Ozzy Lusth never thought he had a chance to return to Survivor after pivoting from reality TV to OnlyFans.
“I’m surprised CBS asked me back after everything,” Lusth, 44, told The U.S. Sun in an interview published on Tuesday, February 24. “I dabbled in some pretty hardcore stuff.”
Lusth has competed on five seasons of Survivor: 2006’s Cook Islands, 2008’s Micronesia, 2011’s South Pacific, 2017’s Game Changers and Survivor 50, which premiered on Wednesday, February 25.
Prior to coming back for this year’s milestone 25th anniversary season, Lusth launched an OnlyFans account in 2021, on which he posted not only naked photos but also sex tapes. He came out as bisexual the following year.
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“It was pretty dark for a while. I wasn’t in a good place back then, and my choices reflected that, but I have no regrets,” Lusth told the outlet. “I’m really surprised my OnlyFans wasn’t a reason for them to turn me down. It’s a lot. I thought for sure it would be a reason they wouldn’t want me on this, you know, sort of family-friendly show.”
However, Lusth shared that the show’s casting director, Jesse Tannenbaum, “assured” him that his side hustle was not a problem with producers.
“When they first started making the calls, I was like, ‘Dude, are you sure?’ He’s like, ‘Look, they know everything. They know it all. It’s not a deal breaker. So that’s obviously why we’re calling you now,’” Lusth told Entertainment Weekly in January. “And I was like, ‘F*** yeah, let’s go.’”
Lusth’s OnlyFans, which is no longer active, was not his first foray into the adult entertainment industry. Shortly after finishing as the runner-up on his first season of Survivor, he appeared in an episode of the Playboy TV reality dating series Foursome.
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“I remember answering an ad for Playboy TV that was something like, ‘Spend 24 hours with two couples, and if something happens, great.’ Something like that — and it paid $500,” he recalled to Paper magazine in 2021. “So I sent in my stuff and got on the show. I never thought I would be an actor or in front of the camera. I had done nude modeling when I was in college, and I was a stripper in college. I’ve been an exhibitionist my whole life. I figured this would be a one-off and no one would watch it.”
However, Lusth admittedly did not think about his explicit scenes living on the internet “forever.”
“I just wanted to have fun,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to have fun with these chicks, and it will be a blast.’ No thought of the future. $500 to have a good time? Let’s do it. And it was so much fun. And I got a taste of what it was like to perform in front of a crew of people, and it didn’t affect me. In fact, I kinda liked it.”
Lusth claimed Survivor‘s former casting director Lynne Spillman was “furious” when she found out about his Foursome appearance, so he wrote an apology letter to longtime host Jeff Probst.
“It didn’t seem to affect them casting me anymore,” he added.
Survivor 50 airs on CBS Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
