South Africa is the stage of the 23rd season of Who is the mole?. Ten well-known Dutch people have tried to discover who the saboteur in their midst is. NU.nl speaks every Sunday with the dropout from the night before. This week it is journalist Anke de Jong.
Gain the confidence of the group in a program whose slogan ‘Trust nobody’ (don’t trust anyone) is, that’s special. Anke de Jong was treasurer, was regularly assigned a key position and easily got the group on board. Rarely on this program have we seen someone say with such firmness, “You all trust me.”
And yet. Despite all good ties and the bond with Daniël Verlaan: the editor-in-chief of ELLE had to clear the field this week. And that while she was the only one who had managed to find all twenty questions in the maze and had completed the test the fastest.
You were ready in nineteen minutes, the next one came three minutes later. Wouldn’t that make you insecure?
“No not at all, I just felt good! I was the only one who had all the questions and I heard and saw how difficult the rest had to find everything. While I had gone through the maze very calmly and kept my list so that I knew for sure that I had everything. I wasn’t quite comfortable with the two assignments before this, so with this assignment I really thought: this one is for me. Well, not so, haha.”
For the first time, you could just look along with the answers of others. Has that changed your course?
“That was really a huge twist. What do you do then? I hesitated for a moment: should I fill in other answers on purpose to make others insecure? And because I went through that maze very calmly, I also checked who they were as Mol had. It didn’t change my course, no. But it was an incredible one mindfuck.”
You were strangely calm when you said goodbye. You barely responded to your own red screen.
“I knew it then. The moment I saw that Daniel had a green screen, I knew I had completely screwed up. There had been so many green screens back then. That’s why I didn’t immediately congratulate him, I knew that this was my downfall.”
“I had thought in advance that I just wanted to stay calm during the eliminations. Don’t overreact to a red screen, because I can’t act anyway and then everyone would immediately realize how I was in it. And I also thought every time : If I go out now, I’m just not good enough. Very simple. So I held on to that. But once the cameras were off and my mic was off, it suddenly hit me. There came a torrent of tears, as I I’m not one to cry easily.”
Ontvang meldingen bij nieuws over Wie is de Mol?
Rarely have we been in Who is the mole? seen someone so blindly trusted by basically the whole group. Why did everyone think: we can believe that Anke?
“How bad isn’t it? Haha. I’m just too honest and really don’t have a mask. I like to share a piece of myself, put a lot of trust in the other. And of course that sometimes goes wrong and that’s bad, but then I know in at least that I stayed to myself. I think that’s why I had a good relationship with everyone. I also lied little.”
“In hindsight you think: shouldn’t I have done it differently? Because because hardly anyone was sitting on me, or well, Nabil (Aoulad Ayad, ed.), I really had to do very well in the tests.”
“Viewers were on me, by the way, because they suddenly saw me doing nothing every now and then, while I am a very fanatical player. I just did not want to bury my head in the sand and I also know that I am not good can catch. Then I can try very hard, but that doesn’t suit me. People thought that was suspicious.”
Conversely, your trust was violated several times. This episode made you seem really angry.
“I was too! I was again yesterday pissed, lol. After that paragliding assignment I also asked the rest to just leave me alone for a while, I was so fed up with them. But when I sat there alone in the grass, they all came together again. I was bummed about Daniel and I was bummed about Jurre (Happiness, ed.) And I was really fed up with it for a while. But now everything is good between us again, haha.”
“We also kept in touch a lot after the recordings and we have become an incredibly close group. We still do a lot together: we watched with a group yesterday and I’m going for a walk with Annick (Boer, ed.). That you can make so many new friends as an adult is a gift, I’m there Who is the mole? really, really thankful for that.”
