Jenna Lewis-Dougherty is as old-school a Survivor player as one can be, but the season 1 fan favorite and season 50 contestant has some new tricks up her sleeve.
Knowing she would probably be underestimated by the mostly younger Survivor 50 cast, she decided to play into the perception that she was too old to be a threat in the game. It all started on the flight to Fiji.
“On the plane, you can’t have anything electronic, but I have a CD player and I made CDs,” Jenna, 48, told Us Weekly exclusively on the red carpet of the Survivor 50 premiere on Tuesday, February 24. “I didn’t have one before. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I want to seem so [like] I don’t know how to use technology.’”
“Well, I do,” she continued. “I had to retroactively teach myself how to burn CDs again, but I carried around a CD player. Everyone noticed. I was embroidering on the plane. Everyone noticed.”
Jenna placed eighth in Survivor: Borneo, the show’s first season, which aired in 2000. Her fan-favorite status and reputation as a gameplayer before anyone really knew how the game was played earned her an invite back for Survivor: All-Stars, where she finished third.
All-Stars aired in 2004, and Jenna hasn’t played since. When Survivor began putting its cast together for season 50, production wanted someone from the first season. Host Jeff Probst insisted on asking Jenna.
“I think Jeff sees me as the first villain,” Jenna said. “If you watched Survivor 1, I was out there playing. Ramona [Gray], who was an amazing girl, comes out and says, ‘I think Jenna can be my first white friend.’ And in my confessional, I was like, ‘Too little too late.’ I wrote her name down like I didn’t care. And I didn’t. I love Ramona. I did not care. I could compartmentalize. I knew this was 39 days. I have a lifetime for apologies.”
Like many former Survivor players, Jenna kept up with the show for a while before real life got in the way and her fandom faded. (“Nobody watched” the 20s, she said, referring to seasons 20-29.)
Still, when she got the call, it was an easy decision.
“If you don’t win Survivor in your previous seasons, then you don’t know that deep niggle,” she said. “Every time you think about it, you go, ‘If one thing had changed, I would be relevant. If one thing had changed, I would be cool.’ That’s what I think. I would be cool and relevant if I did one thing different.”
On Survivor 50, Jenna finds herself in a tribe with other players from Survivor’s old era, including Cirie Fields and Ozzy Lusth. It will be the biggest Survivor season in the show’s history, with 24 castaways hitting the beaches of Fiji, but Jenna has played with only one other player on the cast before. Colby Donaldson, the runner-up in Survivor: The Australian Outback, also played All-Stars and later returned for season 20, Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains, in 2010.
Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans premieres with a three-hour episode on Wednesday, February 25, at 8 p.m. ET on CBS. The series will then go to its normal 90-minute format beginning March 4.
