Dr. Will Kirby is ready to be your “Deal or No Deal Island” villain

Big Brother was on life-support. A disastrous first season had flopped both critically and commercially in the summer of 2000, failing to come even remotely close to duplicating the instant success of CBS’ other new reality competition program, Survivor. Somewhat inexplicably, CBS decided to give the show one more chance, and that decision proved to be one of the wisest the network ever made.

Season 2 of Big Brother was as wildly entertaining as the first installment was painfully boring. And the most entertaining among that season 2 cast was a brash 28-year-old physician named Will Kirby. Dr. Will became enemy No. 1 in the house, and then somehow managed to make it all the way to the end and convince a jury of his peers to hand him the $500,000. Will was even more audacious when he returned for the franchise’s first All-Stars season, at one point daring his fellow houseguests to vote him out. (They did not.)

But while Dr. Will has made several reality appearances since then — hosting Big Brother jury roundtables and making a guest appearance on The Traitors — he has not actually competed since that Big Brother: All-Stars appearance in 2006. That all changes when Will makes his grand entrance on this week’s episode of Deal or No Deal Island (Jan. 14 on NBC). Host Joe Manganiello, showrunner Matt Kunitz, and the DONDI cast have already weighed in with their, shall we say, strong reactions to Will’s gameplay, but we also spoke to the infamous personality to get his take on what we should expect when he makes his grand return to reality TV.

Related: Deal or No Deal Island is your next reality TV obsession

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Break it down for me: How is this game similar to or different from Big Brother?

DR. WILL KIRBY: When you look at any of these games, there's really four aspects, right? There's what you could call the kinetic dynamic or athletic quotient. Then there's the social quotient, there's the strategy part, and there's luck — and every single show has those. So as much as I joke around, if someone pretends they're a phenomenal reality player, they could be really good at three of those, but there's still a huge amount of luck involved and that's just the truth.

This game has a tremendous amount of luck because you have to play the Banker and either beat the Banker or lose to the Banker, which is really a different element because you can't control luck. So the social aspect of the game really isn't imperative until near the very end. The producers did a phenomenal job layering in social at the very end, which I love.

Strategy is important, but only to the extent that it can help you get immunity. It can't really, so it's hard to strategize. And the other component is the athletic component. So the athletic component, you have to have some command of that in this game in particular. So I felt like I had a really pretty well balanced game, but I also came in guns blazing. I was not going to just fizzle out at the end of my career and wanted to make a big impact.

Related: Deal or No Deal Island first victim Luke Olejniczak reacts to playing 'worst game ever'

Let’s talk about that a little more. How would you describe your gameplay this season? We haven't seen you compete on a reality show for a long time, so what should people expect?

I knew that the fellow contestants were going to come in and quickly judge me by my previous reputation, and I wanted to lean into that. So I wanted to come in as a reality show villain. But I'm a very different person than when I played 25 years ago. There's words and there's actions. My words, I tried to play as ethically as I could, but my actions, ironically, were as ethical as you can see.

I had a highest level of integrity of rectitude, of morals, of ethics. And when I made a deal with someone, I 100 percent kept that deal, and I knew that other people weren't going to keep the deals with me, and I was okay with that. I wanted my character arc to come in, be a huge target, be a villain, and then slowly morph into a hero. And I think I accomplished that.

Did you play any reverse psychology, like on Big Brother: All-Stars where you threatened to put everyone on slop if they did not vote you out?

As soon as the second challenge was explained, I reverse engineered it in my brain and then tried to manipulate the rules of the game to my advantage. So what the fans are going to see is somebody who goes 180 degrees from what you expect with the games.

Related: Joe Manganiello reacts to 'the worst game of Deal or No Deal Island ever played' (exclusive)

Who else from Big Brother would do well on this show?

Big Brother is an enigma because the skillset of Big Brother doesn't translate to any other show. And we have seen that over and over and over. Big Brother people go on The Amazing Race and do poorly. I mean, there are people who are Big Brother legends who have lost 10 shows at this point. So it's really, really difficult to extrapolate the Big Brother skillset and bring it into other shows.

I think there's people who've done well on Big Brother and they can always do well on Big Brother, but they're simply unable to work well on other shows. And conversely, there's people who can just go from one show to another seamlessly. And that's Boston Rob, that's Parvati. There's a subset of true professionals — and I include myself in that at the risk of self-aggrandizement — who can enter a show no matter what the setting is and be agile enough and evolve quickly enough to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Deal or No Deal Island airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.

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