Kenzie Petty is the winner of Survivor Season 46! Her win came after a long night of jury pitches during which she had a heated exchange with former teammate Q Burdette, the season’s most controversial (and entertaining) player. Kenzie addressed this exchange in a post-finale interview with TV Insider, revealing that she thinks it actually helped her secure his vote in the end.
Q interjected during Kenzie’s pitch when he disagreed about her recollection of a move. Kenzie’s best friend in the game, Tiffany “Tiff” Ervin, came to her defense saying that Kenzie’s take was right. Liz also stepped in on Kenzie’s behalf by stating that it was Kenzie’s job to answer the questions, not Q’s. Kenzie tells TV Insider there was no way she was going to back down during this exchange not just because it was important to stand her ground in front of the jury, but also because Q would respect her fight even if he disagreed with what she was saying.
“Q and I had known each other very well at this point. We had played together for a long time, and if there’s one thing Q respects, it’s people who fight and people who go to get their point across,” Kenzie explains. “If Tiff hadn’t been there backing me up, I think it would’ve been different, but I was like, hello, am I the only one speaking? And I think he respected the fact that I was like, no, Q, what? Q loves to hear himself talk, OK? I love the man, but if he had a chance to argue he was going to take it, even if it was somebody else’s final tribal. That is just on par for him.”
Q having to be reminded that he wasn’t pitching to the jury is also on par, per Kenzie. While she knew that going toe-to-toe with him and matching his energy in this back-and-forth would help, she eventually realized that he was debating for the sake of debate and her disagreeing had no affect on his vote.
“That’s Q for you,” she says with a smile. “He was going off the money answer, and anything else that happened, it was a wash.”
There’s a lot of should’ve, could’ve, would’ve talk following theSurvivorSeason 46 finale. The final votes were just one away from a tie (Kenzie beat Charlie Davis with a 5-3 split), and third-place player Ben Katzman has said that he would’ve voted for Charlie in the event of a tie-breaker vote. In Survivor, if the final votes are tied (that’s only happened once in 46 seasons), the player in third place is tasked with breaking the tie. Kenzie shares her response to Ben saying his tie-breaker vote would have gone to Charlie.
“My response to that is, it didn’t have to go to a tie,” she rightly declares. “I don’t live in the hypothetical. I live in the reality where that didn’t happen.”
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Kenzie is still shocked by the reality that Maria Shrime Gonzalez voted for her over Charlie. Had Maria stuck to her promise that she would vote for her best friend in the game to win (Maria and Charlie were the strongest alliance of the entire season), the tie would’ve have absolutely come to pass and Charlie would likely be doing winner interviews today. But Kenzie’s powerful performance during the fire-making challenge changed Maria’s mind. That, and her jury pitch about what she would do with the money.
Kenzie says she went into the final tribal council “100 percent” assuming she would never get Maria’s vote, so she didn’t even try. “You can’t predict these people,” she says, admitting she “was very shocked” by the vote.
“I just feel like it shows that you never know what’s going to resonate with who,” Kenzie says of Maria’s defection. “You can try and curate your answers for specific people on the jury, but that’s not what I was doing with Maria, and that’s not what I was doing with anyone else. I was just speaking from my heart and that resonated. So that’s all I could do … If I had curated or tried to move my answers around in a way like, oh, I’m going to try and say this to get Maria, it might not have landed the same way.”
“There’s no perfect formula. There’s no ‘she should have voted this way because of this.’ She voted the way she wanted to because she wanted to, for whatever reason she wanted to. And something I said made and her want to vote for me, same way it did with everyone who voted for Charlie,” Kenzie continues, adding that “It’s not a crazy, nuanced thing, and there’s no set rules. No one was obligated to vote a certain way.”
One crazy, exciting thing from the finale was Liz stopping her puzzle to help Kenzie win immunity in a deliberate (and ultimately successful) attempt to beat Maria. Without that assist, Maria could have been safe from elimination that night and had a chance to get into the final three. Kenzie, Charlie, Ben, and Liz were all in agreement that they couldn’t beat Maria in final tribal, but there was no deliberate plan to thwart Maria in that challenge, Kenzie tells us.
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“It wasn’t like a band together, let’s help each other. It was just like, one of us four needs to win. That’s been said on Survivor a million times. As long as they don’t win, it’s a thing,” she explains. “We did not go in like, ‘I will give up my spot to help someone else win.’ That happened on the fly, on a whim. Liz just started helping me out of nowhere. She didn’t ask for help. I think it caught everyone off guard, including me, including Jeff [Probst]. It was really quick thinking on Liz’s part, and Maria’s so good at challenges that we had to take advantage of it.”
She continues: “Liz and I had a common goal. I mean, Charlie and Ben did too. But really what’s so cool about Survivor is that you have to find these loopholes and think outside the box and think creatively. We had a common goal. We got it done outside the parameters. [Jeff] didn’t tell us we couldn’t, so why not?”
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Kenzie looks forward to rewatching the footage of her and Liz’s hug, that “beautiful moment,” over and over. “It just meant a lot to me that I had made such a good friend that was willing to do that,” she shares. “I think it speaks to my social game. I think it is a beautiful moment that I will cherish deeply forever.”
Liz was convinced she would win if she made it into the final three. “It was so over for you guys!” she cried after losing the fire challenge. “I would’ve beat all of you!” The camera immediately cut to the jury, and the looks on their faces were not ones of agreement. Kenzie, however, thinks Liz was right.
“I believed her,” Kenzie tells TV Insider. “What’s crazy about Survivor is, it’s all perception. And Liz had told me, ‘I was best friends with Kevin and Hunter. I was really close with Venus. I had a good relationship with Soda.’ All I heard was that she was very close with Nami, and Liz is a very articulate speaker. I thought if she got to final tribal, she had an amazing shot to win. So from my point of view, and from Ben and Charlie’s point of view, Liz was the biggest threat in that moment. I think she could have swept the floor with us had she been given the opportunity.”
Survivor Season 46, Available now, Paramount+
