Murtz On The Scene: Exclusive Interview With Big Brother Canada‘s Peter Brown

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I have made no secret of the fact that I was not a fan of The Sheyld on Big Brother Canada this season. I thought that both Alec Beall and Peter Brown thought that their strategies were better than they were and that instead of their confidence coming off as charm like it did for Dr. Will Kirby, it reeked of an unnecessary arrogance. With that being said, I cannot deny that both players definitely made the show infinitely more interesting and that part of the reason the Northern version of Big Brother has been so successful is because you just couldn’t tune away from seeing whether The Sheyld was successful or not. For the majority of this season, it seemed like Peter Brown had this game in the palm of his hand. He avoided the block every week and it was amazing to see how no one saw him as a threat at all. In fact, he was even one of my pre-season picks. After forming The Sheyld with Alec, he also was the brains behind the Quattro alliance with Emmett Blois and Tom Plant and had a secret pact with Liza Stinton going as well. Really, it was almost as if Peter had some kind of arrangement with everyone in the house. Slowly though, things began to unravel. It started with The Sheyld’s terrible idea to keep Andrew in the house over AJ, which alienated them from Topaz. This was followed by Peter listening to Emmett and not using the veto that he won last week to save Topaz which would have forced the break-up of the East Coast alliance. In the end, his loyalty to Emmett is almost certainly what cost him the win. I caught up with Peter the day after he was evicted to discuss what happened. Check it out!

Murtz Jaffer: While I have loved Big Brother Canada this season, I would have definitely preferred to see the contestants play their own game as I feel like using moves from the U.S. version actually was detrimental in terms of overthinking things. The whole notion of “oh Will or Dan wouldn’t have done that” and so on… With that being said there is certainly something to be said for having so many U.S. versions to draw from. I know you obviously prepared a lot for the show and in hindsight, if you could go back, would it be better to draw from previous versions or just play your own game and adapt to the players that playing against you since each Big Brother house is so different?

Peter Brown: I was THE most prepared person going into the house That comes from familiarizing myself with 14 US seasons. It didn’t matter who the other 14 people in the house were. The moment I walked in there they weren’t people, they became archetypes. Their personalities become irrelevant in terms of how I would approach the competition. There was not situation I was unprepared for and that comes from the preparation that I did for a whole year before going into the house.

MJ: Alec discussed your concept of “The Sheyld” strategy where you wanted to use the other players to guard you from eviction. Can you elaborate on this?

PB: Knowing how important controlling the vote is, it was critical that Alec and I aligned ourselves with other strong houseguests and because of the way Alec and I competed, we were goofballs, our aim was for people not to take us seriously, it didn’t seem that we were threats. So if we surrounded ourselves with other strong houseguests that were threatening, people would have targeted them instead of us.

MJ: Both you and Alec came off as quite cocky which is not a dig since all of the Big Brother greats have had a chip on their should which is what made them so compelling to watch. Do you think ego had anything to do with your respective eliminations?

PB: I can’t speak for Alec, but I don’t think I had an ego in the house in terms of how other houseguests perceived me, internally speaking, my confidence came from a place of knowledge so I felt very confident in the house. If that came across as ego maniacal, it’s just because I knew what I was doing.

MJ: Thanks Peter.

Murtz Jaffer is the world's foremost reality television expert and was the host of Reality Obsessed which aired on the TVTropolis and Global Reality Channels in Canada. He has professional writing experience at the Toronto Sun, National Post, TV Guide Canada, TOROMagazine.com and was a former producer at Entertainment Tonight Canada. He was also the editor at Weekendtrips.com.