‘The Challenge’ Star Devin Walker Reveals Where He Stands With Johnny Bananas Now

Amanda Bell October 16, 2024, 9:30 pm

For the first time all season, not a single member of Era 1 was involved in the elimination on Wednesday’s (October 16) episode of The Challenge. Rachel Robinson, now a team of one, defeated every other challenger on the show through sheer grit and endurance and saved herself from another trip to the arena.

When it came to the other eras’ pleas for avoiding the elimination ring themselves, she had very little sympathy for any of them. Rachel was instead thinking only about what move might benefit her best: to send in members of the so-called “vacation alliance” against one another. Josh Martinez tried to speak up on their behalf, but he folded once Rachel explained her logic. That meant Devin Walker and Tori Deal were made to face off against Kyland Young and Kaycee Clark.

The elimination was a cranial one. Each pair had to sort through a pile of tangled cables and connect the wires to coincide with lights for all 40 seasons of The Challenge. Though Devin is known for his intellect, Kyland was practically made for this challenge and handily won. (On the women’s side, it was neck and neck and came down to a matter of who pushed their button first, with Tori taking the win). That meant Devin had to go home — leaving behind his new love Michele Fitzgerald, who’d been accused by Johnny Bananas of manipulating — while Tori stuck around to get vengeance for him by throwing Johnny in.

TV Insider caught up with Devin Walker to talk about what went wrong in that arena and to reflect on the season, including his newfound romance with Michele and where things stand after that snap feud with Johnny.

(Also, be sure to check our previous exit interviews with Mark Long, Nurys Mateo and Paulie Calafiore, Jodi Weatherton, Tony Raines, Aneesa Ferreira, and Darrell Taylor and Tina Barta, and Derrick Kosinski and Averey Tressler.)

This is a really interesting season for you. You started out by jumping in the pool without the clothes on and you just swim your way out of a loss in the first challenge. So overall, what was your high and low for the season?

Devin Walker: The low would have been sinking my boat. And I got that out of the way pretty quickly, but I’ve kind of always entered the season with a nude dip in the pool. I like to christen it. Let everybody know that will be the vibe. This time, it was a little different. There were a lot of moms and wives on the cast, so I had to wait a little longer to hop in, but we checked the box. So, the high I would say probably would have been, I think, like the literal high of jumping off that Avengers-style building in Vietnam and winning that challenge when our backs were against the wall. That would have been high for me.

'The Challenge' Stars Derrick Kosinski and Averey Tressler Reflect on Season 40 Drama

Looking back on the season, you rooted for Tony Raines in his first elimination, but then you were disappointed in his stalemate decision. How are you two doing now?

Oh, Tony’s my guy. Do I understand the game move? Absolutely not. But the thing about Tony is I don’t think he quite understands the game move. And in his mind, I think he was looking for a place to make his mark in a bit of an unsettled game at the moment, and he didn’t want to be somebody that was just gonna go with the flow. So I don’t think he saw it playing out that way. But if I know Tony, he doesn’t regret the decision. So, I’m gonna stick by my guy, Tony is my guy to the bitter end.

You suspected that Jordan Wiseley was throwing it over the Cheyenne answer. Did you ever find out?

I mean, I think we all found out in Jordan’s interview, right? Jordan’s a pretty smart guy. I think Cory says he literally went to the gender reveal of Cheyenne and Cory’s child Ryder. So I’m pretty sure he knew. But at that point in the game, that’s a style I’ve played before. Me and Tori did it a lot in Ride or Dies. If you see somebody that you trust, and they’re in the lead, there’s really no reason to rock the boat. If you feel safe, the name of the game is to survive and advance. And at that point, it was too early for Jordan to feel like he needed to start stacking favors. So if I had to guess, I think he knows Cheyenne’s name.

With regard to this challenge, was it something of a moral victory for you that you were the last one, for your team, including Jordan?

Yeah, I think you can take victories in a lot of different ways. This season as a whole was definitely — I mean, I got an awesome girlfriend out of it, which is cool. But I wasn’t really super proud of the way that I played the game. I felt like there was a lot of things that I just missed. And there were preventable issues that had I Monday morning quarterbacked it, if I could go back and play it again, there’s a couple of minor tweaks that I think you’d see me in this for a lot longer.

Can you get into that and point out anything specific?

Yeah, so I mean, again, it’s really difficult to play the game when you have somebody else that you care about just as much as yourself. And in this particular situation, I had two people: I come in, obviously, with Tori, my ride or die, we’re coming off a win. And then I enter this situation with Michele, and I just feel like had I been a little bit more — I don’t wanna say transparent because I was, but articulate on where I’m standing in the game with the both of them, we could have kind of prevented the what ended up being Era 1, Era 2 link-up because what looks like we had this massive alliance was it was actually much more fragile than people understood and we really should have solidified that a lot longer. So not enough conversations with Josh, not enough conversations with Tori. Not enough conversation with Kaycee, with Michele, even. All of us needed to be on the same page, and we just weren’t.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Devin Walker (@mtv_devin)

Are you fine with Josh now? I know Kaycee was talking about him being a liability, and you guys were pretty ticked off that he didn’t go to bat for her.

Of course, I’m fine with Josh. I have a lot of love for Josh. It’s gonna be difficult to play the game with him moving forward if he brings this kind of same energy. It’s just Josh spread himself pretty thin, and the most frustrating part about it is I do feel like I see the game in 3-D, and I can tell when people are kind of being used. And it was so funny that those allegations were getting thrown out against me when I could clearly see it happening to Josh. And until he recognizes that not everybody has his best interest in mind, he’s gonna have a hard time. And I think now, especially with how things went with him and Cory and how things all kind of played out watching him not really go to bat for us, that’s gonna be tough to come back from.

You alluded to the thing that Johnny accused you of with Michele. Are you guys fine now?

I’ve seen him. So what’s difficult for me is if Johnny picks a narrative, he’s gonna stick to it no matter what. And he’s picked this narrative. He knows he’s wrong deep in his heart, he knows he’s wrong, but he has to now die on this hill. And that’s the part that’s a little frustrating for me because I really did believe that we had moved towards a friendship, and my biggest issue with it is what he’s accusing me of doing would come from a terrible human being to know what Michele had been through in the past and then to do that to her again, would mean that you really are just a s**t person. So I don’t know if I can swear. And so it’s the accusation — game or not aside — and the fact that he’s doubling down on it now, it’s like, wow. So you really think I’m that type of person? That’s hard for me to imagine that we’re friends then because why would you want to be friends with somebody that you think is that low of a person?

You promised Michele that you were going to wait for her in the Philippines—did you?

So I didn’t wait in the Philippines. I actually stayed in Vietnam. And it was a blast. The thing about that country is as it unfolds itself to you, it is a really, really cool place on the Earth, and I feel really fortunate to have gotten to see it — not only from the game but also to spend some time there on my own kind of bumming around and exploring. And I had a great time.

Johnny compared this elimination to the light board arena that you did with him. Do you think that was fair?

I mean, it had lights. So it’s not surprising to me that somebody would compare the two, but it’s completely different. There’s an aspect to this that I just did not get. And I think, again, had I played that, I would beat myself in that elimination 10 out of 10 times. If I go up against the person that was in there, my head was in 1000 different places. There’s absolutely no excuse. Kyland was the better man in that situation. But also what I’ll say is I also beat 85 percent of the people that are on that stage. Kyland is a very solid competitor. He’s methodical. He’s got a great attention to detail. And he got something that was in his wheelhouse. And you just got to take the L with grace and congratulate him for being the better competitor that day and try to get better.

So a lot of people were confused about what you were trying to accomplish. You said you had a plan. Could you explain what you were trying to do even if it didn’t work?

Yeah. So I’ve seen a lot of these things. And typically, so this to me looked like — I mean, Jordan’s not wrong, I over[thought] it a bit. I was trying to go one at a time to eliminate any mistakes. So in a memory challenge or in a memory elimination, you have to pay attention to detail, you have to make sure that you get every single one correct because if you get one wrong and you have to undo the whole thing, you can really put yourself behind the eight ball. So I was trying to go slow and go methodically and hope that he made a mistake. And he didn’t, so it didn’t work. I rolled the dice. I knew I was behind. And that’s a similar strategy to what I did in Spies, Lies & Allies — taking my time to memorize all the numbers and hoping that they messed up. And I think moving forward, I have to be under the assumption that if you get to that stage in the game, there’s not gonna be as many mess-ups. You gotta kind of go full speed the whole way through.

So your elimination was right before they announced that it would be an individual game. How would your strategy have changed if you could stick around for that part?

Oh, the salt in the wound of finding out that it was an individual game at that point… Just because of the format because of the karma vote — typically we’re gone, we’re in a car, we’re driving off set, we don’t hear that — so you already take the L. You’re leaving your girlfriend, you’re leaving your best friend in the game, and now they’ve got to fend for themselves. And then you hear it’s going individual. I was set up so well in this game for it to go individual, which is why Michele refused to nominate me the episode before. What doesn’t show — it shows me saying, “I’m not gonna ask her to put me in” — because she told me straight up, “Go ahead and raise your hand. I’m not picking you. It’s dumb for me to pick you. So I’m not gonna do it. So you can tell Cory whatever you want, but I’m not picking you.” We all were under the assumption that when it got down to one player on a team, we were gonna go individual. And I was a day late and a dollar short, but you see me in this final and with a very good chance at winning it if I win this elimination.

Speaking of the fact that you got to stay after and you weren’t just carted off, you got to see Tori win, and you saw her choose Johnny as a target. Was that a little bit cathartic for you?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we had gone over it at that point in the game, and this is what it was. It was really difficult to explain to people because what comes with doing like 20-plus seasons is that every in and out of the game where to have the conversations, how to have them and you know, to make sure to have them with people that aren’t necessarily gonna connect with each other. So what Johnny was doing with having conversations with Laurel and Aviv and Rachel very separately then conversations he was having with Michele and Tori on our side of the house. So they were all under the assumption they were number one or number two and they weren’t. So I think Tori saw the writing on the wall, and she was gonna take that shot whether or not me and him were kind of feuding because at that stage in the game, if you’re not working with me, you’re working against me. And it was clear at that point that he was not working with us.

When I spoke to Wes Bergmann in support of House of Villains, he named you as the person he thought should join that show next. How do you feel about that?

It’s an absolute no-brainer. I am and always will be the original Are You the One villain. I’ve been a villain on this show. I’m a bit of a hero’s villain. But that show is built for me, and I would love to give it a run.