The Trust’s Tolú Ekundare Kept Her Eyes on The Prize

Tolú Ekundare wants to emphasize that Netflix’s The Trust, the new reality competition show where everyone arrives a winner yet contestants can cut people out of the prize, was always supposed to be about a life-changing amount of money. So it was as baffling to her as it was to viewers to watch the male contestants treat the game like summer camp. The Trust became watchable as soon as the Houston-based model and marketing manager strategized to take out the first player. Exhibiting one of the most consistent gameplays, Ekundare left as one of five winners with $73,600, the second-largest prize out of the group.

As with all wicked social experiments cloaked as game shows, what Ekundare couldn’t anticipate was the barrage of tokenization and racism she would endure as a Black woman. One memorable scene shows a teary conversation between Jake and Ekundare about how uncomfortable it is to be typecast as the “African queen sister� of the house. It turns out there was more emotional labor that viewers did not see her undertake to educate her white colleagues. After the rival alliance’s volatile takedown of Winnie as well as the departure of Jay, Tolú pivoted but always kept true to herself: She was there to win money that would change her life.

“I think I did amazing, especially considering how even with the whole house gone I clawed my way out of the corner,� Ekundare told Vulture. “I think my gameplay was on point. It was just who I was aligned with that was the issue.�

We learned a lot about how your family keeps you driven. But what was it specifically about this show that made you want to join? 
There was a call to action on our application and it was the opportunity to win life changing amounts of money. Boom, I am there. I went in there with a goal to win the life changing amount of money.

I want to know where your decision to vote Juelz out so early came from. Your instincts weren’t wrong: He was lying about his job.
We had a chance to have a one-on-one with everyone. I had a one-on-one with Juelz, as did Winnie, Julie, and Mama Jay. We got together after and said “there’s something wrong about Juelz.� There were inconsistencies about his background. If this is a game about trust and we already feel like you’re hiding something, using your sex appeal to distract, that does not inspire trust. We had decided that we were going to vote for Juelz before we knew there was a Vault. So when he received the silver card, we thought, Fuck, we don’t know what he’s going to do. That was already scary.

You, Winnie, and Julie really got the game going in that moment, because it had campfire vibes from the get. It felt as if no one wanted to play this game and the call to action was very clear. Was the premise confusing for the contestants?
I can’t speak for everyone else, but the premise was so crystal clear to me, Winnie, and Julie. Mind you, $250,000 … if it was one person, that’s life-changing amounts of money. But divided by 11, pre-tax, we are at $22,000 [each], and then Uncle Sam is going to take his cut. I can’t even buy me a little Toyota Corolla with that.

A lot of people were like, “We don’t want to vote. We’re one big happy family.� I’m like, “Where did y’all find these contestants? We have multiple winners, but none of y’all want to play the game?�

There were two clear alliances, and one alliance was successful at splitting yours apart. How did this feel? 
I am getting a lot of backlash: “Why didn’t you start a Black alliance and why did you want this to be a women-versus-men thing?� The answer was pretty freaking clear: I wanted to align with individuals who were like-minded, who actually wanted to play the game. In the beginning, it was only the women who were playing and all the men went to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.�

So here’s where stuff starts to get dicey: I feel like some women were not trusting the process. Julie felt like she needed someone on the boys’ side to protect her. And then Lindsey saw Julie waffling. To her, this became like, Oh, their numbers are not secure and the boys have the upper hand, so I, too, am going to jump ship and gain some protection from the boys. I still don’t understand that, because what the hell were they protecting anyone from? They weren’t even playing! That was the beginning of the end of the women’s alliance.

You seemed to develop a friendship with Julie at the start. How did you reckon with Julie’s decision to play for the other team? 
Any player needs to recognize when they need to redirect, pivot, or restrategize. I had nobody else in the core alliance; Winnie’s gone, Mama Jay’s gone, and Lindsey? Dead to me. I had Julie, so I could work with that. Julie’s still my friend, even though I’m still mad. Like yes, you didn’t vote for Winnie, but you still didn’t protect her. But she was there for me when everyone was gone and walked off. We still had our relationship.

I’d love to know what you saw that we didn’t see that made the men malign Winnie, because it felt so out of left field. 
I, too, would like to know. That’s why I was so angry during the candle-blowing scene. That morning, the both of us were in the boys’ room talking, laughing, playing, eating together. So when I take off my blindfold, why are two of Winnie’s candles blown out? I get it, both of us have very different approaches in how we deal with situations. She’s very straightforward and tells it like it is. If she was a man, they would love that. So I go out [to the men] with a softer approach, more approachable. If y’all are feeling some kind of way about Winnie, why not talk to me about it? [I did] not know that they were all butt hurt about Bryce. For them to assume that we got out Bryce so we want to get them out … Why would we vote you out? We voted out Bryce because he’s a millionaire. Y’all just see me and Winnie as the problems of the house. It still pisses me off.

The show showed a lot of microaggressions that you and Winnie dealt with, from being called mean, aggressive, and outspoken, or literally being typed as Jake’s “African Queens.� How did you feel about these while filming? 
I didn’t want to have that conversation [with Jake], not even knowing it was Julie who told him to come up to me. At the table, if you recall, Jake went around and gave every person a specific thing about their character, and then he just takes me and Winnie — two very starkly different individuals — and lumps us together and says “my two African queen sisters.� Mind you, that’s not the first time. When I met Jake, the first thing he says is, “Wow I love your outfit. You look like a Wakanda princess warrior.� Wakanda is not a real place. I’m from Nigeria. I let that go; that’s his ignorance. Next time he sees me, he goes, “You look like a chocolate I just wanna bite into!� It became to the point that with every single interaction with Jake, he must reference my race and ethnicity, and that’s uncomfortable. I’m proudly Nigerian. I wear that shit on my sleeves and in my ears. But do recognize that me being proud of my culture and ethnicity does not give anybody — Black, white, or brown — the card to sit there and tokenize. You don’t sit there and call Julie “my white queen� because you see Julie in the full spectrum of humanity that she is. But for some reason, when it comes to me and Winnie, you can only see us as the Black girls and the African girls. That’s disgusting. I show a whole array of Tolú, but you only choose to see the Black girl. So when we had that conversation, I wanted to lay it out that I’m not having fun. That’s why I wanted to educate him.

One thing you didn’t get to see on the show is that me and Winnie literally had to have a conversation with the entire house because before the candle-blowing, there was a little bit of tension where they didn’t like Winnie’s approach to something because she’s very straightforward. I’m much softer. But when everyone was upset with Winnie about how she spoke to them, they just lumped the both of us together. We have different approaches and you have different relationships with us. And then when they all decided to go for Winnie, the language they used to speak about her really pissed me off. They would say things like, “cull the herd� or “there’s a rooster in the something something.� She’s not a rooster; she’s a human being. Winnie just told you how it was, the same way that y’all are praising Jake for letting you know that he’s the leader of the house. Why is Winnie not receiving that praise? She knows who she is and she stands on her shit.

How did it feel to split your winnings with the people who tried to take you down? 
It was a lot easier after taking the $25,000. If I didn’t take that from the Vault, I was going to fucking vote. Them being such assholes to me and Winnie and all this shit I had to deal with in the house, it made it so much easier to take the $25,000. I didn’t even have to second guess it much because y’all were such dickheads. I had a name in the envelope and thought should I?

Can you say the name? 
Jake.

Is there anything about your gameplay that you would have changed in hindsight? 
I probably would have not voted that first night. The paranoia was getting to me. I probably would have been like, ‘Y’all, let’s hold off for one night and see how this goes.’ Votes were gonna get casted regardless, but instead of assuming just the women were here to play a game […] I should have given it a day or two to really get to know everybody better and then from there make my alliances. Who knows, maybe me and Juelz would have been allies or gotten Jake out a little bit sooner and Winnie would have stayed. That’s the only thing I would have changed: how I made the alliances in the beginning.