Andy DehnartAce Gordon was arrested shortly after we talked, so our conversation wasn’t about that experience. We did, however, discuss his accent, which by then he’d been asked about so many times that he was irritated. That question, he said, “just becomes boring.” He said he wondered what people expected him to say: “No it’s fake, it’s just that I can’t be bothered to change it? You’re not going to get some kind of slip”–and here, he adopted a fake Southern accent, as if he was just hiding that all along.
Post-eviction, Ace said “everything’s going great; I have absolutely no complaints,” he said, adding that he’s finishing two screenplays: a dark comedy (“like Swingers,” “two guys going out, everything possibly going wrong … when they’re trying to chase girls”) and a spiritual journey (a man “travels around the world trying to find himself”). The second is “somewhat” autobiographical, he said, since he has traveled, exploring world religions. “Am I doing the predictable move-to-L.A. thing? No. … I was always a writer … the Survivor experience gave me the motivation to finish what I’d started long ago,” Ace told me.
As to being voted off by his ally Sugar, who wrote “Acehole” on the vote, people on the street shout at him, “How could you trust Sugar?” but he says “Sugar’s a great girl, but she really had no idea what the hell she was doing out there, so I can’t be that mad at her.” He added, “She’s a very nice person and she’s friends with me, but I wouldn’t call her on her to go on Jeopardy. … At one point, she looked at me in the game and said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I said, ‘I didn’t even know you were playing in the fucking game; I thought you were on Big Brother.'”
When I reminded him that he picked Sugar, he said, “shut up,” and said that he almost selected Marcus, but was worried how it’d look for “two big strong guys”to be selected one after the other, so instead he encouraged Sugar to pick Marcus next. That still would have left two big strong guys on the same tribe.
Ace has no love for his other Fang tribemates. “I got tired of playing the game,” he said, “I just didn’t think as competently as I could have.” That came from “the mental abuse and being stuck on a tribe with such blatant idiots. They were mentally incompetent. I’ve never heard such lackluster conversations in my entire life. It was just traumatizing, to tell the truth. They were mental midgets; it’s really pathetic.” But Ace said “they don’t even manifest themselves enough to be life-long enemies. They’re the people you send donations to for being slightly mentally handicapped.”
Of course, they’re also the people left in the game.