Parvati Shallow Isn’t A Villain. She Just Plays One On TV.

Parvati Shallow strolls into The Ripped Bodice looking like she could be any LA girl on a casual post-farmer’s market jaunt to Los Angeles’ only romance bookstore. Wearing relaxed jeans, a white tank top, and delicate gold necklaces, the reality TV star and soon-to-be-published memoirist greets me with a hug and her trademark Valley Girl accent, like I’m any old friend, in one of our cozy homes and not at a smut palace buzzing with strangers. As we settle into oversized antique lounge chairs, I’m already under her spell — both intrigued and intimidated by her ease and confidence.

To get the ball rolling, I ask Shallow to describe what she does for a living. I expect a polished, media-trained answer, but she’s quick to show vulnerability. “That’s the hardest question ever — for my whole life. I really had anxiety about it when I was younger, when I felt like an impostor in my skin, and I would go to parties and people are like, ‘What do you do?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m a waitress. I do reality TV. I sometimes post.’ I’m always kind of trying to figure it out, but now I would say, ‘I’m a hyphenate. I’m an author, creator, developer, host … reality TV mogul, queen, icon,’” she jokes.

Her winking self-deprecation makes her even more likeable. Whether it’s a tactic or not, it works. The petite brunette with bright blue eyes hardly resembles a “Black Widow,” the Survivor moniker Shallow jokingly coined in a confessional on the show in 2008. It was her second time competing on the show, and she would eventually win the season; the nickname followed her as she returned to play two more times, becoming known as one of the competition’s best players for the ease with which she curried favor — and then dispensed with former allies in cutthroat fashion.

But an unassuming exterior has always been the root of Shallow’s power — and it’s only on the rise. During the pandemic, she courted the adoration of younger viewers who decided to give the Survivor franchise a whirl on a whim. Now, the 42-year-old is branching out from the survivalist game show. She recently appeared on Deal or No Deal Island and The Traitors, the latter of which gained her an army of new fans who memed her Blair Waldorf-inspired looks and cute facial expressions into oblivion. Then there’s her much buzzed-about relationship with comedian Mae Martin, which spurred Shallow to come out as queer on social media in 2023. From the outside, Shallow’s life has never been more exciting.

In her memoir, Nice Girls Don’t Win (out July 8), Shallow, known for her mastery of the unbothered cool-girl archetype, reveals her messy interior. From her childhood in a controlling, new age commune to her messy divorce from a fellow Survivor contestant, she chronicles her impulse to put herself in tough situations, to keep “surviving.” Only recently has she learned to keep one foot out, even in settings like Survivor.

“There’s something about a cult that is so alluring,” Shallow says of these all-consuming experiences. “It’s like, I want to know about it. I want to be involved in it and engaged in it, and then I want to make money from that. And then I want to go back to not doing it.”

The book chronicles how Shallow achieved this new mindset — and it leans heavily on the pop-science language of therapy that’s inescapable on social media. She mentions The Body Keeps the Score (of course). She goes to a craniosacral therapist, does Rolfing, holotropic breathwork, and yoga nidra. An acupuncturist/somatic therapist has her lie on a table covered in a silver aluminum blanket. An informal group of women she calls “the mamas” help her heal through different wellness modalities. At one point, after a particularly potent bodywork session, she comes to a realization. “My body is a sovereign being with its own biology and needs,” she writes. “It’s been there for me and loved me this whole time.”

None of this is that shocking among those of a certain woo-woo persuasion and tax bracket in Los Angeles, but I was shocked that Shallow didn’t make the connection between her traumatic upbringing in a commune and her ability to excel in a culty game like Survivor until recently. “I was completely unconscious to what I was doing,” she says with a smile. “Highly unaware.”

Her parents were devotees of Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, a controversial figure who lured hundreds of followers to live on her Florida commune. Shallow was raised there until she was 9, when her family left after struggling for years with a culture of alienation, punishment, and fear. (The book opens with an adult throwing a young Shallow into a pond even though she can’t swim as a “test,” only pulling her out at the last moment.)

“I was around so many different people as a child, and I really learned how to get what I wanted in a situation where the only person really getting what they wanted was the guru,” she says.

When Shallow was thrust into “normal life,” first in Florida and later in the middle-class suburbs of Marietta, Georgia, she again found a way to come out on top. As her parents struggled to make ends meet, she strove to fit in with her peers, despite knowing none of their cultural references and having a “weird name.” So she befriended the prettiest blond girl in school — because her Barbies were blond, she knew the hair color came with privileges. (I wonder if the Southern star acquired her Valley Girl accent in a similar way.) “I know what my powers are. I practiced them in high school, I was playing ‘Survivor’ before Survivor,” she says. “That’s how I created: I created from scarcity.”

When Shallow first entered the public eye in 2006 as a hot, 23-year-old boxer/aspiring model from West Hollywood, she used her good looks, flirty personality, and cunning to her advantage — and was branded, both by other Survivor players and the fandom, as a dumb sorority girl. Some viewers dismissed her casting as an attempt to boost ratings with “eye candy.” But she showed them (and probably pissed them off further) when she won the Fans vs. Favorites season by spearheading an all-female alliance — aka “The Black Widow Brigade” — famous for blindsiding unexpecting dudes.

While Shallow’s tactics may be considered unremarkable for female contestants now, they weren’t in the early aughts. The game has struggled with criticism from fans who claim it favors men — who do win more often — or at least, reflects the gender biases of regular society. Then there’s how female players have been treated by fans, particularly early on. In her book, Shallow describes seeing a photo of herself circulating online with cum drawn, in classic Perez Hilton style, dripping down her face, forming the word “SLUT” across her chin. Shallow fell into “a pit of self-loathing and shame,” she tells me.

“If a guy makes social connections and controls votes with charm, he’s called strategic,” writes Ethan Zohn, a fellow Survivor winner who played against Shallow in the “Winners at War” season in 2019, in an email. “If Parvati does it, it’s ‘flirting’ or ‘manipulative.’ She’s a player. She’s a leader. She’s a strategist. She’s also warm, funny, and incredibly kind, and none of that negates her game — it enhances it.” Like many fandoms, the Survivor fandom “still has blind spots about how it talks about strong women,” Zohn continues. “And I think if people took a step back, they’d see that what Parvati did out there was redefine what a power player can look like.”

In much of the book, Shallow oscillates between her public persona of empowered badass and an inner world plagued by guilt. Despite how she came across on TV, in real life, she longed to fit in —when she was placed on the ‘Villains’ team for a Survivor season titled “Heroes vs. Villains,” it didn’t match how she saw herself. “I just wanted to be liked and included and accepted,” she says. “I wasn’t getting that and I felt like it was a character attack.”

Off screen, reality TV contestants didn’t yet have social media to capitalize on, and it’d be a while before the reality TV-to-influencer pipeline was firmly established. Survivor is known for casting “regular” people with “regular jobs”; even today, most players commit to starving themselves for a love of the game, not to get hordes of followers or a career in entertainment. “They’re like, ‘You had your adventure of a lifetime,’ and then you go back to being a nurse or whatever,” she says. “So I never thought I would build a career off of Survivor. [After] I played in one, I was like, ‘OK, now I have to get a real job. What am I doing with my life?’”

Shallow’s 20s and 30s were plagued by many false starts. She was a yoga teacher, bottle service girl in Hollywood, meditation practitioner; she invested all her prize money into a wellness studio that has since shuttered. Desiring a child and a taste of domesticity, she married fellow Survivor contestant John Fincher in 2017 and stayed in what she describes as an unhealthy dynamic before filing for divorce in 2021. She struggled with how to best support her younger brother, who died of an overdose in 2020. It wasn’t until Shallow had her daughter, Ama, in 2018 that she found a clear purpose: “She is my number one,” she says. “And she always will be my number one.”

Still, her divorce and the death of her brother led to a kind of bottom, one that resulted in her confronting how patterns from her childhood were running her life. “I am really capable of compartmentalizing, which is how I keep going back and playing Survivor over and over again,” she says. “So it’s like my gift and my curse.”

On The Traitors, which aired earlier this year, viewers saw Shallow finally embrace villain status, instead of tiptoeing around it and asking for forgiveness. The treachery on Survivor mostly happens behind people’s backs, but the Peacock show requires players to confront each other and lie face-to-face at roundtables. Shallow says this was especially challenging because she’s conflict-avoidant and was hiding her status as a traitor.

“I played a character. I was me, but I was Blair Waldorf in a castle with headbands and I understood the camp assignment,” she says, alluding to her iconic styling, which included a rotating cast of loud headwear. “I was like, ‘Get out there, get campy, have a silly time, but make good TV. Try your best to win. But it’s not really necessary.’”

Though she was voted out, she learned to embrace the block button on social media as the show aired, a personal victory that makes her “giddy.” “I’ve [gotten to] a place where I’m like, ‘Your opinion is not my business,’” she says. “I now have a strong sense of self where I like myself, I respect myself, because I’ve gone through some hard stuff and I’ve done the work to get here.”

She also admits the public perception around her has changed a lot since she first appeared on TV 20 years ago. “On Traitors, I got the memes and was flooded with love from the gay community, from the pop culture community, and it was just such a fun moment,” she says. (Her stint on Deal or No Deal Island, she says, gets her recognized more than she ever has been before.)

Shallow credits much of her confidence to Mae Martin, who helped her prepare for Traitors by organizing a “mafia night” with 15 friends so she could practice playing the game. The couple met when Shallow DM’d Martin on social media after finding out they were a fan of hers, and quickly fell deeply in love. In the book, she describes her relationship with Martin, who is nonbinary, as an electric revelation that blew her understanding of gender, and herself, out of the water. We are first introduced to Martin during a scene in which Shallow is gleefully f*cking them with a strap-on.

“I’m queer. I think I love that label,” she says, admitting she always had dreams about women, especially during her marriage, but had never seriously dated non-men. “Mae blasted my whole paradigm open. It was such an incredible experience…I’m fundamentally changed.” The book ends with a very vague admission that they drifted apart, though Shallow plays coy when asked directly about her relationship status: “I think we really love each other, so we’ll see,” she says.

I will step into a completely different persona, a new role, a new archetype.

For once, she’s enjoying a life without labels: “I don’t need to be a wife. I don’t need to be in a defined partner relationship.” This also includes letting go of her infamous reality-TV persona. “[Black Widow] became this whole character archetype that I could not get rid of anytime I played a game: ‘Oh, she is the Black Widow. Watch out for her. Don’t get in her sights,’” Shallow says. “I’m actually just done with it. I feel like that archetype is so powerful and empowering and I want to release her and offer her. If somebody else wants to pick that up and put on the Black Widow suit and take the baton, power to you, go do it.”

After all, the title comes with baggage — and puts a target on her back. “At the end of the day, Parvati gets treated as the player to watch because she is the player to watch,” explains Zohn, who considers Shallow a close friend in addition to a one-time competitor. “She’s just really good at connecting with people, reading a room and playing reality TV game shows. Her kindness and charm always leaves you wanting more … more time, more stories, more approval, more friendship. It’s one of her super powers that gamers don’t know how to handle.”

Thankfully, we’ll get to keep watching. Her fifth Survivor stint, on the show’s Australian edition, has already been filmed, and she’s currently pitching a new reality competition show with her friend and podcast co-host, Amy Bean, which would be hosted alongside another iconic reality TV competitor. “I will step into a completely different persona, a new role, a new archetype,” she promises.

Reflecting on her past, she admits, “I could be a cult leader if I wanted to. I have the playbook. But I have no desire to control anyone else. You do you. Carry on. That seems like a lot of work.”