Big Brother 27’s Zae Says Rachel Was 'Trying' to Get Him Heated in Exchange

Isaiah “Zae” Frederich’s time in the Big Brother house was short but memorable thanks to his beef with Rachel Reilly.

“I honestly don’t feel like I was heated at all. I was pretty levelheaded. Like, I think she was trying to get me to get heated,” the salesman, 23, exclusively told Us Weekly on Friday, July 18, about his argument with Rachel, 40, before being evicted from the house. “I was just kind of confused. If anything, I was like, ‘Why is she still coming after me?’ Like, she couldn’t just drop it. She wouldn’t have a normal one-on-one conversation with me, like an adult.”

Zae added that once he and Rachel were able to talk, the former winner seemed uninterested in conversing with him.

“We finally did sit down one-on-one. She kept on saying, ‘I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored. I don’t wanna talk about this.’ And then I told her, ‘OK, I’m not holding you hostage. You can go if you’d like.’”

Zae shared that from his perspective, it was a “very strange interaction.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation like that with an adult that went like that, that was that immature of an interaction,” he quipped.

During the Thursday, July 17, episode, Zae exchanged words with Rachel after she felt like he planned on targeting her if he stayed in the game.

“At first, she wasn’t my target and she was trying to beat me to say that she was my target. And I kept on saying, ‘No, if I win HOH I’ll put three people up that voted to evict me from the house,’” he explained. “Because it makes the most sense for my game, because it puts the least blood on my hands. She was saying, ‘So you’re targeting me?’ And I was like, ‘I did not say that.’ So she kind of took it that way.”

However, Zae’s intention changed once they had their blowup.

“After we had that interaction, … I was like, you know what? I am targeting Rachel. I will put her up,” he said, “Then at that point, my strategy was, I wanna make her a bigger target than I am. Because people are scared to take shots at her. I wanna be the guy that’s willing to take a shot at her.”

Rachel was not the only one on Zae’s list, as he had plans to go after the other women in the house since he was in an alliance with all men. However, he claimed that Rachel portrayed it as a “boys vs. girls thing.”

“I had multiple of the girls tell me they’re scared to not line up with the girls because they don’t wanna be on the outs with the girls,” he said of his thought process of his potential targets. “There were more girls than guys in the house. And so that’s just kind of how it went down.”

While Zae planned on nominating all women if given the chance, he explained that his thought process was purely strategic and not personal.

“I mentioned at one point that if I won, I would put up three women just because it was kind of divided and [the guys] didn’t have the numbers. I [thought] it was gonna be divided. I needed to get a girl out at some point,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be taken in a sexist way or anything like that because I liked all the girls in the house.”

In addition to his feud with Rachel, Zae made headlines for using an ableist slur on the live feeds. However, he backtracked his remark right away after remembering that he was being recorded 24/7.

“[It was] very different and honestly kind of felt like I wasn’t on camera,” Zae said of his experience being constantly recorded. “It was very weird to be in the house, mic’d up, like, you kind of just forget you are.”

Big Brother airs on CBS on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays at 8 p.m. ET. Fans can watch live feeds from the house anytime on Paramount+.