Cirie Fields was the last person to enter the “Big Brother 25” house as the surprise 17th houseguest, but she won’t be the last to leave it. The “Survivor” legend became the fifth member of the jury on Thursday after getting evicted 2-0. With her reality TV bona fides, Cirie, who won “Snake in the Grass” and “The Traitors,” could’ve been an easy target and early boot, but she quickly showed why she’s so good at these shows, flexing her top-tier social gameplay and making it to fifth place without winning a comp (or ever getting her Veto chip drawn) and after losing her closest allies midway through. She seemingly had an ally in Matt, who vowed just last week he’d never nominate her and then did so hours later. Though he continued to assure Cirie she was a pawn against Felicia, he ultimately caved to Jag’s insistence that Cirie had to go this week. And Cirie knows it.
“I believe that Jag is mostly responsible for my eviction,” she says in a pooled exit interview (watch above). “I would’ve had to beat Felicia to the punch in telling Jag that Matt was targeting him, and that’s not something that I really wanted to do because I did want Matt to target him. So I would’ve been shooting myself in the foot by alerting him to the fact that Matt was going to come after him.”
SEE ‘Big Brother 25’s’ America: Bowie Jane ‘has these goo-goo, gaga eyes for Matt and Jag’
She adds: “My biggest regret in the game was not trying harder to have Matt not save Jag with his superpower.”
Along with her son Jared and Izzy, who knew their secret from the beginning, Cirie was the puppetmaster pulling the strings in the first half of the game. That all changed with the vote-flip that resulted in Izzy’s eviction and then Jared followed her out the door (after a week as a zombie). The game got easier and more difficult for Cirie after Jared’s exist. “It got easier because I only had to worry about me,” she says. “Jared’s position, his alliances or him being targeted could no longer affect me.”
But it was more difficult because she had gotten accustomed to playing with someone she knew. “In other games, I start off alone and I’m not expecting to have any level of comfort having someone from home there with me. You don’t miss what you don’t have, right? Once Jared left, I felt lonelier than I had ever felt in a game before and it’s only because I started off with that comfort from home.”
She did gain a new family member in the house: Izzy, who has an invite to Thanksgiving dinner. “Abso-freaking-lutely. Izzy is a Fields for life,” Cirie declares. “I love Izzy. Izzy is so unique, so quirky, so phenomenal. I need Izzy to understand how amazing she really is and how much I really do love her.”
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