An interview with Jill from Outlast: ‘I’m polarizing … They were not ready for me’ (2024)

“Enjoy the rest of your life acting like a victim, being sexist, being a deceitful liar, theif [sic], and overall dishonorable person.” So ends a post on Reddit about Jill Ashlock, star of Netflix’s Outlast.

Comments in the thread include “Amber, Jill, and I think Justin (the one that started the stealing with sleeping bags) is what is WRONG with society in today’s world!!” and “Stealing the sleeping bags could have literally killed someone.”

Criticism of Jill in particular ranges from calling Jill and her teammate Amber “two crazy psycho criminals,” “scum” and “bullies behaving criminally” to saying Jill is “the most delusional dump truck of a woman” and “a piece of sh*t of a human being.”

And that’s just one thread on one site. There are more comments all over the Internet, and many are much worse. Why such angry, virulent responses directed to the runner-up of a reality competition?

Outlast at first looked like would just be Netflix’s knock-off of History Channel’s Alone. But its producers established a context in which players had to be part of a team but otherwise there were no rules.

Instead of just outlasting each other, the game became about getting others to quit: deceiving others, making alliances, stealing supplies, destroying shelters.

Jill has responded to some criticism of her and her team’s actions, but I was eager to learn more about her experience on Outlast, from how the show was pitched to the cast to what she thinks now about individual moments in the game.

Our conversation follows, with my questions in bold and Jill’s answers in regular type. The transcript has been condensed in some places to remove redundancies, and lightly edited to clean up human speech.

Andy Dehnart: How did you make your way to Outlast? Did you apply to it, were you recruited? And how was the show pitched to you?

Jill Ashlock: I modeled when I was younger, and I did a lot of really small-part acting. Through that, I had certain agencies that I worked with that continually sent me different casting offers. One popped up, and I submitted—just like any other contestant did, I suppose—but I know that [the information] I received must have been a little different than the rest of the contestants.

How’s that? Was the pitch to you survival, or was it competitive reality, or both?

Competition game was the pitch, and it was with the premise that you better have background with [survival] skills, or that you would not be too up to par to be a competitor on the show.

When did this all film? How much time was there between when you were sent the application, and when you actually ended up filming?

If memory serves me, right, it was spring of 2021. And we were flying out to Juneau in September the same year.

Either before filming begins, or once production begins, most reality shows have an off-camera [briefing]. You’re looking at rules, you’re talking to producers. Were there those kind of conversations about here’s what’s going to happen? What the structure is?

Well, in light of COVID, we were quarantined for 10 days. Throughout that entire 10 days, there was conversation, e-mails, different contracts, logistical meetings, briefings. They would sit down with us individually—because we did not have contact with each other unless we were passing in the halls. Things of that nature for those 10 days, so that entire time we’re not only mentally exhausting ourselves from being quarantined, but we’re mentally preparing for the game that we’re getting ready to take part in.

[Outlast’s] pitch to us, as viewers, is that basically there are no rules except be part of a team, and that’s it. Is that the way it was framed to you all as well? Obviously, I’m getting at the stuff that people have been criticizing of your game play—personal safety, property, that kind of thing.

You hear me state, while cameras are rolling, There’s no law here. Viewers are taking that literal, but by no means were we out there without the understanding that all legal ramifications and laws are absolutely one thousand percent still in effect.

We can’t assault each other, we can’t harm one another or cause something or do something that is going to result in harm. There was definitely harassment, terroristic threatening, which are illegal in the United States. But under the contract, there were leniencies to America’s laws. But of course, we did not go out there without the idea of knowing we can’t kill each other. We’re not going to cut each other’s heads off. (laughs)

It’s not going to actually become Lord of the Flies for real.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Never did it cross my mind that we were going to kill each other for a million dollars. Never ever ever. And not one ounce of my soul believes that anyone else on that show believes that either.

[On TV] , we see you’re being monitored by medical staff, and there’s obviously producers around you. Was there check-in with the producers around you as things are unfolding? Like: You can go here you can’t do this. Or were they pretty hands off as you were filming?

I would say for the majority of the time that we were out there meaning, you know, 36 days, that the majority of the time they were hands off.

Did they become hands-on when there was a concern, or a potential safety thing, or was it more structural, in terms of production stuff?

You obviously see it becomes hands on when there is a situation that calls for someone from production, or medical team, or even security to step in with what they show you.

Just in terms of the game structure, did you all have any idea going into it that it would end with a producer-structured challenge? One day they’d be like, Okay, now you have a race to the end. Or would be like the History Channel’s Alone, where you just wait each other out for months and months and months?

We all signed up with the idea that we were going on a show to outlast in a competition setting. Until the letter was dropped in our lap that we were going to have to race to a finish line to win the prize money, none of us had a clue they were going to do that to us. I signed up to outlast, not to outrun three men.

So it sounds like you were disappointed by that decision to end the game that way.

I’m still disappointed. I feel like I could have outlasted everyone there, and I definitely was proving that I had that mentality and confidence of achieving that goal. That opportunity was rejected in the initial premise that I went out there to outlast, not outrun.

Did you have any idea that some of this would become as controversial, or at least as discussed, as it has been?

Here’s the thing. There were 16 of us with multiple audio, cameramen, and cinematography people around constantly. There are at least, let’s say eight to 12 hours a day at each of those teams that they filmed footage.

If you do the math, that’s well over 5,000 hours of footage. They give you barely seven hours of what we endured for 5,000 hours over 36 days. Viewers are seeing literally a blip of what happened out there. And they’re only seeing what the production decided to put on screen.

That means that there are at least 4,993 hours you people are not seeing. (laughs) So obviously, with that being said, I know of a lot of more sh*t that happened that you don’t.

When I came home from Outlast, I was completely engulfed with a pat on the back from not only the production team and the staff, but Netflix as well: You’re the star of the show.

That’s not disputable. Whether I’m the villain, or the hero, the star of the show is me.

I don’t take that with arrogance; I take that because I took the job seriously. When I went out there, I was gonna win; I was gonna give it my all. I only know how to give 110 percent, and that’s what I did. And I killed it.

I was the most skilled by far. You see me with one squirrel; I shot five. And the fishing: holy cow, we could have done a whole episode with me rolling them in.

So when I got home and watched the show, and I see the seven hours of very few survival educational moments that I give to the camera, and I don’t hear the story of my background that I gave in hours of interviews to the cameraman. Only this dramatized version of survival—Lord of the Flies/Hunger Games thing that is produced.

I was saddened, but I was still proud. Because regardless of the seven hours that were given to the world, I still had the other 4,900 in my heart, and I knew what was real and what wasn’t, with the combination of everything that occurred out there.

To answer your question in one word: disappointed.

I completely understand what you’re saying in terms of the editing, and you can shape a story in any way that you want as a producer, and you can even chop little pieces of sentences up and make somebody say something that they didn’t actually say. That happens I think more regularly than people realize.

I’m curious, though, if there’s anything that you regret saying, whether it was a joke or not. Like, you know, Javier died in his fire at his camp, that kind of thing.

Let me see how I can structure that without obviously breaking my NDA. Hmm. So it took Javier a few minutes to get over to Charlie camp, right. And it took us a few minutes to walk down to the campsite that he totally demolished and risked setting [fire to] the Tongass National Forest and burning more than just a shelter down—which kind of made me angry that he would do something like that. It was not a sensible thing. It obviously was a heightened emotional decision, not a logical one.

So when we get down there, there’s this agitation and we are all still just disgusted that this person would do all of the things that he’s done. You hear me say he’s a horrible person. And that’s validated still today, with the continual manipulation that he’s doing to cast by trying to pretend he’s the network to steal our personal information to post on his Outlast fan page. That’s Javier, that’s not the network. It’s not production. That’s no one to do with the professionalized portion of the show. That’s Javier doing all of that hate to propagate and on on social media, which dictates you know, what type of person he really is, and a lot of viewers aren’t seeing that.

Putting that together in combination of what I just said, and what we endured for days with this person—befriending us to our face and then stabbing us in the back, and us giving him food and allowing him to forage on our banks for muscles, borrowing and giving him items like our netting. You see me take the netting back from the shelter that we worked on getting together and Amber takes the buoys off the boat, but you see that Justin has all of that in the beginning when he’s building his raft. Those were ours.

So, we did all these great things for him, and he was just so manipulative and narcissistic about his behavior, that he was constantly trying to befriend everybody—which is great, you know, that’s gameplay. Good for him.

But he was so believable, even to the detective. He’s so good at being bad that even the detective didn’t catch it at first. And I don’t know if I would have ever caught it, but Brian actually had a conversation with me, and you hear that. When I came back from a hunting trip, where I was out with Paul, and I get back to the camp, I tell Justin and Amber, I talked with Brian too, and Brian told me what’s really going on here.

There was so much stuff that just blew my mind and you don’t get to hear me tell everything to Amber and Justin, because it cuts to the next scene.

So when I get down there, and all of this stuff is built up, the sarcastic side of me—which is who I am; if you’ve seen any of my social media, you know that I am a smart ass—when I get down there, I’m like, he’s off this side. We dodged a bullet there. He’s gone. And Charlie’s not going to take him because I trust Paul; they’re going to kick him out because we have an alliance. That one seemed real. I don’t think I got that one wrong. Surely not twice. Right?

They don’t take him because they know how he is too. But when I say, Oh, can we get that lucky? It’s not literal. It’s not literal. So no, I don’t regret it by any means, whatsoever. It was a sarcastic Jill comment. I’ve made a thousand of those over those 5,000 hours of footage, and people don’t get to see them all.

The depiction of me as this horrendous villain, at this point, and you only seeing me stand up for my team. Like Javier, you’re not staying here, you are taking our resources, you’re a traitor, you are a narcissist—I called him that many times that you don’t get to see. I was like, you’re not staying here.

He could have went to Delta; he just refused. He’s so arrogant that he would not just leave Bravo and go to the other side of the river. There’s a lot of [him] berating me at that moment that you don’t get to see. There’s a lot of misogyny of, What are you going to do about it? kind of attitude.

And I did something about it: I served justice where justice was due. And the people that do not understand that because of the lack of footage, god, that’s what I regret. I regret that you don’t get to see the truth.

I think another strong thing people react to is what they see as hypocrisy: On one level, you’re talking about playing a game of integrity, and then on another hand, criticizing people for doing things that your team has done. Is the editing presenting a distorted picture? Or do you think somebody of it is…

The distortion is coming from viewers. I mean, I’m not saying that I went out there with the complex that I was going to be God. But I actually became that of the game, and everybody knew it. You hear Seth, Nick, Paul, Don, Joel, Javier—you hear them all saying, basically, and I’m not quoting obviously because this didn’t come out of their mouth, but they all say: Jill’s in charge.

I made the rule with hootie-hoo with Paul—I didn’t make up hootie-hoo, that was Paul’s thing, I think I called it something else that sounded a little bit more mature than that, but we went with hootie-hoo.

I made that rule. I said, Once Delta and Bravo are gone, new rule: Nobody gets to play dirty anymore. You do not get to demolish tents and camps, and you do not get to steal things any more. That Charlie and Alpha would play fair from there on out.

That was my role, and Paul agreed to that. So with that alliance, Alpha and Charlie decided once Javier and Don and Joe were gone, this is the way the game is gonna be played. And because I became the game god, when Justin did what he did, those boys [team Charlie] knew that he broke Jill’s rule, and that’s why they didn’t keep him. It didn’t have anything to do with hypocrisy. I made a new rule. It started that there were no rules until I made a new one, and people followed it, didn’t they?

What happened with that relationship with Paul? Why didn’t you join them at that moment when it seems like that could have been a possibility earlier?

As much as people want to throw me under the bus for this villain title that I’ve been planted with, my integrity was always intact.

I never lied not to my team, not to another player. I was always honest and upfront, and I approach them that way. If I had anything to say, I wasn’t manipulative with the point of I’m going to do this in order to get this for me. It was always about my team.

Even when the conversation with Paul took place—we want you to come over here—I didn’t come up with that. That was given to me. I didn’t go to them and say, Hey, I think I might traitor my team to like Javier tried to do with us, and how you did with with Delta in the beginning, I think I want to do that too. That did not happen.

He came to me, and I never agreed. I never agreed to go. But obviously, this was an alliance, right? And I wasn’t going to say no until I was forced to. I tell him at the end of that conversation in the woods that day, I want to come back tomorrow and we’ll continue this conversation. I did not say I’m coming back tomorrow and joining Charlie.

A lot of people have even misconstrued that. They don’t watch the show; they just hear what they want to hear. I’d never said that; I would I never agreed to it. I said I would come back the next day and that we would talk about it more. And we didn’t get to do that because of course the game gods were like No, you’re going fishing. So we didn’t get to.

The day at the river—you’re talking over a month in, going on five weeks of starving and being cold and just miserable, missing your families. People are breaking down. Justin is cognitively losing it at this point. And I’m losing him; I’m losing my team. They are dying out here. That’s where our minds were.

Obviously, if we were dying, we would have been taken out of the game. But in our minds, when you’re when you’re in that state for so long, you start to think, Oh, this is my reality. So when I get to the edge of that riverbank that day and these boys are like, You gotta come over here. Don’t you want to win? Don’t you want to win?

I was like, well, duh, are you idiots? Of course I want to I want a piece of that million dollars. I know by this point—I see Amber, I see Justin, and I’ve seen these three guys. They’re not gonna outlast me. I have the food. I have the protein. I’m the hunter. I’m the fisherwoman. I can forage; nobody else even knows how to get mushrooms because they don’t know which ones will kill them or not.

We have fresh water, because I made a water filtration system. We didn’t have to boil our water. We were going to outlast them—one thousand percent of me believes that even to this day.

So when they came knocking at my door, they wanted me for the win, and they kept pushing me and kept pushing me and the pressure was immense. In my heart, in my head, I was like, I can’t. My integrity has been intact this entire time. I cannot leave my team for this.

You hear me say Amber, Amber, Amber, because I know Justin’s gone. I’m losing Justin. I don’t know where he’s going; I don’t know if he’s gonna flare his flare or leave or go to Charlie. But I’m losing him. I don’t know if he’s gonna make it all the way if we’re here two weeks or two more months.

So I’m Amber, Amber, Amber, and I cannot do it. I can’t betray my team. I can’t leave her. I can’t quit on what I started. I worked my ass off for this to this point. I worked so hard. I’d be damned if I give these three guys some easy win off my back. I’m not gonna give it to you.

The part that you don’t see is when they start making me feel like a girl. And I hear: You’re just letting your emotions get to you. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but in my head, I remember feeling that they were saying was: Stop acting like such a girl. And I lost it. I just lost it, and I was like, you will not treat me like some submissive little bitch.

Are you and Amber still friends? You say you’ll be friends with her 20 years from now—is it still strong?

Absolutely, one thousand percent. We’re still doing duo interviews. The next one I have today is with her. We talk daily. The only time we haven’t talked is when we have to kind of black out from society, which I do too. We do it three or four days at a time, and we’ll just go off and leave our phones at our homes and shut it all off, and get with nature, and see what the universe has in store for us next.

I imagine that’s important, especially with the social media reaction and everything coming at you. Is it hard to look away from that?

In the first few days of this, like I said, I was so disappointed with the reaction of the world, because that’s not the show that I remember. That is definitely not the way I see it today, even if I’m only watching that seven hours.

I see this thing is epic—and it is, obviously. The world either loves it or hates it. There’s not really any black and white. But the thing of it is, is the world is watching it because it’s so engulfing, it’s polarizing. I’m polarizing, and that’s what people can’t handle. They were not ready for me. They cannot handle a strong confident, hard working—I have all the skills, I am the jack of all trades, there’s nothing that’s going to make me back down.

Oh my god. How did this Kentucky girl get to be so much good? Oh, she must be bad. And that’s what they have to do. Their own insecurities are what’s causing them to propagate hate against me. It’s not that they see this show and they think, Oh my god, how awful. Surely, there’s not that many people lacking the intelligence to see that they’re watching their TV. They’re not live with us seeing this happen. It’s a TV show.

So the only other explanation to me is that they have to validate their emotional attachment to this show. Whether it’s anger, sadness, excitement, they have to validate that. What do people do? They go to their social media accounts, and they get behind their keyboards where it’s safe, and they mouth.

And what does the majority of people do today? Unfortunately, they mouth hate, because it makes them feel better about their own insecurities. I know that.

Besides Amber, I’m guessing you’re not BFFs with Javier, based on what you just said. But is there anyone else from the show that you are on good terms with? After [filming], was [the cast] like, Yeah, this was a good game, we all did our thing, now we’re outside of that and things are good between us?

I can actually say that all 15 contestants have reached out to me including Javier. And he did that even after I called him out on impersonating the network. And he tried to pretend that that everyone knew about it, but obviously I talked with everyone and no one else knew either that he had reached out under the fake accounts with the Netflix Outlast name brand right when we’re getting all of this coping training before the show comes out. It laid right in there with it. So we just assumed that it was part of it, and he gathered so much of our personal information. But when we figured out it was him, we all kind of like came together. If anything, that’s probably what brought us all so close after the show was him attacking us from behind and being a manipulator again.

But everyone that I’ve talked to, as far as I know, has no ill feelings at all whatsoever. I’ve been praised, like, Oh my god, you rocked it. You’re so inspiring. Look at this. I had no idea that you gave up a guaranteed chance at this, Jill. sh*t. Like that’s mind blowing. We saw how hard you worked for that. And you could have one all you had to do is walk over to Charlie team. And you didn’t do it. Oh my gosh, I love you. That’s the kind of things I’m getting.

None of the other cast is behaving this way. They’re not propagating hate on one another. None of them are.

The Seattle Times interviewed Dawn. They have her saying some things.

[TV critic Rob Owen quoted Dawn as saying, “I hope America hates her as much as everybody on the show did.”]

I talked with Dawn; we’re Facebook friends; we’re Instagram friends. We’ve had cell phone conversations. She has told me point blank, that is not me she’s talking about.

Thinking about, like you said, all this stuff that we didn’t get to see, is there one particular moment or time you can think of that you just really wish we had seen?

Oh, gosh, there’s so many. The many things that I taught these other players, the skills that they have and that they thanked me for, even after the show and still today.

I spent hours in front of that camera, showing people how to char shelf mushrooms for kindling for fires, the water filtration systems, the foraging for mushrooms, the snare setting, archery skills, the limpet preparations.

There’s so many things in all of these hours and hours of footage that would have made a great survival TV show. I really wish the world would get to see those. They’re still there; they’re not deleted, right?

And then my story. I like to think that I’m poetic when I speak, and I do write poems, and there’s a lot of my TikToks that I’m starting to release that are of my spoken word and poetry. And I want to give that more to the world, because all of the content like that that I gave to Outlast is not on the show. And there’s hours of just giving motivational speeches … because of where I’ve come from, and that I’m not a statistic.

You know, I was abused as a child, severely. I left home when I was 15 years old. I worked two jobs, and lied to the people that hired me and told them I was older than I was because I wasn’t even old enough to legally work. Those kinds of things that I gave to the world to inspire people—to know that it doesn’t matter if you come from dirt floors with nothing.

Look where I am today, and it’s because I refused to quit. And that basically is what Outlast is to me. I didn’t f*cking quit. I just didn’t outrun the guys, right?

What is next for you? Obvious, this filmed a year and a half ago, but are you back to your normal life, or does this change the trajectory of what you want to do, or how you want to do it?

I can’t even answer that right now. I’ve got I’ve gotten offers. It’s so mind boggling to me right now that I have so much going on with social media and these haters, but then from a professional standpoint, they are treating me like I’m some kind of royal queen. So it’s confusing, right?

It’s conflicting for me emotionally. I’m trying to stay strategic, trying to make intellectual decisions here. But part of me wants to be this giddy little teenage girl and be like, Oh yeah, you picked me!

Nobody ever wanted me on their team as a child. When I was in elementary school, all the way through high school, I was bullied horribly, and was never picked first, maybe second to last a couple of times.

They’re all picking me first [now]. It’s crazy that I’ve done this 180 in my life, but it’s because of who I am, and because of who I refused to be, and these haters are trying to confuse the two. I have to anchor myself really hard right now and put them on a shelf. I have to put these supporters on a shelf too.

I have to ground me. What do I want? What will make me happy? Because this is my life. It’s not Netflix’s life. It’s not social media’s life. It’s not TikTok famous life. It’s not USA Today’s life. It’s Jill’s life. And I will decide what I do next based on what I want.

It sounds like if you do TV again, it would be with producers that you trust to to handle your story, and edit in an ethical way.

I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t know if you can go on a reality TV show with an expectation that everything you do will be portrayed exactly the way you want it to. And if you ever do that, that’s where you’ve made your first mistake.