On the second day of Second Chance, I visit Bayon Beach, the home of ten of the season’s returning players. I see Joe Anglim right away. He’s standing near the shelter, chatting up a storm with Jeremy Collins and Andrew Savage. He’s on the way down toward the water, pausing for a stop and chat with Monica Padilla. He’s sitting in the sand, hearing Kass McQuillen’s concerns about his place in the game, and then responding with his own self-assessment as well as his take on her odds.
In almost every way, seeing Joe in his natural Survivor habitat is the exact opposite sensation of seeing Keith Nale, Ghost of Koh Rong — unless Joe is one of those overly friendly, way-too-excited ghosts, like Casper, and not the guy from True Detective. Joe is the life of the party at Bayon, somehow everywhere no matter where I look. He’s like the captain of sports throwing the biggest rager his small town has ever seen, and he’s going around from patron to patron making sure everyone’s having a blast.
When I see him two days earlier at Ponderosa, on the eve of Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance, Joe bounces and bubbles a little bit less, but he still looks cool, calm and collected.
“It’s cool, calm and collective,” he corrects me. “There’s a V in there. It’s very important. Don’t forget the V.”
Indeed, the Three Cs are not the only remnant from his season that have traveled with Joe from Nicaragua to Cambodia. The 26-year-old jewelry designer and No Collar heartthrob hails from Survivor: Worlds Apart, the show’s 30th season, and the one that wrapped up on the same night Joe and 19 other Survivors were selected to start a new million-dollar mission. Joe, like Spencer Bledsoe and Kelly Wiglesworth, did not have much to worry about in terms of the Second Chance vote; he was as locked and loaded as they come.
“I was pretty confident going into it,” he tells me, grinning big, respecting my request to not be humble or cagey with his assessment of his chances. “Most of my cast was like, ‘Hey, you know you’re going back. You know you’re a shoe in.’ But there’s still a part of you that’s like, ‘Don’t get your hopes up.'”
But Joe knew. Everyone knew. Heck, several minutes of the Worlds Apart finale were dedicated to the impossibly amazing Joe, actually nicknamed Joey Amazing by his cast. The cast itself, of course, has a nickname of its own: The Dirty 30, one of the tightest groups of Survivors in the history of the show, and a group that Joe wanted to spend his final few days of freedom with ahead of his next adventure.
“I was just trying to focus on 30,” he says. “I was trying to enjoy the moment with everybody. You’re already planning and plotting and thinking about the future, but at the same time, you want to be present with everybody and enjoy it. It’s only going to happen once.”
Turns out, it’ll happen twice.
“Yeah,” he says, laughing, “but only once with those people, and I love them all!”
He certainly does; the Dirty 30’s internal love affair is the kind of thing you read about in great romantic epics, a quantum entanglement that causes nations to go to war with one another. But that was last week. Now, Joe says goodbye to the Dirty 30 — for now, at least — and looks toward starting a new fling with the Fun 31. (NOTE TO EVERYONE: WE ARE NOT ACTUALLY CALLING THEM THAT.) To that end, Joe looks out at his fellow Second Chancers on the beach of Ponderosa, and sees only one familiar face from his season — but he already feels right at home.
The fan in my cabana buzzes in shirtless Joe’s face, whipping wind into the flowing hair his fans adore so much, as he smiles and declares: “I feel great. I feel like this is my season to lose.”
ON THE NEXT PAGE: Why Joey Feels Amazing