Until next week...

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TVGuide.com: Last week we saw your tribe feasting on snail soup after entering your seventh day with little food to be had. What exactly does that taste like?Misty: It's terrible! You take some seawater, throw some snails with all the sand and shells in there, and then add some hermit crab. We drank the broth — sand and all — in hopes that it was going to give us some kind of nourishment. I don't know how bad the food choices could have gotten, but I'd rather eat worms!
TVGuide.com: Who had the idea to cook up that concoction?Misty: The whole tribe figured that we could eat this as food, and we were constantly collecting snails.... It was our nightly ritual to eat snails.
TVGuide.com: Was there a lot of talk after Sally lost the spear and thus La Mina's chances at real food?Misty: There was a lot of talk. If only we had that spear, we would have been eating.
TVGuide.com: When the tribes gathered for the reward challenge, Bobby praised Bruce so openly for being the key to the improved morale at the Casaya camp. After learning of the role he played, which La Mina member was most vocal in deciding to send Bruce back to Exile Island?Misty: They made a detrimental move telling us Bruce was the strong one. I didn't want to send him back, mainly because I knew I didn't have the idol and I didn't want to give him a second chance to look for it. I wanted to send one of the younger girls, because I thought by themselves, they'd crack. It was a smart move at the time, but they came back angry and strong.
TVGuide.com: Having been the first one stranded on Exile Island, what was it like? Did you find yourself doing a lot of searching for the hidden immunity idol? Misty: That's one thing you miss on the one-hour show: my searching for three, four or six hours a day, as long as I had daylight. It was a challenge, emotionally and mentally, to stay focused.
TVGuide.com: It was rather strategic on your part to fool the women on your first tribe into thinking you did find the idol.Misty: I thought that was a good backup plan. Danielle walked up to me and said, "If we have to lose, let's get rid of Sally." It really helped me get in with Danielle and Courtney.
TVGuide.com: When I talked to Melinda last week, she said there were times she'd rather have been alone on Exile than be with her tribe. Did you experience any similar feelings?Misty: We were all smart, hardworking and diligent people. There was no drama. We were starving, but we would have great conversations every night at campfire. They don't show this, but we would sing ourselves to sleep. It was a great comfy, cozy environment, as opposed to the dysfunction that was going on at Casaya.
TVGuide.com: That said, who on La Mina did you bond with most? And which person not as much?Misty: I bonded the most with Sally, and I'm cheering for her now. I didn't expect to have that much in common with her. The person I bonded with least was Terry, but sometimes when you have a lot in common with someone, you just seem to repel. I was trying to scheme in my head, constantly thinking about how to get him gone.
TVGuide.com: Prior to tribal council, the La Mina men said they were intimidated by your intelligence. Do you feel that played a role in your oust?Misty: Man, that's why I didn't date in high school. That was the problem! [Chuckles]
TVGuide.com: Terry, for one, said you were "smart as hell and could cause some trouble."Misty: It stinks to be gone because I didn't just walk around going "Oh, please, dear Terry, show me the way." That's not me and that's not ever going to be me. I thought, "Gee, Terry, if you thought I was that smart, why didn't you get an alliance with me?"
TVGuide.com: Can you pinpoint a key factor in your getting voted off?Misty: Maybe they realized I would have been harder to get rid of later. I wasn't physically hurting, but after all the bug bites I got, maybe they thought, "She's getting eaten alive, it's starting to look gross and we should let her go now."
TVGuide.com: Were you strategizing while giving the guys on your tribe massages, or simply having fun?Misty: It was definitely having fun. You want to have a good time out there, but my goal was to stay in the game as long as possible. I knew the young guys were faltering and were on the fence with their alliance, so we started working Austin and Nick. I got absolutely nothing out of it.
TVGuide.com: In your CBS.com biography, you describe yourself as a "tomboy in high heels." What amenity did you miss most on island?Misty: My toothbrush! I have this oral-hygiene fixation and now I walk around with one in my purse all day. I didn't get any luxury items.
TVGuide.com: Other than brushing your teeth for a good long time, what was the first thing you did when you arrived home?Misty: I have two Boston terriers that I absolutely love and missed so much, so I've said I went out for pizza and Italian food, but I really ordered in and watched movies.
TVGuide.com: As far as your occupation, viewers were let in on the fact that you are an engineer but saw you hesitating to tell your tribe at first.Misty: I didn't tell the younger women, but when it came to the other tribe, I figured that because Dan's an engineer and Terry's a pilot, we could bond [over it]. We all got along fine, but it definitely did not aid me in making the right alliances.
TVGuide.com: Did you struggle at all telling La Mina?Misty: I just came right out with it when Dan said he was an astronaut, explaining how working for NASA has been my dream since I was a child. We were talking for a while and I told him I work on a rocket program, but until then no one knew.
TVGuide.com: You've certainly proved your worth, showing that you can hang with the boys!Misty: I do it on a daily basis in my job, but it didn't work on Survivor. Go figure!
Are you addicted to shows like Survivor? Find out the real reason why reality's a hit.

But unlike the story of Bening's real-life romance — her marriage to Warren Beatty has been going strong for nearly 14 years now — there's no happy ending for the character the Oscar-nominated actress plays in HBO's Mrs. Harris (premiering Feb. 25 at 8 pm/ET). Inspired by Shana Alexander's best-selling book Very Much a Lady, the movie explores the sensational 1980 murder scandal involving Jean Harris, the middle-aged headmistress of an exclusive girls' boarding school who shot and killed her longtime lover, world-famous Scarsdale Diet guru Dr. Herman Tarnower (played here by Ben Kingsley).
After years of tolerating the charismatic bachelor's refusal to marry her and his in-your-face philandering, Harris feared she was losing out to a younger woman (Chloe Sevigny). By then drug-addicted and suicidal, she went to his house one night intending to kill herself. Somehow Tarnower was the one who ended up dead. Although Harris maintained that the shooting was an accident, she was convicted of murdering the 69-year-old doctor and was sent to prison for a dozen years.
"It's a terribly sad story, but at the same time fascinating," says Bening. "She was a woman of enormous competence who also seemed to be on this road to self-destruction. Jean Harris isn't easily summed up, and that's where great drama is." The film, adds Kingsley, is "the autopsy of a relationship. It's like a Greek tragedy. There were all these tiny little accidents and seemingly small, mundane decisions that came together to produce a terrible tragedy."
Though the case was a tabloid staple at the time, Bening knew little about Harris and Tarnower before taking on the role. So she prepared by immersing herself in everything from books and articles written about the case to the actual trial transcripts. She also wound up talking to Harris, now 82, whose prison term was commuted by then-New York governor Mario Cuomo in 1992.
"I didn't want to invade her privacy, but she wanted to speak to me," Bening says. "She said very nice things about Tarnower and the way he made her feel — that he was a wonderful dancer and that he made her feel like Ginger Rogers. When you talk to her, it's really hard to believe she wanted to kill him. So it's hard to understand what happened."
It's also hard to understand why two people who seemed to get so little from each other stayed together for so long. "I think that's what's most fascinating to so many people," Bening says. "Most of us have been involved in crazy kinds of relationships that weren't necessarily healthy but, for reasons that are out of our control, were compelling. But there's a boundary we don't cross. Jean went over that boundary and found herself in a nightmare. It's all so bizarre."
Bening's off-screen life, however, is the picture of normalcy — at least as much as the life of a movie star who's married to an even bigger movie star and has four young children (Kathlyn, 14, Ben, 11, Isabel, 9, and Ella, 5) can be considered normal.
"We're just running around trying to keep all the plates in the air like everyone else," says Bening, who's currently starring on stage in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in Los Angeles. "Children completely fill your life. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Every once in a while I look around at people who do movies all the time and go from play to play, and I think that would be great. But I really just always wanted kids, and now I have them. I don't think I'd do well in the world only to satisfy my own interests and desires. That would be a pretty boring life for me."

TV Guide: You're looking really svelte. What's your secret?Tia Carrere: Well, I'm doing this food-delivery service called NutriFit, which makes it a lot easier for me. It's three meals a day and three snacks. I was like, "Really, all this food and I'm still going to lose weight?" And I have been. I learned something valuable [during this process] — starving yourself all day is not going to help. First of all, I wouldn't be able to do everything I [needed] to do on [Dancing with the Stars] and [still] breast-feed a baby. That was the main reason. I could lose it faster by doing I don't know what, but, like I said, I'm feeding a baby and first and foremost, I wanted to be healthy for her.
TV Guide: How did you pick NutriFit?Carrere: I consulted with a dietitian, this lady named Jo Scott, who has worked with lots of actresses. She turned me on to it.
TV Guide: What's a sample day for you on the diet? What do you eat for breakfast?Carrere: Breakfast is two or three little whole-wheat pancakes with syrup and some fruit, and I'll have maybe a smoothie for a morning snack. Then for lunch, it will be, like, a turkey chili, green beans and a green salad. And then, I don't know, Mediterranean tapas on little crackers or vegetables for a snack. For dinner, it will be, like, honey-Dijon chicken with a vegetable medley and a salad, and then I can even have a slice of angel food cake or a fudge brownie for dessert. I mean, it's a lot of food.
TV Guide: What sort of calorie intake is that?Carrere: It's 1,700 a day. They added an additional few hundred because I'm breast-feeding; otherwise, I think I could take it down to 1,200 or 1,400 a day. It's easier for me because I get this food delivery, but for an everyday person... I don't know. Portion size is key. I would go to a restaurant and have a huge chef salad. You get used to eating that [amount of food] in American restaurants.
TV Guide: And you weren't hungry at all?Carrere: If I eat everything that they give me at the right times, I might get a little hungry, but I'm not starving, going crazy. You just have to keep the machinery working, to keep the metabolism going by having a little — even if it's six almonds or 10 pistachios and a banana for a snack — so that your body doesn't ever get to a point where it's starving and you eat badly. One of the dancers on the show told me an interesting story: Japanese people [tend to be] really slight, slim people, but they do have sumo wrestlers. So how do they make a sumo wrestler? They starve them all day and then they feed them at night [right before] they go to sleep. They're not eating Krispy Kreme donuts or anything — they're eating chicken and fish and rice, just regular food — but they're starving themselves all day and then gorging at night. I think most of us have eaten like that, where we think, "I haven't eaten anything all day and I'm hungry, so I can eat this." But your body holds on to those calories more so because it doesn't know when the next meal is coming.