Big Brother 5: where are they now? One's a volunteer firefighter, one paints for Bon Jovi — and one turned up on Catfish

Big Brother's fifth season ran two twists at once and got away with both, which is why people still talk about it. What the fourteen houseguests did with the following two decades is considerably less orderly.

The season aired on CBS from 6 July to 21 September 2004, 82 days, $500,000 on the line. The premiere pulled 9.55 million viewers, the season averaged over 8 million, and the finale drew 10.54 million — numbers the franchise has not matched since. The twists were packaged as "Project DNA": Michael "Cowboy" Ellis and Jennifer "Nakomis" Dedmon were half-siblings who shared a father and didn't know it, and identical twins Adria and Natalie swapped places for the first five weeks before Natalie entered as her own player on Day 35. It was also the first season with a Fast Forward week, now called the double eviction.

The finalists

Drew Daniel, 22, a college graduate from Ohio, won on a 4–3 jury vote over Cowboy Ellis, a 23-year-old security officer from Oklahoma. Drew moved into acting afterward and has kept out of public view since. Cowboy went back to security work in Oklahoma, was considered for Big Brother: All-Stars in 2006 and not cast, and surfaced on MTV's Catfish: The TV Show in 2020.

Diane Henry, 22, a cocktail waitress, finished third on Day 78. She did make All-Stars, placing 11th, and acted in The Scorned and Kill Reality. She now lives in Winchester, Ohio, married with two children.

The one with the paintbrush

Karen Ganci has the most unexpected second act of the fourteen. She works as a painter, with custom commissioned pieces of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams among her sports portraiture, and her work hangs in Jon Bon Jovi's home.

A houseguest evicted in 2004 now has paintings in a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee's house. Nothing in the casting tape predicted that.

The rest of the house

• Jase Wirey — serves as a volunteer firefighter in Illinois and keeps a minimal social media presence.
• Adria Klein and Natalie Carroll — the twins run an elite fitness training studio and work in fitness publishing.
• Lori Valenti Webb — a realtor in North Carolina's Triangle area, also managing an Airbnb property.
• Nakomis Dedmon — 21 and a waitress at the time, evicted sixth on Day 75, later returned for All-Stars and placed 13th.
• Marvin Latimer — a 36-year-old mortician, the oldest in the house, out ninth on Day 65, and back for All-Stars competitions.
• Will Wikle — a 25-year-old registered nurse, the sixth evicted on Day 49 and the first member of the jury.

Holly King, Scott Long, and Mike Lubinski, the three earliest exits, have stayed out of the reality circuit entirely.

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Why this cast keeps getting revisited

Big Brother 5 sits at the point where the show stopped being a social experiment and started being a game with engineered handicaps. The twin swap forced the house to solve a puzzle nobody had told them existed, and the half-sibling reveal handed two players an alliance built on blood.

The season also produced "House Calls," billed at the time as the first live internet talk show made exclusively for a television network — a footnote in 2004, standard practice now.

For the record: two members of this cast went back for All-Stars, and neither made the final four. The winner of that season, Mike "Boogie" Malin, was from season 2.

Earlier we wrote: What happened to Ethan on General Hospital? Nathan Dean's comeback lasted three months — and his replacement has never done a soap