Eva Erickson made history this season on Survivor for being so open about her autism, which hasn’t been shown on the series in the past.
The 24-year-old contestant came in second place on the 48th season, which ended this week on CBS.
In a post-finale interview, Eva revealed one key moment from the finale that wasn’t shown on TV and she explained why she wishes it had been shown in its entirety.
Keep reading to find out more…
Eva had a bit of a meltdown during the finale when she was practicing making fire ahead of the final tribal council. She knew that she was going to be competing in the fire-making challenge and she was having trouble making one while preparing for the showdown.
In her chat with Entertainment Weekly, Eva says the producers didn’t show the extent of her autism episode.
“I think that that moment that we saw in the episode where I was having my own autism episode, that was actually greatly downplayed to the extent that it affected me,” she said. “When they showed Joe and Kyle hearing me screaming, they’re not showing me. And this is probably a time where I was most affected, most impacted by my autism in the game where I was stimming, I was scratching myself, I was on the ground rocking in a ball, and I was almost disappointed this wasn’t shown because I know it’s important for people with autism to see me in that state. See just how low I was, how much I had to battle through for myself to get to the end of this and perform.”
Eva continued, “And so you are able to see a little bit that I was struggling, but I pushed through so much more than people were aware of and that the audience sees that only Kyle and Joe got to see out there because they were there with me and they supported me. Both of them begged for me to let them do it for me. And I was never ever going to let anyone take that moment away from me. I knew that I could do it. I knew I just needed to push past what was going on in my head. And once I got through that that I was going to make that fire, and I did.”
Eva recently spoke out to slam RFK Jr‘s claims that autism destroys families.
At the beginning of the season, Eva was part of a “first” for the show, involving host Jeff Probst.