How They Pick the Castaways
Tens of thousands of people apply to be on the show, and ultimately, the casting producers will mix a bunch of Survivor aficionados with people, who usually end up being models or actors, they recruit. Still, those recruited players must go through the full casting process.
“Believe it or not we receive many applications from the same people year after year,” former casting director Lynne Spillman, who had been with the show from the beginning until 2018, told Reality Wanted.
Now, host Jeff Probst is handling casting.
“Typically, it goes like this,” he outlined to Entertainment Weekly. “We hop on Zoom, and they start to tell us about their lives. I often spend the first few minutes thinking the same thing… ‘How have they already done so much at such a young age, and what was I doing when I was 24!??'”
There are several rounds after that, including a meeting with the show’s pyschologists. “Our only intention is to get to know who they really are,” explained Probst. “It’s one of the things I try to stress to people who are applying to be on Survivor. You don’t have to be anything other than who you are. It sounds so simple but it’s the absolute truth. You do not need an emotional underdog story, you do not need to be the funniest person in the room, you don’t need to have a college degree, you don’t need to be anything other than you.”