Aussie reality star ‘King George’ Mladenov shares his secrets in new book
Australian Survivor player ‘King George’ spills about the ups and downs of his rise to reality TV fame in a candid new book.
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It’s not easy being a reality TV villain.
From Chantelle Barry’s Popstars scandal way back in the year 2000 to this year’s The Block villains Kristy and Brett, reality television leaves in its wake a trail ex-contestants who’ve learned the hard way how damaging it can be when you get your one shot at fame … only to watch the show back with the rest of Australia and realise you were the bad guy.
But there’s a least one reality show on TV where the villains are embraced. On Survivor – arguably the most successful reality franchise there is – the sneaky schemers and dastardly double-crossers are exalted. After all, everyone knows villains have more fun.
And who’s had more fun on Australian Survivor than George Mladenov, aka ‘King George of Bankstown’?
The Western Sydney lawyer and political operative gained a reputation as a Survivor strategic genius, always one step ahead of his (many) enemies in the game – and always quick to gloat as he knocked them off, one by one.
His hometown of Bankstown, he says, informed his entire personality and attitude to life: “In a community like Bankstown, if you don’t fight for it, you don’t get it. It’s that simple.” It also informed his scrappy, tooth-and-nail performance in Australian Survivor, where he lasted a cumulative 94 days in the game across two seasons.
Some viewers loved his cocky bravado, others found him entirely too much and grew increasingly frustrated his campmates were keeping him around. Love him or hate him, he was such a good player, you at least had to respect him.
His latest venture is as an author: Part celebrity memoir, part motivational handbook, How To Win Friends And Manipulate People: A Guidebook for Getting Your Way is filled with behind the scenes insights about his double Survivor stint. A longtime Survivor fan, I’d been writing about the show for years, and assisted in the process of getting his stories onto the page.
The result is a window inside the mind of ‘King George’: “It’s me sharing my lived experience, so people can take the knowledge that I’ve gained. They’re going to get practical tips, they’re going to get practical advice,” he says.
A big part of that lived experience is growing up in Bankstown, in Sydney’s western suburbs, where he’s gone from school kid to political operative to community leader and now, local celeb, constantly stopped in the street as he goes about his daily life.
His wheeling and dealing started early: in the back row of his high school maths class, in fact, when George enlisted his fellow students to play clandestine games of poker against him, all the while making sure their cantankerous teacher never sprung them.
Soon the game grew to the school grounds, and not wanting a teacher to spoil their fun, it then moved to his living room, upstairs at the family home in Bankstown. Weekend after weekend, boys from his school – as many as 70 over time, he estimates – joined the game, $50 in hand and eager to play.
For them, it was purely social. Little did they know George had been fostering a secret interest in poker for several years, reading up on the game and practising tactics. He won more often than not, but his fellow students didn’t care. The poker club made him more popular than ever – making new allies and fleecing them of their hard-earned cash along the way. Making friends and manipulating people. Hmm … there could be a book in that.
But there were some hiccups along the way, too, as he pursued his TV dream. As a teen, he was obsessed with two TV shows: Survivor and The Amazing Race. He and his twin brother Steve auditioned for The Amazing Race back in 2012. Auditioning for TV shows is a long and sometimes tedious process. There are many hoops to jump through – videos to submit, endless online questionnaires to fill out, lengthy phone call interrogations – before you even get in the room with the people who make the big decision.
Full of youthful bravado, promising to bring a producer’s dream ‘chalk and cheese twins’ dynamic to the show, George and his brother breezed through each step of the audition process – until they finally got into a room with the people who held their fate in their hands.
Ushered into a hotel room in inner-city Sydney, three serious looking TV types sat at a table before him. Time to turn on the reality TV magic they were looking for: Dance, monkey! But … he couldn’t summon it. In fact, he could barely speak. Looking back, he laughs as he explains how much the sterile setting had thrown him, and made him shrink back inside himself.
It was a big lesson – one he goes into much detail about in the book. Self-confidence is key, and – as he went on to learn – if it’s not coming naturally, just fake it til you make it. Today, he thinks it all happened for a reason: “Thank god I failed that audition. If I did get on The Amazing Race back in 2012, I might never have gone on Survivor … and it looks like I’m a lot better at Survivor than The Amazing Race,” he says.
His next reality TV audition, for the eighth season of Australian Survivor, was a different beast entirely. The nerves were there, as was the spectre of that first failed audition haunting him. Would he flop again? But some wise advice from a friend the night before his audition propelled him forward: Be who you are when you’re out having a drink with me. To put it bluntly: Be ‘Pub George.’
Which is exactly what he did. That self-confidence propelled him through the auditions and on to his first season of Survivor, Brains Vs. Brawn, in 2021.
Pity the poor Australian Survivor contestants who made it onto the show during the pandemic. Covid restrictions meant the usual exotic filming locales of Fiji and Samoa were off the table. Instead, the game was played outside Cloncurry, east of Mount Isa, deep in the Queensland Outback.
No coconuts, palm trees or cool ocean water to wash yourself after a challenge. Instead, contestants sat in the desert dust, bathing in the increasingly muddy water of a nearby dam. Temperatures soared to well over 40 degrees during the day and plummeted to less than 10 at night, as contestants huddled together for warmth. Oh, and watch out for those poisonous snakes! I visited the set that season, and watched as a snake handler cleared a path for the cameras each time they set foot in a new bit of land. More often than not, some deadly snake would be found behind a rock and moved on.
Under those trying conditions, George made it all the way to the end, just losing out on the $500,000 prize in a showdown with season winner Hayley Leake. There were no hard feelings: He counts her as one of his best friends, and the pair went head to head again just over a year later, returning for a season that mixed all-star players with newbies under the banner Heroes vs. Villains. Hayley was the former; George the latter. Incredibly, this time he made it all the way to day 46, voted out just before the finale. Sure, he’d just missed out on the win twice, but his two season-making stints on the show had cemented his status as a Survivor legend.
By the time he enlisted sister Pam for a stint on The Amazing Race: Celebrity Edition, he was a reality TV veteran, imparting sage advice behind the scenes to get his younger sister up to speed (lesson number one: Save the good stuff for when a camera’s pointed at you, sis).
They lasted six legs of the race, eliminated midway through the season having trekked through India and Malaysia. And despite it not being as impressive a placing as his two Survivor stints, he says the show was a comparative walk in the park.
“Survivor is a long burn with no reprieve, while The Amazing Race is about 12 hours of an explosion of stress but the valve turns right off in between legs,” he says.
“The difference between the two is that on Survivor the torment never ends, until your game does. There’s no hotel buffets, no shower or lounging by a pool like we had at pit stops. Pam and I made up the most ground when the Race was hard and constant. The tougher it got, the better we did … I wish it was harder.”
Now, he’s pondering his next move. Two of his biggest life goals since he was a teenager are ticked off the bucket list: He’s competed on Survivor (twice!) and The Amazing Race. Next comes the book, a guide to life he hopes will strike a chord with others who find themselves in the same position he was when he was younger: Full of ambition and eager to take over the world, but unsure how to make that first step.
But viewers of another Ten show, Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, will have recently seen another side of George: Absolutely dog-whipped. The show’s resident ‘dog whisperer’ Graeme Hall was horrified when he saw what went on inside the Mladenov family’s Bankstown home during a recent episode of the show: Douglas was the real King, interrupting dinners with demands for human food that George would dutifully obey.
But in his short time with the Mladenovs, Hall was able to offer some tools to bend Douglas into obedience – by the time he bid them farewell, he seemed like a changed dog.
George is only slightly sheepish when I ask how the new regime is faring, months after the episode was filmed.
“Douglas is still manipulating me,” he says with a sigh. “There’s only one person on this planet I always give into, and it’s him. He’s by baby, and I treat him like one.”
(Uh, Graeme Hall? Don’t read this next bit).
“The Dog Whisperer’s tips were really good, but after he left, when I was delivering them to Douglas, he was getting really sad. Always being told to sit down? Thinking you’re getting a nice piece of steak, but getting a tiny dog treat instead?” he asks.
“He’s halfway through his lifespan … The least I can do is make the second half of his life as happy and joyful as the first.”
So there you have it: George Mladenov, master manipulator, reality TV villain … dog-loving softie.
How To Win Friends and Manipulate People: A Guidebook for Getting Your Way by George Mladenov is released November 29 by Harper Collins.
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