Survivor still isn’t revealing the identities of the two Season 49 players who will be in Season 50 in 2026. But Jeff Probst has explained why they cast them, and how it led to the 24-person cast, one of the biggest groups in the show’s history.
The Survivor 49 cast was revealed on August 20. Two of the 18 contestants impressed the Survivor crew so much, they made space for them in Season 50 as opposed to bringing in returning players fans already knew.
“What we agreed to as a group was, ‘If somebody makes a big impression, we’re going to want them on 50. So let’s go into 49 with our own state of flux,” Probst told Parade. “And what happened was two players impressed us.”
“We did not go in looking for two players,” he continues. “We didn’t go in saying, ‘If we do it, it has to be a person of this age or this gender.’ We didn’t have anything. We just said, ‘Let’s just stay open.’”
Contrary to some fan comments online, the series wasn’t trying to prioritize new era players in its Season 50 cast list. Former contestants and fans alike expressed disappointment about the 50 cast when it had a substantial number of players, nearly half, from Seasons 41-49 alone, whereas Seasons 1-40 weren’t as equally represented.
“We were never going to put somebody on just to have 49 represented,” Probst told Parade, insisting that production simply found the two from 49 so compelling that they wanted to invite them back to play again immediately (Season 49 filming wrapped just weeks before the start of Season 50 filming). Probst said this allowed them to bring back more players from previous seasons than originally planned; at first, they were going with 18 Survivors.
“What it ended up doing was benefiting everybody, because it expanded how many players we put on 50,” Probst said. “We started out at 18 and immediately said, ‘Well, that will never work. And then we just started doing variations on the math based on whether we were going to have two tribes, three tribes, or four tribes. And you can do the math and figure out which numbers work, 20 or 21, whatever.”
“We landed on 24 in part because we saw these two players on 49 and said, ‘We got to have them,’” Probst went on. “But what does that mean for our math? Does that mean we can invite more people onto 50? So it was really a win-win. But it was not guaranteed.”
The Season 49 cast is shaping up to be a unique bunch. There’s the two players coming back in 50, and there are two alternates who were brought into the game 12 hours before filming began. Jason Treul and Michelle “MC” Chukwujekwu went to Fiji as alternates, knowing that the chances of playing in 49 were slim and in the hopes that they’d be cast for a later season. But they were fated for 49. Two players, a man and a woman whose identities have not been shared, were cut from the competition for reported rules violations in the final hours of their pre-season sequester.
This was the quickest alternate turnaround in Survivor history. And when a show’s been around for 25 years and 50 seasons, firsts are hard to come by. But as Probst always says, the casts are what make Survivor so watchable.
Survivor, Season 49 Premiere, Wednesday, September 24, 8/7c, CBS