The man who looks like Clark Kent, Survivor Ghost Island’s Bradley Kleihege needs to keep up his facade if he wants to get jury votes in the end.
Usually, when it comes to our Survivor Ghost Island cast assessments, we strive to look at the positives of castaways with a slight undercut of concerns we have about their ability to win (if they have any). So far, nobody has given us an outright bad feeling about their chances to win just yet. So far, we haven’t given our cast assessment for Bradley Kleihege, as the guy others refer to as Clark Kent may have a bit of Lex Luthor within him.
I want to cover his CBS bio first, as even in the written word without spoken cadence you can see part of the holier-than-thou attitude Bradley Kleihege carries himself with. His pet peeves include “stupid people and people who think they know everything.” He doesn’t have any inspiration because he doesn’t “believe in emulating or worshipping anyone.” He notes he has the same penchant “for making people feel irrelevant” as Spencer from Cagayan and Cambodia.
Whereas Spencer got mostly positive edits due to his tribal underdog status in his seasons, I truly believe that Bradley’s air of “I’m smarter than you” will shine through fairly quickly in a season where mostly everyone is a superfan. The man’s a UCLA law student, so he knows he’ll have to hide that side of his personality, but when he’s rocking the nerd-chic glasses, it’s hard to avoid.
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His strategy to avoid being a Spencer type is to hide his law student ways through the shield of being a geography grad student, which is just about the weirdest cover one could have in Survivor. It allows him to continue to act in an intelligent way but doesn’t dissuade people from wanting to hand him a million dollars the way a banker or a lawyer would have that problem.
For the most part, he’s been hiding his arrogance well in his posture, winks and smiles in the pre-game Ponderosa. From the first impressions told about him by others, it seems like most people see him as either an everyman, an intelligent player they’d like to know more or would like to see get charmed into their alliance. It’s players like Sebastian, Desiree and Jacob who see something to watch out for, as they see something in him that others don’t.
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That leads us to his introduction video, where Bradley Kleihege makes his most concerning comments from a “not sure if he can win” perspective. About a minute in, he gleefully exclaims how he likes to make fun of people and taunt them, noting that he knows he won’t be able to stop himself from doing so during this game. He also remarks about how well he gets along with smart people and finds difficulty working with “simple” people, although he will try to learn more about them to find common ground.
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That level of superiority carries the confidence of a Nick Maiorano without the physicality or charm of a model, which might set up Bradley for a hard fall early. While I don’t necessarily see him as a bad person, in a season with so many superfans and few outwardly treacherous people, I could see him becoming one of those pre-merge “villain” edits that is set up for a fall.
Bradley Kleihege is too exceptional to be the first one out, but I could easily see him getting power early in a tribe and then ousted from an alliance once they see how he talks down to others. My guess is a vote or two before the merge, first and foremost. If not, I could see a keenly aware player carry him to the end knowing his arrogance might rub the jury the wrong way.
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What I hope is the case is that he actually pulls off what he says he’ll do and learn not to judge others so harshly and self-improve on the island. However, this is Survivor; we know what 39 days with little food and water does to people.