Taylor Hale didn’t grow up a pageant girl, but she was crowned Miss Michigan USA in 2021.

Similarly, Hale was never a “Big Brother” fan, but in 2022, she joined the cast of the show and not only won the CBS reality competition, but she also pocketed the biggest check — $800,000 before taxes, around $760,000 after — in the show’s 22-year history.

Now as she gets ready to make her next move — she’s looking for a job in the entertainment news field, which will take her away from her hometown of Detroit — Hale is calling upon her resilience, her drive and her ability to make things happen for herself, which is how she achieved her previous milestones.

“It’s interesting navigating this new space that I didn’t think I’d be thrust into so quickly,” says Hale. “There’s a lot of doubt and fear, naturally. But I need to tell myself, ‘just put your head to it.’

“Because I’ve done it twice over,” she says, her signature huge smile creeping across her face. “So why not do it again?”

Last summer at this time, Hale could be seen on TV three times a week, her hand buried inside a bag of Lay’s potato chips.

On “Big Brother,” the series you’re either obsessed with or don’t know still exists — there’s no in-between, and no such thing as a casual “Big Brother” viewer — Hale became a fan favorite, largely because of the hell she was put through on the show.

“Big Brother,” which has been on the air since 2000, is a summertime reality competition series where a group of strangers move into a house on the CBS studio lot in LA and have their lives taped 24 hours a day, footage of which is cut into three weekly prime-time TV episodes. (It’s broadcast 24/7 online.) Competitions for power are held, and every week a houseguest is voted out until at the end, one remains and wins a grand prize, $750,000 in the case of last season (up from $500,000 in previous years).

Hale, 28, was recruited by a casting agent to be on the show in early 2022. Initially she was contacted about “The Amazing Race,” but Hale inquired about “Big Brother” instead, even though at the time her knowledge of the show was ancillary at best.

“ ‘Big Brother’ never came into my world unless something involving race was happening, good or bad,” says Hale. That included the “Big Brother” Season 23 “Cookout” clique, where a group of Black contestants formed an alliance and dominated the house.

“I heard about it on TikTok, and I was like, ‘ooh, the Black people are getting together, let me go watch this!’ ” she says. She watched until the alliance made up the final six members of the house, guaranteeing the show’s first Black winner, and she then bowed out. “I didn’t want to watch them turn on each other,” she says.

After going through the “Big Brother” casting process for several months and undergoing a crash course in the show’s history, Hale was ready for the show, or so she thought. She remembers thinking it sounded like a fun opportunity to spend the summer playing a game.

“Sounds like a crazy summer, a fun time,” she says of her mentality heading into the show. “You go into this knowing it’s a game. This isn’t a love or a dating show where I’m supposed to be forthright and honest and put everything out there. This is a competition, and at the end I expected everyone to be able to say, ‘good game, what a crazy experience, let’s all go get drinks now.’

“And then,” she says, “I entered the house.”

To her surprise, Hale was almost immediately labeled as the bad guy among her fellow houseguests. She was nominated for eviction three out of the first four weeks, and her days on the show seemed numbered, much to her surprise.

“You don’t expect to become a villain,” she says. “I love reality TV, period, and who doesn’t love a good villain? Not a mean-spirited person, but someone who serves up a little drama. But being a villain in that house when you don’t do anything, it’s very weird. And not knowing how they’re perceiving you is also bizarre.”

Hale was painted as a bully in the house, when in reality, she was the victim of bullying and various microaggressions. Fans, especially Black women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, saw through the subterfuge and rallied around her online, “because they saw a lot of themselves in the bullying experience that I went through,” she says.

Hale proved her resilience in the house, ducking eliminations and winning competitions throughout the summer, triumphing at every turn, usually with a bag of Lay’s not far from arm’s reach.

Her momentum swelled, her fan base grew, and she made it to finale night where she competed against two other houseguests for the show’s grand prize. In her closing speech to her fellow houseguests, she argued her gameplay and her role in the house were bigger than herself.

“I have bandaged myself together every single time and gotten up and continued to fight, because like so many other women in the world, that is what we have to do to get to the end,” she said.

They sided with her in a landslide 8-1 vote, and on Sept. 25 — 24 seasons into the show’s run — Hale became the first Black female to be crowned champion of “Big Brother.” She also was the first winner to earn the title of America’s Favorite Houseguest, which carried with it an additional $50,000 in prize money, and she was showered in confetti as she exited the house on finale night, 82 days after entering the house.

She knew her win was symbolic, and in the same way she connected to reality TV personalities in the past — from “America’s Next Top Model” to “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — she knew she was now a symbol for others.

“To see how those shows impacted my life directly, now I know what I, as a Black woman winning a reality show, meant for a lot of other people,” she says.

Her victory propelled her into the top tier of “Big Brother” royalty, says former “Big Brother” winner Rachel Reilly.

“She’s the epitome of female empowerment,” says Reilly, who won “Big Brother’s”s 13th season, in 2011. “Her story is such a great story and such a Cinderella story. She fought against all the odds, everyone was trying to get rid of her, and I think her story is going to be retold over and over again.”

Winning “Big Brother” was a major victory for Hale — emotionally, yes, but financially as well.

“It’s nice to have that bank account behind it,” says Hale, who invested most of her money but splurged and bought herself a Ford Mustang Mach-E — not to mention front-row Beyoncé tickets — with her winnings. “This is not only something that I accomplished, but I can walk away from it if I want to.”

She has spent most of the last year traveling, and the longest she has been home for any one stretch in the last year was two and a half weeks.

She attended the Grammy Awards, endured a public breakup with her “Big Brother” castmate Joseph Abdin (they’re really good friends, she says) and is now looking toward a move to LA to find her dream job in the entertainment news field.

A new season of “Big Brother” launched recently, and Hale is happy to be watching from afar, a big bag of Lay’s at her side.