What To Know
- In the second episode of The Challenge, Johnny Bananas makes a move on rookie Alexis Lete.
- Here, the Deal or No Deal Island alum explains her reaction.
The last time TV Insider spoke to Alexis Lete, it was after she placed second on the game show history-making second (and, unfortunately, final) season of Deal or No Deal Island. Back then, the former wrestling pro indicated an interest in joining a show like The Challenge — but it was mostly because people kept telling her she should, thanks to her athletic showing on the NBC reality competition.
“I remember hitting up the casting director because there were so many of my comments from Deal or No Deal Island, and I was like, ‘Hey, apparently I need to go on your show,’” she told TV Insider while discussing her inclusion in the cast for Season 42, Cutthroats. “They didn’t hit me up till probably like eight months later, and they were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ And I hadn’t watched The Challenge at this point. I’ve just been told that I should go on to it, and I started watching it, and I was like, ‘Oh, I feel like this format is something that I could really excel at,’ especially since you have to be eliminated. It’s not like, ‘We voted out…,’ which I loved.”
If The Challenge fans weren’t already familiar with Lete, she made herself known right away in the premiere episode by engaging in a shouting match with Johnny Bananas over his elimination of her teammate, Cedric Hodges.
“That’s bulls**t,” she repeatedly shouted from the bleachers.
“Hey, shut the f**k up, you haven’t been here long enough to start talking like that!” he retorted.
By the second episode, “Crying Won’t Get You Off This Roof,” though, it looked like Lete might be getting pulled in by Johnny Bananas’ charms.
After Lete threw everyone for a loop by exfoliating her legs in the pool, Bananas was surprisingly taken by the move, saying in a confessional, “I’m gonna summit Mt. Lete and hopefully plant a flag when I get to the top… or the bottom.”
Indeed, from there, he went on to try and win her over in a rather unusual way: by giving her a note that took her on a treasure hunt that ended with her joining him in a bathtub while wearing her bikini over her clothes.
Jonne Roriz / Paramount+
“On Episode 2, I was definitely still thinking that he was a bit of a weirdo,” Lete said of the moment. “He kept making little moves on me — braiding my hair and saying all of these things, and I’m just kind of like, ‘All right. I’m just here to win. Can you please stop bothering me?’”
Lete continued, “I think he was one of the people that I was honestly trying to stay away from, just because I’ve heard a few things going into the show, and people were like, ‘Oh, you gotta watch out for that Johnny Bananas!’ Every time I watched a season, everyone for some reason didn’t like him, and I was like, ‘What kind of shifty stuff does this guy do?’ And, ‘I can’t trust a word that he’s saying.’”
Still, she ended up caving to his attention-getting efforts … if only to benefit her own game.
“I was just hesitant, and he kept hitting on me, but I was like, ‘OK, I’ll keep entertaining it until I need to use this,’” she explained.
The Challenge, Wednesdays, Paramount+