Jeff Probst Left Stunned by Brutal ‘Survivor’ 50 Immunity Challenge — “I Honestly Thought There Had to Be Something Wrong”
Jeff Probst was left genuinely shocked after taking on a grueling Survivor 50 immunity challenge that even made him wonder whether he was being set up.
It turns out that getting off the couch is harder than it looks. Jeff Probst discovered that firsthand over the summer when he added a new role to his long Survivor résumé: competitor. Variety was on set in Fiji during the filming of Wednesday’s episode, where Probst took part in his first immunity challenge.
As part of the competition, he struck a deal with the castaways: if four of them could outlast him, they would win a bag of rice. Ozzy, Joe, Tiff and Jonathan accepted the bet, meaning Probst only had to outlast one of them. Spoiler alert: he didn’t.
“My forearms are still sore,” Probst said two days later. In the challenge, castaways had to hold onto a handle with a rope wrapped around it. At the end of the rope was a bucket filled with a percentage of each contestant’s pre-game body weight. Probst lasted seven and a half minutes — still an impressive effort. When it was over, he handed over the rice and even signed the bag with a Sharpie.
(It wasn’t exactly a shock that Joe won immunity again. During Season 48, he set the record for the longest win, lasting 52 minutes.)
“It was so much harder than I thought,” Probst told Variety. Before the challenge even began, he worried about giving too much away. “I had this thought: Don’t outlast too many people, because it’ll seem rigged and no one will believe it. And turns out, I could barely outlast anyone. There was no concern about somebody thinking this was staged.”
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From the moment he started, he knew just how tough it would be. “You take the handles and click them back, and instantly, I honestly thought, there’s got to be something wrong with my bucket. Did the art department play a joke on me? Is there a joke that I don’t know about? I asked! I’ll admit I even went to bed thinking: Was my station set up the same as theirs? Even though I know it was because I was making sure of it! But I thought, how can it be this difficult? And I am fit, I work out. I do pull-ups, I have a grip. I gave it everything. I had no more time. That was it.”
After he dropped out, he says he immediately began thinking up “a litany of excuses” for why he didn’t win. “I was disappointed and surprised, and then immediately, I started justifying. ‘Well, I was also hosting, and I’m very depleted from the last year and a half of trying to produce the show,’” he says. “The truth is Probst, it wasn’t your day. Just admit it and step away!”
After 25 years of Survivor, Probst says this was one of the most eye-opening moments he’s ever had — and that’s saying a lot.
“Beyond the fun of the twist, it was really informative to me. It’s very difficult to do these things. I happened to pick one that was more strength-based, but even watching somebody just stand on a narrow beam and balance a ball, I will never again look at it the same way,” he says. “And I’m the one saying, ‘It’s so easy to talk about how well you could do when you’re sitting at home.’ I’ve been that guy for 25 years. I finally got off the couch myself, and I will never be the same.”
He was also happy the moment played out exactly as it did. “I was so happy that the players embraced me and then made fun of me, and gave me what I deserved, which is 25 years of smack talk,” said Probst. “I had a blast with it, and they got rice. They earned it, which is what the fans want.”
