Alex Casey talks to Lisa Holmes, Survivor NZ winner and now contestant on Australian Survivor: Australia vs The World, about re-entering television’s most enduring strategy game.
Lisa Holmes dreams of Survivor, quite literally. “I’ll be at home in Christchurch sleeping in my bed, but I’ll be dreaming that I am either back on my season of Survivor in Thailand, or I’m playing Survivor with some other random people in some random place,” she says. But when she drifted off on a beach in Samoa during Survivor Australia vs The World, and was awoken by her all-time Survivor idol Cirie Fields, Holmes didn’t know if she was awake or asleep anymore.
“Then I look over and Tony [Vlachos] and Parvati [Shallow] are like ‘come on Lisa, we gotta go,’ and I assumed I was still in one of my dreams,” she laughs. “How could this be my reality?”
As a competitor in Survivor NZ: Thailand in 2019, Holmes was a formidable strategic force who orchestrated several blindsides and busted up a long-standing high school alliance. Determined to destroy her “quiet librarian mum” stereotype, she proudly laid out all her moves to the jury in the final vote. “In playing the game that I needed to play, I lied to you,” she said, the light flickering across her face dramatically. “I probably lied to all of you – because I want to win.”
And win she soon did, taking home $250,000 in the live grand finale and ticking off her ultimate bucket list item of being the sole Survivor. “It just felt like the best thing in the whole world being in that theatre, and knowing that everyone I knew and who cared about me was also watching and cheering me on,” she says. “As much as you can’t be results-oriented, when you really care about something as much as I care about Survivor, it is really good to ace it.”
And Holmes really, really cares about Survivor. She first started watching Survivor US when it arrived in New Zealand, as well as the Australian, UK and South African offerings. “It’s a very deep game, especially the interplay between people is just-” she stops herself. “People think I’m silly when I talk this way about Survivor. But the human experience is about interacting with other humans, and Survivor, at its core, is a game of interacting with other humans. It can be funny or sad, and there’s always a lot of richness there to enjoy.”
It’s a profound takeaway from a show where people also talk to each other in llama and have meltdowns about chain restaurants, but Holmes says Survivor had an equally profound impact on her life. “Until I went on Survivor, I’d lived quite a small life. I hadn’t traveled and I’d really limited myself in terms of what I thought I could do and who I thought I was,” she explains. “I just didn’t realize how much I was limiting myself until I got stuck on a hydro lake in Thailand.” To this day, she uses it as a pep talk: “Come on, you’re a Survivor winner, just go and do it.”
Holmes also confesses something else that has been in the back of her mind since that grand finale in 2019. “I have been thinking about what I’d do if I played Survivor again since the day I won,” she says. “I never totally wrote off that there would be a chance for me to go back.” As a result, in the countless interviews and podcasts she has done since winning, she never discussed her return strategy, just in case. “I’d purposely answer it with ‘well, I’m a different person now, and I certainly wouldn’t be so strategic’… which wasn’t really true at all.”
When Holmes finally got the call up to return to Survivor Australia vs The World, she immediately went into “quadruple 4D chess” mode. She Googled herself and found a lot of discussion around her strong strategy game, so quickly got to work lowering her perceived “threat level” online. “I got my friend to make a YouTube video that implied that I shouldn’t have won my season,” she says. “And then, using someone else’s account, I argued with everyone in the comments about how bad my game was, that I didn’t deserve to win.”
She also did a lot of research, watching old episodes of Survivor, scouring Reddit threads for cast rumours and making “pages and pages” of notes. “Some people I had just ruled out straight away. Cirie from Survivor US is my favorite player of all time, and she was one of the people I couldn’t even face the idea of researching because it seemed so ridiculous,” she says, unaware at the time she would soon be on a beach with her hero. When Holmes wasn’t hitting the Reddit threads she was hitting the gym and eating healthily, all in preparation for the show.
While she can’t reveal too much about what happens next, Holmes does know for a fact that some people who became her competitors on the show watched her friend’s slanderous YouTube video about her. It’s just one of the many ways she continues to buck the stereotypes about easy-going, nonchalant New Zealanders. “We have this image on the world stage of being quite laid back, but I’m really not that laid back as a person,” she laughs. “I think they were expecting that I would play Survivor really casually, so I did lean into that a lot.”
What Holmes can reveal is what she changed about her game going into Australia vs The World (if you believe a word she says of course). “In Survivor, you do have to sometimes go along with a lot of garbage things people say and do – even if you don’t agree you just say ‘good one, nice one’ because you want to win,” she says. “But the age I am now, I see the importance of treating people nicely, respecting everyone and including everyone. Even for a game of Survivor, I’m not negotiating on that stuff anymore.” Even still, she has a slightly ominous message for her competitors.
“It’s Survivor,” she laughs. “No one’s safe.”
Watch Australian Survivor: Australia v The World on TVNZ2 7.30pm Thursdays, or here on TVNZ+
