as Kellyn points out, it ended up all being “worthless” in the end, because the re-vote was directed toward her, but it certainly did make tribal council a bit more interesting! “It was so fun to watch them and see it as the votes were tied and they were all surprised,” she admits. “That was a fun little thing. But mostly it was written in stone that I was going home.”
Check out the rest of our interview with Kellyn here:
Did you have any conversations with Sebastian [Noel] and Angela [Perkins] about voting for Dom or Wendell with you and Donathan? I tried to talk Sebastian into coming with me, and Angela, I think she was just starting to slip away after the Chelsea [Townsend] vote. Dom and Wendell started to pull her in. So, the short answer is no. Donathan and I couldn’t get anyone else even willing to play ball with us.
Did you try to plead with Dom and Wendell to keep you around? Oh, absolutely! At some point, I figured out that Laurel [Johnson] was not defecting from the two big guys. After I voted for Laurel,there was no repairing that relationship. I even tried to go to her and be like, ‘You voted for me, too, and I’m willing to trust you.’ But she just wouldn’t budge. So my play that last couple of days was to be like to Dom — go through the jury votes, there’s no f***ing way you can beat Wendell. And he said he didn’t care, he thought he ran the show. Then I went to Wendell and I said — there’s no f***ing way you can beat Dom. And he said that’s not true. I was working them so hard to be like…it’s dangerous to take the other person, what are you thinking?! Wendell and Dom had reigns on everyone except Donathan. Laurel, Sebastian and Angela all believed the boys were going to take them to the final three. So good on the boys for that.
Laurel claimed that she didn’t want to vote against Wendell because he technically finished the immunity challenge first and she felt bad. Was that genuine, or was that just an excuse to not have to vote for him? I don’t know — she wasn’t talking about it to me. I know she did feel weird about the way it went down, we all did. So I do believe that. I don’t know if that was an excuse not to vote for him or if it was justification for not voting for him, or if she genuinely didn’t feel right about it. I seem to be the emotional one on TV, but I would say that was a pretty emotional decision — to make a game decision based on that.
What did you find most shocking about playing Survivor compared to watching it on TV? It’s such extremes. So the parts where you’re playing the game are so intense and you’re trying to read faces and always thinking someone’s lying to you. It’s SO much more extreme — you’re so much more into it than you realize sitting at home. It’s all encompassing in every single way. You leave the world and you’re in the universe of Survivor. On the fun side of that, I’ve made friends who are dear, dear friends. These are people I’ve gone to visit and flown to see. That part you don’t realize when you’re watching — it’s really building bonds. You’re in Fiji for 7 weeks with no cellphone and you become a new human with adult friends.