Charlie Updates Fans on His Complicated Friendship With Maria After 'Survivor'

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the Survivor 46 finale.

One of the things that makes Survivor such a compelling game to watch and play is how strategy weaves into interpersonal relationships and vice versa. Survivor 46 had one of the most intense post-merge games of the New Era with consistent blindsides up until the Final Five, when Maria Shrime Gonzalez was unanimously voted out for “being the biggest threat.”

The vote was driven, in part, by her number one ally throughout the game, Charlie Davis, who made it to the Final Three and lost in a 5-3 vote to Kenzie Petty. The biggest shock of the finale, however, wasn't necessarily Kenzie’s win (which was well-deserved), but the fact that Maria voted for Kenzie to win over Charlie. Many fans are saying they wouldn't be friends with Maria after a betrayal like that, so what is Charlie and Maria’s relationship like now?

There isn't much information out yet about the status of Charlie and Maria’s relationship after Survivor 46 aired, but there’s enough to put the pieces together. The official Survivor podcast, On Fire, interviewed the Final Three and gave us some insight into how Charlie and Maria are now. Charlie was clearly hurt during the finale that Maria didn’t vote for him.

“It’s just so many emotions,” he said on On Fire, “and a lot of them are really — devastation and anger and confusion — there are a lot of negative emotions. And I’m proud of myself for keeping my composure and I stand by everything but it’s brutal. It sucked to learn that at the after-show that someone I played the entire game with, who knew my game so well and who, the last thing that Maria said to me was that she was voting for me to win the game, so if there was one vote I was counting on at Final Tribal Council, it was Maria’s.”

When Jeff asked if it felt wrong, Charlie admitted that it did. But he added, “There’s the equal parts side of me that’s like, ‘You know what? I don’t control Maria. Maria is not beholden to me.’ She voted the way she voted, and the circumstances of how it happened are really upsetting and hard for me to digest and process, but at the same time, they may make perfect sense to Maria.”

“And who am I to tell her that how she thinks about the game is wrong? That’s what makes Survivor so so complicated … It really sucks to have someone you thought you were depending on as not only a vote, but someone to be an advocate for you on the jury, to not vote for you at all is really really brutal.”

So Jeff asked Charlie if he had spoken to Maria since. “I have spoken with Maria,” Charlie revealed to Jeff. “I stand by everything I said. She’s an amazing person, really really impressive woman, amazing mother, has an amazing career, while doing an incredible job raising her family.” Of course, however, there’s a ‘but.’”

“I’m a Survivor superfan,” Charlie said. “So I’ll call back to a moment in Survivor: Tocantins when I know Stephen [Fishbach] was talking about JT [Thomas] bringing him into the final two from the final three and he said, ‘If he doesn’t bring me, I don’t know if our friendship would be the same. This is what we set out to do.’”

“And I would be lying to you if I said Maria not casting a vote for me at the end to win doesn’t add a real complicating wrench into our friendship. That’s just the nature of the game and how emotionally invested and how important it is to me and how much I gave blood, sweat, and tears to get to where I did in the game and then to have my closest friend ultimately not vote for me is a tough one to swallow.”

Jeff also added that after his interview with Ben, he learned that Ben would have voted for Charlie in the case of a tiebreaker. So Maria really did cost Charlie $1 million, which must be tough for Charlie to swallow.

While Survivor was airing, the talks of lifelong friendship and Charlie becoming “Uncle Charlie” to Maria’s kids seemed real. Now, however, as Charlie revealed, it seems that their relationship is “complicated” even if they want to work towards the friendship they imagined.

Just a couple of hours after the finale aired, Charlie shared a pic with the caption, “I have a lot of thoughts. But right now, I just want to tweet this photo,” which was a hilarious pic of him, Jelinsky, Jess, Ben, Venus, and Jem, with Maria notably absent. Other people noticed that while both Charlie and Maria were at the live finale party in New York City, they sat on opposite sides of the room.

In fact, some noticed that Charlie and Maria were seemingly not following each other on social media, adding even more fuel to the fire that their friendship was fractured. But the final kicker is that at the end of the finale, Charlie tweeted, “thank you aMARIAmee,” which is a reference to a Taylor Swift song that is all about her feud with Kim Kardashian titled, “thanK you aIMee.”

The capital “K-IM” is a not-subtle reference to their feud, as is Charlie’s shout-out, which could have just been in good faith considering what he said on On Fire. Regardless of their current relationship, we trust that we’ll see more of Charlie in Survivor’s future and we hope that he and Maria are able to heal from their time on the show, whether that means as friends or acquaintances.

Amid his exit press — most of which was understandably focused on Maria's FTC vote — Charlie clarified on Twitter that he and Maria do not have a personal relationship. He was also very clear in saying that he doesn't want Maria to get any hate from the fans.

All episodes of Survivor 46 are available to stream on Paramount Plus.