‘The Challenge’ Star Anna Leigh Wilson Details Her Rocky Rookie Season

Things started out on a very high note for Anna Leigh Wilson on her rookie season of The Challenge, but it was all downhill from there. After winning the opening challenge to become a team captain, she was instantly sabotaged by fellow first captains Chris Underwood and Justin Hinsley, who quietly conspired to make her Team Blue selections as disagreeable as possible.

From there, it was loss after loss in the dailies, and just when things started to look up, the triple DQ took out the last two guys on her team (Nelson Thomas and Josh Goldstein), and the team was combined with the similarly kneecapped Team Gray.

All the while, Anna Leigh had a bit of a flirtmance with Leo Dionicio that she had to subsequently apologize to her at-home husband for (an incident which has also made her a lightning rod for the internet), she was targeted with a bizarre Johnny Bananas underwear gag in this week’s episode, and she had to unexpectedly face Tori Deal in an elimination after she decided to sub in for Michele Fitzgerald.

So how does The Amazing Race alum feel about her first season of The Challenge in retrospect? TV Insider caught up with her to dig into all of the messiest moments.

You’ve had what I would call a rough rookie season. When I talked to you last time, it was at the preview junket, and you had told me that even though things started on a high note, that it wouldn’t last for you. So, what’s it been like for you to relive all of that and have so many comments coming your way?

Anna Leigh Wilson: It’s been terrible, honestly. I mean, I’ve gotten death threats. To be real, I’ve lost job opportunities. It’s been horrible. It’s affected my relationships at home. It has been horrible, but I have gotten thicker skin at this point. I’m telling people to go kick rocks now because I had to get to a point where I know who I am. I know what happened on that show. I know what I meant. I know where my heart is. I know how things got twisted. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I wasn’t the one that edited it. Had I been the one that edited it, it would have been a different story. But those were the cards that I was dealt, and I just have to be able to get a little tougher skin and move on.

I do want to ask about this underwear gate thing that happened. Did you feel like you were being bullied with all that?

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That wasn’t the first time. At that point, that was just funny. That was a typical Bananas stir in the pot situation. But it started out with Leo, and then they didn’t air this, but Will [Gagnon] and I danced at the country night. We had a two-stepping moment, and the cameras were all on us. I could have sworn that that was going to be another thing. And then it was me touching Josh [Goldstein]’s leg, which didn’t happen. Then it’s me stealing Bananas underwear. It was just nonstop all season. I was constantly having to try and defend myself because once something happened, once that conversation happened, they used it as an opportunity to exploit everything that I had done from that point on, and it was just… nothing I could do.

You told me before that Keanu [Soto] came in as your friend, but was there anybody else that you had a genuine friendship with in the house?

Going into it? No, but after Keanu, Reilly [Smedley] and I also hit it off very quickly. Love Reilly to death, but she left very early on as well. And so once they left, really in the house, the only two people who actually would come in and check on me were Cassidy [Clark] and Leo. So when you’re feeling like you’re on an island, anybody who’s going to remind you, “Hey, you’re not crazy. I see what’s going on, too”? It’s reassuring, and you need it in that type of environment.

For sure. And … they ganged up on you from the beginning with the team selections. Did you know, just at that point, when Chris and Justin are kind of secretly, quietly doing that, that you just had your work cut out for you here?

Yeah, I think I said it in that first episode: “This is about to be an uphill battle.” I knew it was coming. I knew it. But I mean, my thing is that I don’t need to convince everybody that I’m perfect. I’m clearly freaking not. I make mistakes on the show, but I can laugh at them. I can own them, and I can definitely apologize when I hurt somebody. But what I’m not going to do is let people take the fact that I made one mistake and use it as permission to make everything else that they say about me automatically true. I’ll own my stuff, but I feel like everybody else can own theirs, and that’s what’s been hard seeing everything back is now that everything has come out, anything that certain people say, post-show of whether it’s on their social media or in videos, people are assuming is true, and it’s just wrong.

Since they chose your team for you and set Team Blue up to have some trouble… if you could have formed your ideal team and chosen it yourself, who do you think you would have?  

Like I thought we were going to? Yeah, definitely Keanu, Tori, Sydney [Segal] would have been great. Bananas. At the time, I wanted Cara [Maria Sorbello] because she was my favorite female vet. Yeah, but no. Sydney, [Alexis] Lete because of her height. Josh, great competitor.

Speaking of Cara, I mean, y’all’s blow-up in the most recent episode is kind of fiery. What was it about her that changed your mind? You’re saying that you watched it before, she was your favorite when you came in.

Well, watching her and how she’s portrayed is a lot different than competing with her and alongside her, and seeing how she walks out on hard conversations and makes little comments like, “I’m getting my check regardless,” and cries on a heights trivia challenge and tries to hide behind people to not go into elimination, and it’s just … There were so many things. It’s just disappointment. It’s not who I remember seeing. It’s not. Even this season, you’re not even seeing half of it. So there’s just a lot.

Coming to this week’s daily, if you guys had won, what was your plan for the elimination?

We didn’t have one. Yeah, we didn’t know what it was going to be.

Fair. Did you feel confident that they were probably going to send you in, then?

Oh, I knew. I knew. I knew before even going into that if anybody, whether it was Adrienne [Naylor] or my team, if my name was on the talking block, it was going to be me. So it didn’t matter who was next to me. So I knew it was going to be me.

Gotcha. Since you’d already been in elimination with Nurys [Mateo] and won, did you feel confident when you thought you were going against Michele?

Oh, 100% yeah. But it’s hard, too, because a lot of times before eliminations, you have a little moment where maybe some of the vets or people who have done it before can give you little tidbits of information, but going into that elimination, one, I had never seen it, and I didn’t recognize it, and then two, nobody gave me any information at all. As a matter of fact, Cara was cheering for Michele or Tori — once it was announced Tori would go in….. The whole time she was cheering against me, so I had no vets giving me any help. It was just completely blind. So it’s scary.

Tori throwing herself in, were you expecting that at all? And what was your reaction?

No, nobody was expecting it, but I almost took it as a little bit of like, “All right, respect,” because clearly she saw what it was and recognized that I had a real chance to beat Michele in it, and so she was like, “All right, I got to take matters into my own hands and make sure that we have our full team.”

So you’re saying you had not known about the iconography of the Bananas backpack story and stuff like that?

No, I knew that, but it just looked like a ring, so I didn’t know what to expect because it’s not until you’re sitting in it when they start zip-tying you and stuff [that it’s clear]. So I just didn’t know from looking at it. I had seen the Bananas backpack.

If Michelle had been the one that you went against, do you feel like you would have walked away victorious?

I think so. I definitely think we’d have a different conversation right now.

Jonne Roriz / Paramount+

With Tori, what was the advantage that she had?

Well, I mean, she’s taller than me for starters. She lifts like 400 pounds. She’s definitely stronger than me. She’s seen it before. There’s a lot of things. Another thing, too, is looking back on it, there’s just things I would have done differently. Like when I went down in the sand, I went down to my right, so I was pulling with my weaker side, my left side, and then also, I put my mic pack under my harness, and I physically could not breathe because it’s pressing into my diaphragm. There’s just things that now, if I was to ever be in that position again, I know what I would do.

One and one’s not bad for a rookie season, by the way. But I do want to ask, after the tumult of this season — we don’t know the future of The Challenge, but is this something that you want to keep doing and try again?

Heck yeah! I feel like I’ve got something to prove now, and if I did come back, I’d be coming back with a vengeance, and may the bridges I burn light the way. And that’s what I can say.

I understand there’s not going to be a reunion, but is there anything that you wanted to say to people that throughout this season that you haven’t gotten to say and won’t?

I mean, the biggest thing is if you haven’t been able to see by now, things that have been edited out. Watching something from your couch is a whole different story from being there and going through it, and seeing how things are edited back, because a lot of times the stories that you’re seeing are not exactly how they happened. You know how they happened, and we’re all human, and we all make mistakes. And if we own up to our mistakes, that’s one thing. But I mean, at the end of the day, I just wish people would realize that it’s a TV show, and it’s not who I am.

The Challenge, Wednesdays, Paramount+