A naked gay man changed American culture as we know it.
That’s not cheeky (heh), but very real: Twenty-four years ago, Richard Hatch was the first winner of Survivor. The CBS competition series birthed the reality TV craze with its blockbuster premiere season in 2000, seizing the zeitgeist, turning its Average Joe (and Joanne) contestants into the biggest celebrities of the summer, and bushwhacking the path for countless reality series and stars to follow.
Hatch was 39 when he outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted 15 castaways to become Survivor’s first million-dollar winner. He was the kind of TV presence Americans hadn’t seen before. He was openly gay, unapologetically—and often hilariously—cantankerous, and boasted a giddily mischievous mastery of reality TV gameplay long before there was a model to follow.
Add in his now iconic decision to spend his birthday on Borneo in front of cameras in his birthday suit, and he became a lightning rod in a pop-culture thunderstorm; everyone had an opinion about Richard Hatch.
Hatch has managed to turn 15 minutes into two decades in the public eye, proven by his involvement in Season 2 of the E! reality competition House of Villains, premiering Wednesday. The series unites a veritable Hall of Fame of notorious reality TV veterans from shows including Big Brother, RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and 90 Day Fiancé. Naturally, the O.G. reality winner would score an invite to the show’s “lair.”
Ahead of the season premiere, we chatted with Hatch about the unexpected journey his involvement in Survivor has taken him on: the warring backlash and appreciation he received for being openly gay on TV, his time served in prison for tax evasion, and the ways in which his experience “devastated” his life.
As was his way 24 years ago, he is cuttingly witty and candid about it all. Plus, after surviving all he went through, he has some strong opinions about the new generation of reality stars.
Having watched Season 1, you seemed like a perfect fit for this show.
Season 1 is child’s play, Little House on the Prairie, compared to Season 2. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen people interact like this. It’s a little over the top.
It must be a little surreal, too, because a direct line can be drawn to you in that first season of Survivor and the way of reality TV behavior that has now metastasized to what we see on House of Villains.
Metastasized! What a great word. Oh my god, I agree. The difference, I think, is what you saw me do originally was play a game. So here, 24 years later, I assumed people would all understand that they’re playing a game by now, but holy crap, there’s even more crying and yelling and anger. I was shocked. I was really, really shocked by how little people understood that they were in a game. How unable they were to separate gameplay from how they were feeling. It was fascinating from a human perspective.
Twenty-four years ago, how did you understand that gameplay was necessary, before you had a model to follow?
Kevin, that’s a deep question. I can go into that I was raped when I was eight. I was molested when I was 10. So I became really, really introspective when I was really, really young. Then I just applied it to life and to this game and to Survivor. My background is in psychology. So I feel like I understand how to separate gameplay [from life].
You know, football players don’t walk up to one another and tap each other on the shoulder saying, “Hey, buddy, I’m going to tackle you. Is that okay?” No, you slam the guy to the ground. It’s a game. There are rules within the game. And then you walk off the field and you’re not in that game anymore, and you behave the way you would in society and in life. It’s pretty straightforward to me. But I agree with you. I don’t see that distinction being made very often. I don’t know why I do, but many people don’’. And I would say almost no one in this House of Villains Season 2 did.
Twenty-four years ago, when you were doing Survivor, did you feel like the villain was a character you were playing? Was that a fair description of what you were doing on the show?
No, not at all. I thought I was going to come home to a hero’s welcome. I thought I was the MVP. I thought people were going to be so happy with how I played, and they were going to recognize it and reward it. They had no idea. The people I was playing with didn’t understand the rules of the game. The viewers didn’t understand. The press didn’t understand. Rosie O’Donnell gave me a box of rice when she gave everybody else a car. They didn’t get it.
Now more viewers get it. Since COVID, particularly, I get all kinds of email and contact from people asking, “Well, what the heck? They said you were a villain.” They don’t understand why. That’s because they understand the game now and they were watching the game. I’ll just tell you that the people who cast Season 2 House of Villains did not select anyone who understood how to play a game. Maybe that was intentional, I don’t know, but it was so unexpected. Oh my gosh.
I was cracking up during your first scenes, when you walk in the house and you’re meeting Teresa Giudice, and instantly you’re bonding about going to prison for tax issues.
Did you see her face? “Oh, me too!” We went on to talk afterwards, and the bonding wasn’t so much the tax issues as it was over how broken the system is, and that we did not do what they claimed we did. I mean, her husband did. I didn’t. But that’s just true. Our system doesn’t function the way it should.
She must have felt very comfortable with you. Right off the bat, she was asking if you’re a top or bottom and if you’ve done poppers.
Oh, she just doesn’t care. And that’s me too. I mean, be direct. Be open. Be honest. What secrets do I have at 63? I don’t give a crap. So I loved it. She was surprising to me in that she understood a lot about gay interaction and gay dynamics, and that was just a piece of it.
I was young and closeted when Survivor first aired, and now thinking about it all these decades later, I’m even more impressed that you were out and open while on a reality TV show 24 years ago.
Well, it devastated my life, frankly. I didn’t anticipate it. It’s the reason I was prosecuted. I could go into details, but you wouldn’t care now, about the homophobia and the prospective jurors writing “homo,” “a queer,” and “a f–,” and the judge refusing to even let us question jurors about it. I mean, it was crazy that that happened.
But it’s one of the most important, most prideful things that’s ever happened in my life, the way that gay guys—young gay boys and men—reached out to me and thanked me or just connected with me and were so shocked that they saw themselves on TV. I hadn’t anticipated that. I didn’t expect it, and it’s continued to this day, people wanting to talk about the impact I had on their lives by just being me.
I now have more perspective on how complicated it might have been that people saw you as a villain because of this arch stereotype of the “gay villain.”
Very, very complicated, yeah. You know, I’m a pretty reasonable, rational guy, I think. I’m healthy, I’m educated, etc. But boy, oh boy. Life took a turn as a result of being not just gay, but an out, unapologetic gay atheist. It really changed the trajectory of my life in a really large way.
When an opportunity comes up to revisit your legacy and time on the show by doing something House of Villains, what things do you consider before saying yes.
So for me, I’m long past the point of caring. I probably should have cared before Survivor, when the world was that way. But now I look at it the same way I did then, which is that it’s an opportunity. Part of the naked thing was an opportunity to help educate people that, for crying out loud, it’s just a body. We’re all naked. There were benefits to my doing it on Survivor too, for the game, but I also was hoping that society would grow, that we wouldn’t care about such trivial things. It’s similar now.
It’s quite a full circle moment when you arrive to House of Villains naked. Were you surprised that people were so taken aback when you appeared naked on Survivor?
It was not as people perceived it. What person has gone camping and wasn’t naked at some point? We were camping! It was 110 degrees. Everyone at some point was naked around the fire, but they let the story be that I was the naked one. And they did show some, you know, commentary about people being shocked, asking “how long is he going to do this,” that kind of thing. But it wasn’t as shocking on set as most people would think. It was shocking beyond what I could have imagined to America. That I didn’t anticipate.
I didn’t think about that aspect of it, that it would seem very natural that if a group of people were living together on a beach for more than 30 days, they would end up seeing each other naked at some point.
I’m the only guy who didn’t get crotch rot. The staff, crew, everybody else in those wet shorts 24 hours a day, all the time, they got—what do you call it?—jock itch. Walking around in pain. I was like, listen, you idiots, dry out. There was a reason to do it, and it’s just normal. I mean, I’ve camped all my life. Every camping trip I’ve ever been on, we’ve been naked. You rinse and wash in the river. You go in the ocean. You hang out to stay dry around the campfire. It’s not a sexual thing. It’s just a normal, natural thing. But viewers didn’t get that at all.
When we first started talking, you mentioned that you were maybe unimpressed with the gameplay of a lot of the cast members in House of Villains…
I wasn’t unimpressed. I was impressed with the lack of it. [Laughs.] How is it possible that 24 years of reality TV, unscripted drama—whatever you want to call it—games and contests, how do you avoid learning that this is a game and that you have to play it? And that it can be at your expense if you become all kinds of emotional and lose your mind and get angry? What the heck? So I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been for those kinds of emotions. But the key to winning: adapt. That’s what I’ve said since Survivor 24 years ago. That’s the key to winning. You’ve got to be able to instantaneously adapt.
A phrase that’s been used on many different reality shows is “I’m not here to make friends.” When you do a show with other reality TV veterans like House of Villains, are you abiding by that phrase? Or are you trying to bond with people who you share an experience with?
There’s an interesting thing that you can watch for in this season of House of Villains. This lack of understanding of the separation between the game and real life causes participants to want to be friends. And so you’ve got to work to be “friends.” Big quotes around that word, friends. Whether you want to or not, you just do in this world where people don’t know how to play a game. So the flexible player has to play the way he might want to play, but he also might have to try to be friends. But underneath, I don’t care. I don’t care about anyone that I’m playing a game with until the game is over, and then let’s talk about it. Do we have some compatibility? Should we be friends? But while we’re in the game, what the heck? That just doesn’t make sense to me.
Being on House of Villains is sort of like being inducted into a reality tv Hall of Fame. You’re the first winner of Survivor, which set the reality TV competition craze into motion. Do you feel like you get the praise, or the spot in the pop-culture pantheon, that a person who is the first winner of that show deserves?
That’s a great question. I don’t know. It’s not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I think when I look at the way people engage with reality TV and the way people on social media contact me, etc., I know that there’s a fanbase that understands me and my approach to these games. I appreciate their interest in it and their connection with me, but I don’t spend time thinking beyond that to, hey, am I as liked as I should be? Or as understood as I would like to be? Life doesn’t work like that. If I cared so much about what others thought, I’’ be wasting this very short life we have. There’s no way everybody is ever going to understand me, and whether or not they like me isn’t my concern.
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