Big Brother’s Zae Friedrich Unpacks Game-Shattering Fight With Legend
While Zae’s time in the Big Brother house may have been an intense whirlwind, viewers caught sight of him on the live feeds in a moment that gave many pause. Heard using an ableist slur, Zae quickly retracted the word and tried to move forward. With his fellow houseguests already considering his eviction, Zae made his target in the house bigger after a major argument.
Though he may not have realized it, Zae getting into a fight with Rachel Reilly managed to seal his fate in the game. Despite his best efforts to make it clear that he would work to take Rachel out of the game for the rest of the house, Zae was evicted by a 5-9 vote. Speaking to Screen Rant, Zae unpacked his game.
Screen Rant: Absolutely. Okay, so I want to start with your fight with Rachel, obviously, one of the biggest things you dealt with. It really gets heated in the Big Brother house and it can be really tough to recover. So why did you continue to recount the fight afterwards, rather than swallowing down those feelings?
Zae Friedrich: So honestly, I didn’t want to fight in the first place. I don’t like conflict, but afterwards, I think people looked to her and they’re like, well, maybe she’s a little bit crazy, because anyone that witnessed the whole thing firsthand had a very different take on how the episode portrayed it. And so I realized after that, I was like maybe I can use my advantage, because people are now going to vote for me because I’m apparently a threat even though I’ve done nothing in this game to make me a threat. And so they’re going to try and get me out right now. My best option is to try and make Rachel look like more of a threat.
Let’s say I’m going to battle it out with her and maybe they’ll keep me in the house so they can see the battle play out. Well, and you know, well, you know, two people are battling is kind of better for everyone else because that keeps less off of them and more on us. So I was like anything I can give you another week in this house, I’ll do I’ll take and so that was kind of my goal. I’m going to try to make her a target. I’m going to try and take your feet off me that way. Maybe Amy, who’s her closest ally, gets evicted and me and Rachel aren’t even playing field we can battle it out.
Screen Rant: In terms of Rachel, in those debriefs kind of going around the house talking about what happened, you hit a little bit below the belt. You mentioned her age, you mentioned her kids, you mentioned her maturity levels. Can speak to why you kind of chose to go the more personal route talking about her rather than sticking to game?
Zae: I actually disagree with that statement. I told her to her face that I would not say anything personal to her. I don’t remember, I mean, maybe I mentioned her age. I don’t remember exactly what I said, you know, there’s a lot of these conversations that go on. I did mention her maturity level because I do believe that it was a very childish interaction. And I tried to, you know, meet with her one-on-one. And when I did meet with her one-on-one the entire time when I was trying to explain myself and have an adult conversation, she was saying, “I’m bored. I’m bored. I don’t want talk about this. I’m bored.” And, you know, she left.
And so I do think it was a childish interaction. I just like to call it how I see it, but I didn’t want to turn into anything personal. If I did at any point obviously mention anything personal to her, then I apologize for that. But I do remember specifically saying, hey, Rachel, you know, just because you’re saying personal things about me that I need my mommy and all this kind of random stuff. I said, I won’t say anything personal about you. I think you’re a great wife and mom, and I told that to her face. I do believe that, I do think she is. She cares a lot about her kids. I do think it was a childish interaction that could have been easily avoided or handled a lot better on her end.
Zae’s Strategy Was To Be Ready For Anything
He Understood Big Brother Can Twist Like No Other Show
Screen Rant: As you’re going through the Big Brother house, I know you mentioned more than once that in your preparation, you use ChatGPT. I’ve seen since that you said it didn’t totally help you. What else did you prepare for coming into the game?
Zae: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, honestly, I didn’t prepare as much as probably most people do, but it’s just because I didn’t want to. I feel like the more you prepare, the more you research, the more rigid your strategy becomes. You say, okay, I want to play like this person. I want to do this. I would do this in this situation, you know, and it’s really hard to play like that because every season is so different. You never know what you’re going to get.
And so I purposely didn’t want to over-prepare because I didn’t want to have, you know, take much of my head of how I’m going to play. I wanted to be able to play based on the situation and play based off of how I thought would be right in the moment. I trust my instincts. I trust my abilities. Obviously, I got voted out first, so it didn’t work out for me too well [laughs], but I do think it was external factors that mostly caused that rather than me making a ton of terrible game decisions.
Screen Rant: I mean, you joined an elite club. First Boots are interesting. You get the community however you can get it.
Zae: [laughs] Right.
Screen Rant: Big Brother is one of the few games where you can really lie without consequences if you play your cards right. You played as much of an honest game as you could – why did you really stick with that honest instinct?
Zae: Great question. I think that it would have played out for me long term a lot better because people already knew that I wasn’t BS-ing people. They already knew I was being honest, and so what I wanted to do is for the first couple of weeks, if I’m 100% honest in everything that I do, as soon as I need to make a move to blindside somebody or, you know, tell that lie to help myself in the game. No one’s going to second guess what I’m saying.
So it gave me the opportunity to, if I’m super honest with everyone upfront that I can, that people are going to trust me, and then when I’m not being trustworthy, then people aren’t going to think twice. So that was kind of my strategy going in. I was like, if I can make it past this week one, you know, be honest for the next couple of weeks until it starts being, you know, until I need to take that shot.
Screen Rant: Did you feel like others were playing either an honest game with you or similarly honest game in general? Or did you feel like you were the only one that was doing that in the house?
Zae: I think several people were playing pretty honest. I mean, Morgan [Pope] told me straight up, she was like, I promised Amy that I would keep her in, so I’m going to keep her in, and I respected that. It made me want to work with her more in the future. Vinny [Panaro], he was always super honest with me. Lauren [Domingue], super honest.
Jimmy [Heagarty] was someone who’s playing both sides and lying a lot. But I caught on to it really fast. And so, you know, if I would have won HOH, he was one of the ones going up on the block because I caught on to he’s playing both sides, and those aren’t the kind of people I want to play with, especially that early on in the game when people are already kind of seeing play both sides. So in my opinion, those are the kind of people that need to go before the kind of people that are playing like me.
Screen Rant: I’m curious about another houseguest, Keanu [Soto]. So obviously, Keanu was somebody that you had a little bit of beef with, but at the same time, it seemed like towards the end of the week, somebody that you would have worked with. Moving forward, if you had stayed, what would the situation have been with Keanu?
Zae: Yeah, so I didn’t fully trust Keanu. I trusted him for that week for my vote, especially because the whole Rachel situation he saw firsthand. He was like, whoa, she’s crazy, but I wanted to kind of keep Keanu at kind of an arm’s length where I use him while I can. But then, you know, when the timing’s right, because I didn’t fully trust him, I felt like he was someone that would jump sides a lot. He was jumping sides a lot. So I had good reason not to trust him fully.
He’s someone I wanted to work with because I like him a lot personally. But in a game sense, I didn’t fully trust him, so I wanted to use him while I did trust him. And then when the timing was right, you know, obviously, do what I have to do. But he wasn’t someone I felt like I could go with long term in the game because I felt like if I didn’t blindside him, he was going to blindside me.
Screen Rant: Speaking of Keanu, he was the person you were speaking to when you used a slur in the house. You caught yourself pretty quickly. You did mention to Keanu that it was one of the words you were trying to stop using on Big Brother. Can you speak on that and explain that statement?
Zae: Yeah. Obviously, I apologize to anyone affected by that. That wasn’t my intention at all to, you know, use words that could be potentially considered offensive. And, you know, obviously, I didn’t do a great job at it. But just any sort of vulgar language, you know, my family, my friends, everyone’s watching the show. And obviously, I didn’t want to use vulgar language at all on the show.
But, you know, obviously, when I’m around people that are, you know, kind of cussing a lot and things like that, I kind of fall into that. It’s really easy to. But especially like offensive words is something that I wanted to keep out of my vocabulary 100%. And I did have that slip up. I tried to correct myself as soon as I could and move on from it. But obviously, it’s something I did say and I do feel bad about saying.
Screen Rant: If you had stayed, you had mentioned that you were talking about targeting women. In this conversation, you talked about mentioning putting Jimmy on the block. Were you thinking strategically in terms of targeting women? Or were you more going in just how you were feeling in the moment?
Zae: Yeah, not at all. It was never my intention for it to kind of be a gender versus gender thing. Because obviously, we didn’t have the numbers, so that was the last thing I wanted. I was trying to pitch to the girls, like, this is not going to stay a gender thing. But the girls, I think, were kind of pitching like, hey, it’s boys versus girls this week, you got to vote with the girls or you’re going to be on the outs.
The girls were scared to vote against the girls. And so I mentioned that at one point, I think, in one conversation, I was like, maybe I just have to put up all girls because I felt the boys had my back, and the girls didn’t. It was very strategic, it was nothing sexist or anything like that. But honestly, as I started thinking about it more and more, I felt like Jimmy was a better option for me, because he wasn’t straight up with me and he was kind of jumping sides, so that was a better option.
I would have put Rachel, Jimmy, and then somebody that Rachel was close to. Whether it’s Amy, Morgan. I’m not exactly sure who I would have put up if I would have won HOH, but somebody that wasn’t aligned with me. I felt just the way that the cards kind of fell was that it was kind of a gender battle that week one almost. Which obviously sucked for us because we were outnumbered, and so it kind of screwed us over a little bit. I wasn’t going to, if every single boy had my back and voted to keep me in, I wasn’t going to turn around and start putting them on the block. It wouldn’t make sense for my game strategically.
Zae Feels Morgan Pope Is Playing The Best Game
He Thinks She’s Flying Under The Radar
Zae: I want to say Morgan. She’s flying under the radar. She’s a crazy threat. She’s really smart, really strategic, really athletic. She’s going to do really well in this game, but nobody really is thinking. She’s on people’s radar, and so I think she makes a crazy good run in this game when she needs to. She’s going to start making moves that are going to really play out well for her.
