We Spoke To Drew From ‘Big Brother’ About His Ex Tully & What Went Wrong With Sam
Guess what! Punkee’s Reality Tea podcast is back. We’re unpacking all of the latest reality TV goss and recapping what is going down in the Big Brother house. Find us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Anthony Drew truly came to play on this year’s Big Brother, causing quite the controversy on this week’s episodes after he made a plan with former rival Joel Notley to eventually evict his in-house girlfriend, Sam Manovski.
This is a version of Drew we’ve never seen before on Big Brother, with Drew most known in the Big Brother universe for his controversial relationship with Tully Smyth on the 2013 season. We spoke to Drew on the latest episode of Punkee‘s podcast Reality Tea about Tully, Sam, and why he came back to the reality show that catapulted him to stardom.
Drew and Tully reunited on the 2022 season when Tully arrived in the second week, which according to Drew was because Tully was exposed to COVID while on her flight which forced her to quarantine and enter a few days late. When asked if he and Tully might have rekindled their romance in the house if they were both single, Drew gave us a definite answer. “We are strictly friends these days. We are good friends now.”
In an episode of Reality Tea last week, Tully told Punkee that she wasn’t too thrilled to see Drew in the house. “It is kind of frustrating because it’s like, why couldn’t you have just let me have my moment? Let a girl live! Let me come back and play on my own,” she told us. After relaying Tully’s words back to Drew, this was his response to Tully’s statement: “It wasn’t her moment. This wasn’t The Tully Show, this was Big Brother.”
Drew went on to say that Tully wouldn’t have achieved the level of fame she has now without him — and vice versa. “She is notorious for her and I being together on the show. Without me, she wouldn’t have such a big profile because of that season. And I’m the same, I wouldn’t have the notoriety that I have without her. Unfortunately, we are bound together from our past.”
Drew also addressed the group chat the Big Brother housemates are in, which Tully claimed he never contributed to. “That thing is archived and it’s got like 500 or 600 messaged unread in there,” Drew confirmed. “Who wants a group chat with like 20 people?”
In response to that rather spicy convo aired between Drew and Joel on Monday’s episode, he confirmed “100%,” that it was about Sam — contradicting what he told Sam on Wednesday night’s episode. “That chat was about Sam, it was also about Tim, and the royals — the royals being Dave, Reggie, and Trevor — because they were OGs and they were the classics. I needed them to be gone because if I made it to the final three, I wouldn’t stand a chance [against them],” he said.
“That was me getting Joel to do my dirty work.”
Well, THIS is a twist none of us saw coming 😳 Is Drew making a deal to take out his own girlfriend? #BBAU pic.twitter.com/wcjhiHcyYG
— Big Brother AU (@BigBrotherAU) May 23, 2022
When asked why he was plotting against Sam, Drew said he thought she was hindering his gameplan. “Sam’s great but she wasn’t playing the game. If you watch, we don’t vote together at all,” he said. “Johnson and I became pretty close, especially in how we vote, and she would ask us what to do and we would tell her, she’d be like ‘ughh I don’t know’. In terms of an ally… she was useless at the strategic [stuff], shocking.”
We asked Drew if he received any angry messages from Sam after his chat with Joel was aired. “I did actually,” he replied. “Would you like me to read them?” Drew asked, before sharing a snippet of what Sam sent him. “She said, ‘Oh my God, who were you actually talking about?’ I said, ‘Both you and the royals’,” Drew read out. “She goes, ‘Yeah, it just looks bad.’ I said, ‘I kind of love it, makes it dramatic.'”
Sam apparently then scolded Drew, as he claimed she sent him a message that said: “Because that’s not what you said in the house, I feel like I’ve been played. It’s embarrassing to say the least.” Drew added that he understood where Sam was coming from. “I get that! But I had a job to do,” he said.
“Make no mistake, I was there to win.”
The big question of the moment is whether Drew and Sam kept dating after Big Brother wrapped up. “That didn’t continue very long after the show finished,” Drew confirmed, telling Punkee their post-Big Brother romance only survived “a few weeks” outside the house. “She was in Melbourne, her family is down here but she doesn’t consider it her home. She was down here and fairly miserable,” Drew said.
“We are very different people outside the house.”
–