Top Banana

"No pun intended, but I'm always up for a challenge, and this season was definitely one of the most challenging ones that I've ever done," teases Johnny "Bananas" Devenanzio.

Best known as Johnny Bananas, or "Bananas" for short, he is one of six veterans from the long-running MTV reality competition series The Challenge, recruited to compete against cast members from The Amazing Race, Big Brother and Survivor on the second season of The Challenge: USA, premiering August 10 on CBS. (Devenanzio attributes his "Bananas" moniker to a stint working at Banana Republic and, going back even further, to an incident in his youth when he stuffed bananas in his mother's car's tailpipe in an attempt to avoid school.)

A seven-time champion of the flagship series that, like the CBS version, has contestants taking part in grueling physical and mental challenges, Devenanzio is The Challenge's most decorated player.

Born and raised in Southern California and educated at Penn State, where he earned an economics degree, Devenanzio began his reality TV career in 2006 on MTV's The Real World: Key West.

Later that year, he competed on MTV's The Real World/Road Rules Challenge (as The Challenge used to be known) and has been a staple on the series ever since, competing in twenty-two seasons. (He has also competed on MTV's The Challenge: Champs vs. Stars and last year's The Challenge: World Championship, which streamed on Paramount+.)

"I attribute a lot of my success on the show to the fact that I've never taken a break, and I've never really walked away," Devenanzio says. "I've always seen The Challenge as my career."

He adds that his father is still mystified to this day by how Devenanzio has parlayed being "mischievous" and "the class clown" into nearly two decades on television.

When he isn't stirring the pot on The Challenge, Devenanzio also hosts NBC's late-night travel show 1st Look. And last year, he started a production company called Bad Banana Productions through which he plans to create and produce television shows. "For me, that's the next logical step," he says. "Trust me, if I could, I would be in front of the camera doing The Challenge until I had tennis balls on my walker."

"This is a really tough game physically and mentally ... I'm getting older, and the competition is just getting younger," he continues. "So, I've already started plotting an exit strategy."

"I'm not saying that that's going to be anytime soon," Devenanzio stresses. "But I've always wanted to see what it's like to be on the other side of the camera."