She’s been a fierce competitor through the season, the “mob boss” and the leader of the newbies, but tonight, Aleisha Campbell‘s time on Big Brother Royalty Vs New Contenders came to an end.
It’s been a bumpy road for Campbell, who told The Latch over the phone that she didn’t expect the amount of hate she’s received on social media from fans of the OG contenders, who want to see one of the former housemates take out the win.
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“I’ve just been focusing on the positives, because there have been so many amazing people,” Campbell said, “and the people who are nasty, they’re just trolls at the end of the day and they don’t really matter.”
One of the more vicious rumours going around about Campbell is that she won two million dollars on the lottery, and then “blew it all”, moving states to avoid sharing the winnings with her family.
On this, Campbell is quick to shut down the conversation, saying: “Yeah look, this is all I’m going to say is that I personally don’t think people should believe everything they hear in the tabloids.”
She added: “I just got brought up to not talk about money, so I’m just going to shut that down and not answer anything further, but yeah, don’t believe everything you read.”
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When Campbell signed on for Big Brother Royalty Vs New Contenders, she assumed it would be a season with all new housemates, and was “definitely rattled” to realise that there were All Star players like Tim Dormer, Reggie Bird and Estelle Landy joining them.
“When they came in I was like ‘oh my gosh, this is gonna be a lot more intense than I intended it to be’,” she recalled.
Soon enough, she found herself on the opposite side of the OG alliance, making her one of the villains of the season.
“No one wants to vote out the OGs, no one wants them to be gone from the game but it’s like, well if we don’t vote them out it’s giving them a free pass to the end,” she explained, “so it was making that decision like, ‘okay, we’ve gotta vote out some people we really like and respect, here’.”
Although Campbell is mostly happy with the edit she got, she does wish that the audience had gotten to see a bit more of her personality outside of “Aleisha in strategy mode”.
“I’m very laid back, I love having a laugh, but I don’t think that came through as much,” she said.
Campbell explained that while she “[loves] this new season” and had “so much fun” playing the fast-paced version of Big Brother Australia, she hopes that in future seasons we get to see “some more character quirks” of the housemates, rather than just all strategy, all the time.
“The OGs, you know them from previous seasons but I think you need some screentime for the newbies for our personalities to shine through a bit more, so you have that connection,” she said.
“I also feel like every time Johnson [Ashak] and I come on the screen, if you pay attention there is like, knife sounds in the background and scary music!” she laughed, “and I’m like ‘oh my God, it’s a game!’, but at the end of the day I know there needs to be a hero and a villain.”
“I’m happy with it,” she reiterated, “I just wish there was a little bit more of my personality shown”.
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As for whether anyone can beat fan favourite Reggie Bird for the win at this point, Campbell doesn’t think it’ll happen.
“Ahhhh, no, I don’t [think anyone can beat her],” she said. “And look, personally, I love Reg — I think she’s such an amazing person and she’s such a strong woman and I love that, but for me, I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t say that I want either a newbie or a game player to win, because that’s who I’ve been rooting for this whole time.”
She explained: “Big Brother is a game and we know that this season is about playing, so I would like to see a game player win the game. It doesn’t have to be a newbie! Like, Tim Dormer, if Tim was in there, I would actually say Tim deserves it, because he played the game brilliantly.”
As a fan of the new version of Big Brother Australia, Campbell said that it was “a bit frustrating” that Bird didn’t want to get involved with the strategic element of the game, going as far as to hide in the laundry to avoid “strat-chats” with her fellow housemates before an Eviction Ceremony.
More than that, though, Campbell said that when housemates “would all be around telling stories or playing a game or something”, Bird was often reluctant to join in.
“We’d be like ‘where’s Reggie?’, and she’d be laying in bed,” Campbell said. “Like, the whole season, it was a joke. ‘Where’s Reggie?’ ‘Laying in bed’, like she wasn’t involved in any of the fun stuff, or the times in the challenges where we were all character building and getting to know each other, Reg wasn’t there.”
She continued: “You saw when we were strat-chatting and she went in the laundry, we got so angry because it’s like, ‘dude, come on, it’s a game and even though it’s uncomfortable, none of us wanna strat chat, none of us wanna put people up for noms, but you have to’.”
Campbell said that she wants the audience to remember that “the OGs were newbies once as well“, and to “take that into consideration when there is a Top Three vote”.
“We love the game just as much as the OGs do, we’re all fans of the show,” she said. “One side is not better than the other.”
As for whether she’d do it all again? “100%,” she said. “If they said to me tomorrow ‘we forgot to press record on all the cameras, we need you back in ASAP’, I don’t think you understand — I would get there.”
Big Brother Royalty Vs New Contenders continues at 7.30pm on Monday night, only on 7 and 7 Plus.
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