Don’t come for the queen.
Zae Frederich was the first person evicted from “Big Brother 27” after he failed to convince the house to oust Season 13 winner Rachel Reilly’s closest ally, Amy Bingham.
In an exclusive interview with The Post, Frederich, 23, opened up about why the majority of the cast aren’t going against the former champion.
“I can see two reasons. I don’t think either of them are good reasons,” the 23-year-old salesperson said. “But a lot of the people are kind of fanboys, fangirls, and they just like being there with her. They think she’s cool. It’s not even a game aspect as much as it is a personal aspect.”
“They’re like, ‘Well, it’s so cool a ‘BB’ legend is in the house with us,’” Frederich continued of Reilly, 40. “Which obviously I’m not like a super fan or anything, so I didn’t know who she was walking down the stairs. So that meant nothing to me at all. If anything, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s more reason to get her out.’”
Frederich believes that the other houseguests are “scared” of Reilly.
“She hasn’t done anything to make herself scary. She hasn’t done crazy in the competitions like she used to back in the day. She’s done really nothing,” he stated. “But people are scared to go against her because they feel like if they stand up against her they’re gonna get voted out like I did.”
The Arizonian native even claimed that Lauren Dominigue told him she couldn’t vote for him to stay because she was “scared to vote against Rachel.”
“I think it’s a terrible reason to have mentality of if you can’t beat them, join them, because obviously if everyone has that mentality Rachel’s gonna coast her the way to the top five,” Frederich added.
Despite Reilly’s early success in the game, Frederich told The Post he doesn’t believe she necessarily has an unfair advantage against all new players.
“Maybe it’s not fair in the sense that she has more experience than us, but at the end of the day, ‘Big Brother’ every season is so different that I don’t believe that means she has a ton of an upper hand on us,” he explained.
“I tried to play that into that a lot, say that she’s a threat because she’s played again, but really, I don’t think it plays into it a ton,” Frederich continued. “It might help her a little bit to know certain ways where she can direct things. But for the most part, this season’s probably very different than the last season she played in. So I don’t think it’s going to mean that just because she won a season means she’s going to win this season.”
“Big Brother” airs Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on CBS and streams on Paramount+.
