Drew Basile reveals why he's not holding his breath for Survivor 50 invitation

Survivor 45's Drew Basile doesn't think he'll be invited back for season 50, which Jeff Probst has revealed will be all returning players — and the newly-crowned Jeopardy champion is actually totally fine with that.

"Anyone who has ever sniffed the Fijian beaches is praying for a call for season 50, and I would be delighted, I really would," Basile tells Entertainment Weekly. "I think I have more to offer. That being said, I really am content with the way Survivor went."

In addition to staying friends with a majority of his cast, Basile also thinks he left it all out there during his game, where he made it to the final six before being blindsided by his own alliance members.

"I felt like I played well," he says. "I fulfilled almost every dream I had. I even won an individual immunity. It's hard to look at the full package, the full Survivor experience, and say, 'I need a little bit more.' It's kind of like in the movies when you have a perfect ending and then they make another sequel — sometimes it's good to just stick with the perfect ending. So while I would love to play Survivor 50, I'm not holding my breath. And there are so many other eminently qualified players who I'm sure will be out there."

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The 23-year-old master’s student who formerly declared himself to be "one of the smartest people to ever play this game" knows he's got a healthy attitude when it comes to his reality TV career — which now includes being the first Survivor alum to play on Jeopardy, where he ultimately qualified for the Tournament of Champions during his seven-game winning streak, which came to an end on Friday. He says his ability to stay grounded is partly due to being out of the country (he’s currently pursuing a master’s degree in English Literature at the University of Oxford in England).

"One of the tough things about living in England is that I'm not able to watch it on TV with everybody," he adds. "I'm not able to go to all of the events. I never get recognized except for, like, twice. But I guess that has an advantage too, because sometimes it feels like it didn't even really happen. I think there are pros to that, to keeping a level mindset."

It also helps that he believes his "edit" on both shows is true to who he is offscreen. "The thing about Jeopardy is that it's really true to life — it's presented basically the way it happened," Basile says. "Whereas Survivor is condensing hundreds and thousands of hours of footage into, like, 0.1 percent of that footage, so obviously there are cuts made. I found my edits to be very representative on both shows. Maybe I'm a little bit goofier than I thought I was. But my fan reception has ben very similar on both shows, so clearly there's a commonality."

What did surprise Basile was how "physically demanding" Jeopardy was, especially after his time out on the island starving and not sleeping for Survivor. Now he's planning a whole new kind of training for his return for Tournament of Champions.

"Standing at the podium, seeing the board across the stage, that was really difficult," he says. "You can see on TV, I'm squinting quite a bit. The physical aspect really surprised me. Obviously, it's a little silly to say I need to train physically for Jeopardy, but I think that it's definitely going to change my sleep schedule, my dieting, and prep for the competition and day of, but that was the biggest surprise part, that there is a very legitimate physical component to Jeopardy, reaction times, etc. And that physical component might actually be definitive, I think, in a large majority of Jeopardy games."