Jonny Fairplay, born Jon Dalton, is mourning the death of his grandmother two decades years after lying to Survivor: Pearl Islands competitors about her passing.
“I’ll miss her every day,” Fairplay said of his grandmother in a new Entertainment Weekly interview. “It’s easy to think she was just part of one of the biggest lies in TV history, which made me famous, but I look at her place in my life as a loving grandparent who only wanted the best for me in my life and would do anything to help me get it. Which she did.”
While Fairplay’s Survivor lie may have appalled viewers who watched his first run on the CBS reality show in 2003, his grandmother apparently enjoyed the ruse, even adorning her car with a “DEAD GMA” vanity license plate.
“She loved the exposure and attention from Survivor,” Fairplay recalled. “It didn’t hurt that she thought [Survivor host] Jeff Probst was one of the most handsome men on the planet.”
That grandmother was Ellen Jean Hauser, who was born in 1934 and died on Friday, February 7, at Embrace Hospice House in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Hauser dated Grand Ole Opry host Faron Young and Grammy-winning singer Robert Goulet, Fairplay said. She died on Friday, February 7.
Fairplay, who went on to compete on 2008’s Survivor: Micronesia and the E! reality show House of Villains in 2020, previously told Entertainment Weekly he had no regrets about his dead-grandma lie. “There had been ‘bad guys’ prior to me on reality TV, but they never sought out that personification. They claimed bad editing or creative storytelling,” he explained to the magazine in 2020. “I embraced the role and reveled in it.”
And to hear Fairplay tell it in the new interview, his grandmother was promoting his reality TV career even in her final moments.
“Her dying words were something like, ‘Jonny, I want to see you on Survivor 50, The Traitors, and Deal or No Deal Island,’” he told EW. “I had no idea she had so many streaming services.”
Survivor, Season 48 Premiere, Wednesday, February 26, 8/7c, CBS