Rachel Reilly has made a career out of winning reality competitions and being unmistakably herself while she does it. She won Big Brother, won Fear Factor, won Snake in the Grass, and married the man she met during her first stint in the Big Brother house. Her run on The Traitors Season 1 added a new wrinkle: a game she didn’t win, playing alongside and against people with very different reputations than the Big Brother cast she came up with.
Reilly’s path to reality stardom started far from any studio lot, in a chemistry classroom in North Carolina.
From Chemistry Major to Reality TV Fixture
Reilly studied chemistry at Western Carolina University before pivoting toward entertainment. She worked as a cocktail waitress and model in Las Vegas and picked up a brief role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful before landing her first reality gig.
Winning Big Brother and Meeting Brendon
Reilly first appeared on Big Brother 12 in 2010, where she formed a showmance with fellow houseguest Brendon Villegas. She returned the following year for Big Brother 13 in 2011, partnered with Villegas, by then her fiancé, under the season’s “dynamic duo” format, and won the season outright. Villegas proposed to her on Valentine’s Day in 2011, and the two married on September 8, 2012.
The pair went on to compete together twice more on The Amazing Race, finishing third both times, and Reilly ran the course a third time with her sister Elissa Slater, placing seventh. Along with her Big Brother win, she also took first place on Celebrity Fear Factor and USA’s Snake in the Grass, making her one of the few three-time reality competition winners on American television. Reilly and Villegas have two children together, daughter Adora, born in 2016, and son Adler, born in 2020.
Playing Detective on The Traitors
On The Traitors, Reilly allied early with fellow Survivor alum Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick, a former rival from Snake in the Grass turned trusted partner in the new game. The two correctly identified Cody Calafiore as a Traitor early on, one of the season’s sharper reads. Reilly grew suspicious of eventual winner Cirie Fields late in the game, but the read came too late to act on. She was banished in Episode 8, finishing 8th of 20, after a season-long feud with Kate Chastain that became one of the show’s more talked-about personality clashes.
Back on Big Brother, and Life Now
In 2025, Reilly returned to the Big Brother house one more time on Season 27, entering as a mystery late-arrival houseguest more than a decade after her original win. Outside the game, she and Villegas now live in Birmingham, Alabama, where he works as an assistant professor at UAB Hospital while she juggles motherhood with a casting business and her own TV production work. She has produced and hosted several of her own shows, including Better with the Brenchels, Reality Relapse, and Adventures 4 Pets, keeping her in front of cameras on her own terms rather than waiting for another invite back to a house full of strangers.