Spoilers are ahead. Everyone came to The Circle season 2 with a strategy, but preparation paid off when it came to the ultimate winner this time around. Making friends does help you win on The Circle, as we learned when Trevor, aka Deleesa St. Agathe won. She may have been lying about her identity, but she had the connections and alliances necessary to be at the top of everyone’s rankings. She also put in the work before the show even started. But despite her secret weapon — a notebook full of intel on her husband’s interests — the real Trevor almost lost her the game.
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“I personally thought everyone played a masterful game,” St. Agathe told Refinery29 on May 4. The cast was all about strategy this season, and now that they’re out, they have a group text, they Zoom. Still post-show friendships were slow to start as everyone adjusted to life outside of The Circle, largely because chatting online after playing the game would drive anyone bananas. "We would feel like we're back in The Circle," she said. "Now that the show has come out, we definitely talk so much more. We're so supportive of each other. We really became really good friends."
Even Courtney, who St. Agathe concedes was a much better Joker than she ever would have been, are buds now after ending up as rivals in The Circle. "Me and Courtney are cool — that's my baby! He didn't take it to heart. It was a game and it's all done," she said. Besides, while she maintains she would have been nicer as the Joker, “I probably would have been a little bit less entertaining to watch."
Of course it would have been very entertaining for the audience to see a catfish get caught, but St. Agathe was not going to let that happen to her. Her secret weapon was the spiral-bound book of handwritten notes she prepared with her husband — and watching her flip through it on the show ended up being way more thrilling than a faux pas or a fumbled response. "We studied for like, I want to say at least two hours every night," she said. "I was writing stuff. He was writing stuff."
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Not only did the amount of work Deleesa put into becoming Trevor pay off on The Circle, but the fact that they did this together has got to count as some kind of love language. They ended up with an encyclopedia of various men's haircuts, brands of cologne, whiskeys, cars, workouts, sports-themed video games, and details specific to Trevor: jerseys he had growing up, his clothing and shoe sizes, his favorite rappers, some sample lyrics, as well as his tattoos. "I know his tattoos," she said, "That's my man, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to get caught up with anything." The sports section included everything from Trevor's favorite Knicks players, numbers of famous players, rules of games, team logos, and even the definition of various terms like "alley-oop."
And while the sports intel came in handy during the Geek Chic Quiz in episode 9, Trevor is kind of the reason she almost didn’t make it through. "I didn't know who Scottie Pippen is," she explained. “I remember specifically asking him, Who is Scottie Pippen? And it's so terrible, I only asked him because I was watching the Kardashians and I think Larsa Pippen came up at some point." He told her not to worry about it, but she wanted to be prepared, so he just told her to remember that Pippen “has a really big nose.”
Sure enough, St. Agathe had to identify legendary Bulls players Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Michael Jordan from a photo in the trivia game and that random hint was enough for her to pull it off. "I have all these notes, but I didn't have pictures. And I'm like, right, okay. So I knew the other two players, I'm digging in my book and I'm losing my mind. And I'm just like, Is this the guy with the big nose? His nose looks pretty big to me. Maybe this is this guy. And I just guessed it, man."
That moment could easily have threatened her place in The Circle if she got it wrong, but despite the excess of catfish this season, The Circle cast wasn’t exactly focused on outing potential fakers. In fact it probably helped that most of the most successful players in season 2 were catfishing the group — St. Agathe was so focused on her game, she didn’t even think about trying to out anyone else.
"I didn't care if anybody else was a catfish because I felt like it doesn't matter; they can still rate you high. They can still become part of your alliance. They can still save you when needed and they can still get you to the end. And I think that was everybody's strategy as well."