There is, weirdly, a lot of crossover between the music industry and CBS’s beloved reality TV competition show Survivor. Musician Ben Katzman (formerly of Guerilla Toss) got to the final 3 in Season 46 just a few years ago. Country singer Zac Brown had an over-stuffed and ill-advised cameo just a few months ago. For some reason, every music publicist I know is obsessed with the show, with multiple agencies even having their own in-company fantasy league for Season 50. God knows we here at Paste—specifically, editor Matt Mitchell and I—are diehards ourselves, despite working at what is, ostensibly, a music magazine; every Thursday morning for the past two months, our first order of business has been to unpack the shenanigans that went down on our screens the night before. So, yes, there’s a surprising amount of music people who religiously tune into Survivor every week. But based on a clip from today’s episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler, it doesn’t seem like Billie Eilish is one of them.
So what, right? Who cares if one random popstar has better things to do than watch Rick Devens dramatically flip a Mr. Beast coin at Tribal Council? Except Billie Eilish is not a “random popstar” when it comes to Survivor Season 50. She’s practically the season’s secret 25th player. If you took a shot every time she gets mentioned by name, you’d get alcohol poisoning before an episode ended. Hell, I’d bet the audience has heard her name more than Tiffany Ervin’s, and Tiffany is still actively in the running for the now-2-million dollar prize as we speak (to be fair, the lack of focus on Tiffany is the editors’ fault, not her own or even Billie Eilish’s; Survivor’s never been good at editing women, and boy, has this season been no exception).
To celebrate this massive, historic season, Jeff Probst and the Survivor producers decided to put all the major decisions “in the hands of the fans,” which is the season’s tagline. But, really, the only fans whose hands seem to matter are celebrities. Which brings us back to the “Birds of a Feather” singer herself. Supposedly, we’ve got Billie Eilish to thank for one of the most useless, lackluster twists in Survivor history: the “Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol,” which is a functionally useless immunity idol for the person who finds it, unless they gift it to another player and that player gets voted out without playing the idol—or, my bad, without playing the Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol, since it seems the players are legally obligated to use its full nine-syllable name every time it’s brought up.
It’s been frustrating, to say the least. But what’s been particularly strange about the in-game advantage has been the utter lack of response from Billie Eilish herself. All of the other celebrities featured on the season have, at least, done something with the show: both Zac Brown and Mr. Beast flew out to Fiji to do their part live and in-person, and when a bafflingly lopsided Jimmy Fallon-inspired advantage sent fan-favorite contestant Christian Hubicki home, Fallon at least had the decency to book the robotics professor on his show for the following night. Eilish, however, has said nothing at all, her conspicuous silence all the funnier considering just how determined the show is to invoke her name at any—and I mean any—opportunity.
That silence, it seems, has ended today. At long last—roughly two months into the season—Billie Eilish has finally uttered the word Survivor in a public forum. And, frankly, she does not sound like she gives a single shit about any of it.
It’s kind of beautiful, honestly. Eilish rolls her eyes when she says “Billie Eilish Idol”—which alone proves she hasn’t been watching the season, since anyone who has been will never forget the phrase “Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol” for as long as they live—and does sarcastic finger-quotes when she says she “wrote a letter to the contestants,” all but confirming that the cameo was handled entirely by her team. She notably cuts herself off when explaining what the idol “does,” presumably because she doesn’t actually know: “It’s like, ‘Here’s your secret idol. If you use this idol, you can-’ you know?” You can what, Billie? (For the uninitiated: using an idol means you’re safe at Tribal Council and will not be eliminated that night. Except, as stated above, the Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol is unnecessarily convoluted and has had little impact on the game as a result.) Honestly, the fact that she doesn’t say the word “boomerang” once is damning.
Amy Poehler tries to give Eilish some grace and instead asks the singer what she loves about Survivor. Eilish rubs at her ear, swivels in her chair, and says: “Ummm…” She does come up with an answer, eventually: she loves imagining she could be on the show and thinks she’d be good at “the physical part,” but says “the math part of the problems are the things that I couldn’t do.” The math part? Of Survivor? What math part? Okay, maybe she means figuring out how best to split the vote to get your target out—except she doesn’t, because when she elaborates somewhat, she gestures vaguely to “when they have to, like, solve the- you know?” while doing an inconclusive solving-a-puzzle hand motion. When asked what they think their flaw would be on Survivor, most people would answer with the survival aspect, the social maneuvering aspect, or the strategy aspect. I have never once heard someone say it’s because of the puzzles that sometimes come at the end of immunity challenges. Now, I’m not a betting woman, but if I had to bet: Billie Eilish has never seen Survivor and was shown a single challenge by her team before signing off on the show using her name for a game advantage—which is how she knows absolutely nothing except for the fact that the challenges include both a physical portion and a puzzle portion, and that idols exist and do something.
This is probably not the glowing promotion Survivor was looking for when they inked a deal with Eilish’s team before the season started. But, man, after two months of my eyes rolling into the back of my head every time the phrase “Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol” is uttered, there’s something immensely satisfying about seeing Billie Eilish herself do the same:
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