Survivor Island of the Idols cast assessment: Dan Spilo is a Goliath
Dan Spilo is a celebrity talent manager in Los Angeles who has all the skills needed to be the winner of Survivor: Island of the Idols.
It seems like almost every Survivor season nowadays has at least one “celebrity” in the midst of the cast. For Island of the Idols, we have an Olympic Swimmer, a professional poker player, and a former NHL player part of the 20 new castaways. However, Dan Spilo is a close fourth as he actually works with celebrities.
Dan Spilo, 48 years old, has been running his own talent managing company for 20 years now, where he represents actors and actresses. I can only imagine how much dealing with celebrities on a regular basis will help Dan deal with the social dynamics of his tribe. Just hearing Dan’s interview with Josh Wigler on RHAP is enough to tell that he is an eloquent and convincing speaker and has the power to control the game socially.
His 60-second casting video highlighted Dan’s wise Day 1 strategy. His goal is to always be amongst the biggest group at camp. In so many seasons including Edge of Extinction, when a few people go off doing their own thing, the bigger group left at camp notices that. It’s those large groups that start to complain about these outsiders and paint them as easy first targets.
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So early on in the season, if one or two people ask Dan to go with them somewhere, there’s a good chance he’ll say no in order to stay with the majority of his tribe members. If he’s always with a majority, he feels that he’ll be a part of the key conversations and it will be tough for people to scheme against him.
In addition to his social and strategic mindset, Dan won’t be a pushover when it comes to challenges. In his CBS bio, he listed fitness as one of his hobbies and mentioned that he has basic, if not superior physicality to help out his tribe. Just look at him in the full cast photo if you don’t believe him! With Dan’s stature and career, it’s no wonder why he was originally set to be a Goliath member on David vs. Goliath.
One interesting comment he told Josh Wigler was that he would be happy to make it to Final Tribal Council and have someone else win, as long as he helped them get to the end. Although Survivor fans everywhere probably rolled their eyes when they heard Dan say that, it actually might not be a bad thing.
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Having a relaxed, chill attitude coming into the game will prevent overthinking and playing too hard out of the gate. Mike White had that similar nonchalant outlook coming into David vs. Goliath and he almost ended up winning it all! I’m very excited to watch Dan play and I feel like he’s a realistic winner pick.