Continuing our chat with FACE OFF casualty Sam Cobb, begun here… 

FANGORIA: How does someone who seems as even-keeled as you deal with the situation of being on a reality show? Close quarters, no TV or phones, cameras in your face the whole time…

SAM COBB: For me, I’m pretty good at regulating my own emotions as far as—I understand and I know immediately when I’m starting to feel stressed, and I know what to do with that. And I watch myself as far as how I’m feeling right now, how am I handling it, am I bottling anything up? Am I dwelling on this insult? I do that frequently throughout the day as a general course of life. So I felt that this helped me a lot to sort of say, “Hey, look, that person is saying this because they’re stressed…” I try to take everything into account. And if I do feel stressed out, I try to find myself a place where I can find quiet.

And that was the whole trick with me; for others, it was a great relief at the end when everyone came back. For me, it wasn’t [laughs]. I think I might have preferred to have done it myself for the last episode. Simply because it had just been five and a half, however many weeks of so many people, and I’d finally gotten it down to a place where there was just four of us left in the house. You could get some peace and quiet, you could get a place to go and think by yourself. All of a sudden everybody came back, and there was a huge food fight that night, and everybody was screaming until 2 a.m. And I was, like, “Oh, God, what just happened to all my peace and quiet?” I was savoring that period of silence, and then it was broken. I had to learn how to deal with that. I ended up going to bed early, just because I thought I gotta find my own place of peace right now.

FANG: Would you do it again?

COBB: I would. And the only thing I would change would be my decision of what to pick on the last challenge [laughs]. But everything else I’d do the same.

FANG: In the end, you’re all finished, you all have your designs in the scenarios, and you could see the landscape of what you were up against. Did you have an inkling you weren’t going to win?

COBB: Oh, absolutely [laughs]. Well, number one—just coming from where I’m coming from, I didn’t expect to blow down the doors and take the show by storm anyhow. However, going into the last challenge, I was really excited at first by the concept of it. But once I started to get going on that one, I realized, most important, how much I did not understand what I believed “psychedelic” was [laughs]. And I also made the mistake of going into that challenge with a character completely and solidly in mind, and then dropping that character midway through because, I guess, the spirit of the character didn’t quite fit the whole thing. I kind of wish I would have kept on with that one instead of what I ended up doing. I basically second-guessed myself to death on that one, and I knew from the get-go that it fell out of my hands early. I thought, “If I could get it done, then I will be happy…” And I think I managed to get it more or less done. It’s completely unfinished, but I got it at least up to on stage to a place where it was at least presentable.

FANG: What was your favorite challenge?

COBB: I had a great deal of fun on the villain, for a number of reasons. First, I chose to do something small as far as I did one appliance, and it was a small and slightly technical sculpt. You can’t tell from far away, but I put in veining, and the dermal layers of fat under the skin, and it’s all sculpted in and it’s painted in. I didn’t cover it up with blood. The invention of the silicon eyeballs that I stuck into the villain, which were fun to make. The mask itself was fun to make. I just had a good bit of fun making it. And then on top of that, I got the most, I guess, guttural reactions from people who were on the crew. Our director would not even look at my character. Every time [the model] came around, he would actually duck around a corner. He told her several times to stop looking at him [laughs]. And of course she got a kick out of it, so she would creep up behind him and tap him on the shoulder. And he’d kind of shudder and run away.

FANG: What was your least favorite challenge?

COBB: The last one, without a doubt. From start to end, it was so much more stress than I would have hoped for as far as having to pick teammates for it, and having to have crews working with and for you. I much prefer to work on my own. I enjoy the solo sculptures a lot more than I did the groups. Plus, I was tired [laughs]. It definitely was my least favorite.

FANG: A lot of people would wonder why you picked Megan Areford and Jo as your helpers for that considering their past relationship on the show.

COBB: [Laughs] That kind of fell into place…I don’t know, it was fate it almost seemed at that point. When it came around to the first picks, I felt the only person I knew well enough—Jo was my roommate. I knew what some of Jo’s abilities were, and I felt confident enough that she was able to do what I needed her to do during the course of the challenge. When it came around to my second pick, the two people who were left over were Megan and Serge [Guerra]. And I just had this toss up where I really didn’t know—Serge left early—and I didn’t really know what Serge’s skills were. And having chosen, although poorly, the subject matter that I was going to design, Megan was the best fit for it. So it really was a kind of fate thing where those two fell into my team. And I was amazed; they worked really well together. The entire course of the time they communicated with me, they communicated with each other. They worked together with myself as a team, and I was very excited to see that.

FANG: Was there a moment when they literally, verbally, said, “We need to put our stuff aside and work together for her”? A truce called?

COBB: I feel that there was, honestly. I don’t know if they did it one on one, but it felt that way. And in fact, Jo said something to that effect to me at some point. “We’re here for you.” And that was really cool. Even when we were filming, we knew that they were going to get a rap for their particular personalities, and the fact they were vocal about how much they disliked each other. And you didn’t see the half of it on the show. I have not actually seen the last episode yet, so I don’t know what’s in it. I don’t have a TV [laughs]. But Jo jumped up and helped Megan with things, and Megan jumped up and helped Jo with things. And I really couldn’t complain about having them as teammates. I don’t believe they were responsible for any level of failure on the challenge’s part. It was completely down to my choice of design.

FANG: What’s next for you?

COBB: [Laughs] This is going to be weird, because this is odd. But my life is weird, so it’s not weird for anyone that knows me. In Oregon, I will continue to sculpt for Chisel 3D. I do their maquettes. I also work in Paintbrush, and I’ll be making their maquettes digitally and sort of telecommuting that way. I’m also pretty big on the sustainability aspect of things. I volunteer here in Georgia for a group called Crop Mob, and we go to different organic farms and farm on the weekends. So basically I want to get more involved in that while I’m over there in Oregon. It’s another passion of mine, and something want to drag back into my life a little bit more.

For more of Sam Cobb’s work, visit her website here.

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