After years of auditioning, Kenney Kelley was given the opportunity Big Brother Season 26, and he loved it. Unfortunately, being a longtime fan watching the live broadcasts with a Paramount+ subscription doesn’t prepare you for the grind and rigors of actually playing the game. Kenney learned that the hard way, to say the least. With that in mind, he shared some tips for future houseguests while speaking to CinemaBlend and reflected on the big mistakes he wished he had avoided.
As an old man of Big Brother House can be tough. These contestants, more than other typical houseguest archetypes, often struggle to forge alliances or build basic connections with others in the house. I noticed Kenney struggling with these exact hurdles when I streamed Big Brother myself. However, when I asked him about all this, Kenney mentioned another aspect that was even more difficult for him than dealing with younger house guests:
It was pretty difficult to lie about my job. (That) really messed me up too because I’m super proud to be a police officer. I really wish I would have gone in there and come right out and told them who I am.
Kenney also told me that he had not known how much downtime there was in the Big Brother House. (So I’m guessing he never read my article about what houseguests do throughout the day.) Most of what houseguests do throughout the week happens between Thursday night and Monday afternoon, but even then there’s a significant amount of free time in between. There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting, and there’s not much to distract the houseguests from that.
For Kenney Kelley, this meant that he had a lot of time to talk to other houseguests and he just couldn’t think of anything to say. No one wanted to talk about the game, so he struggled to speak up on other topics because he had to maintain a lie instead of talking about his real life. If he had been able to be himself and talk about his job as a police officer, the game could have turned out differently for him, Kenney believes:
That would have made it better because then I would have been able to have better conversations with the people in the house. Since I said I run a food truck, I didn’t really have a lot of good topics to talk about, and when you’re not talking about the game, you have to talk about personal stuff.
The law enforcement officer was constantly on the brink of eviction during his term in office Big Brother but he was able to redeem himself with a Veto win in Week 2. Although his mood was up and down throughout the game, Kenney assured CinemaBlend that he would have continued to fight for the win had he stayed in the game after that week.
Ultimately, however, the reason Kenney asked Cedric Hodges to kick him out at the start of HOH’s reign in Week 3 was a lack of mental preparation. When asked for one piece of advice he would give to other older viewers thinking about applying for the show, Kenney said that brushing up on mental toughness is just as important as strength training:
So, for the older people in the house, I think I did a lot of training going in there. I wish I had done a little more mental (preparation) stuff. I wish I had maybe meditated a little more, stuff like that. Stuff to distract my mind. I underestimated that part of it. So I think you have to prepare mentally at least a month or two in advance if you’re going to go in that house, rather than, well, working on staying in shape.
Big Brother is one of the most mentally demanding games on television. If you want to win BB you often have to deal with lies and unsavory choices that are seen by the outside world. On top of that, you have to deal with missing your family and everything else outside of the game that’s going on simultaneously. It’s a miracle that we still find people who volunteer for all of that, all things considered. With that in mind, future contestants would probably be wise to heed Kenney’s advice.
Big Brother will air on CBS Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. ET and Sundays at 9:00 p.m. ET as part of the 2024 television schedule.
