The Challenge Season 42 is here! Throughout the season, Parade will speak with the challengers who were eliminated from Cutthroat.Chris Underwood had a lot to live up to coming into Cutthroat. After reigning supreme in one of the most controversial wins in Survivor history, he had a lot to prove in the second season of The Challenge USA. And he did just that, winning four eliminations, conquering the final, and beating some of the most seasoned veterans in the show’s history. But would that success translate to the “flagship” proper?Well, for quite some time, it seemed to! Chris was made a captain of the Gray team, which he stacked with his Survivor allies Sydney Segal and Cassidy Clark. Additionally, he nursed a secret cross-team alliance from the beginning of the game with Tori Deal and Michele Fitzgerald, giving him protection from multiple sides. Indeed, through the first half of the season, any time Chris was close to sniffing the arena, he was kept safe, supported by the many people who had his back. It was to the point where, even when Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio wanted revenge against him for helping put him into the first elimination, he wasn’t able to get him in danger. It was all going so well……until it wasn’t. In a series of unfortunate events, to put it mildly, Season 42 had an obscene number of people leaving the game outside of elimination. Sydney was medically removed after injuring her knee. Cory Wharton left the house for a family emergency, while Josh Goldstein, Nelson Thomas, and Leo Dionocio were all ejected for breaking the “code of conduct.” In the blink of an eye, Chris lost all of his protection, the only man on a homunculus team of Blue and Gray. Forced into the next guy’s elimination by default, he tried to leverage his connection with Tori, asking for Justin Hinsley in the arena. And, while the request did lead to some strife (and claims of threats), Tori did grant it. But Chris soon succumbed to a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.” Despite a massive lead, struggle with the puzzle had Justin mounting yet another elimination comeback, giving him his first loss in The Challenge — and reality TV as a whole.Read on for our full interview with Chris. New episodes of The Challenge: Cutthroat drop Wednesdays on Paramount+.
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So, when you and I spoke following your win on USA Season 2, you had said that, given where you were in your life and the time commitment, you probably wouldn’t be able to cross over to the flagship. What caused you to change your mind?They changed the timing of the show! Now it’s six weeks, seven weeks. It’s a lot more palatable. Season 38 was what? 10 weeks, 11 weeks? Way different. So they shortened the amount of time for filming, which made a huge, huge difference. And then secondly, my wife is just a rock star, and our kids were a little bit out of that “up multiple times a night” phase. So it gave me some space to come out here and compete and go three for three. I’m dead focused on that goal. I wanted to be the only person to be undefeated in reality TV. So there was a lot riding on it, and I just felt like it was the right timing for me and in my personal life to make it happen.You seemed to have a massive lead on Justin going into the puzzle in that elimination. So what was it about the way the pieces fit together that had you fall so far behind that you’re talking with me today?This is my first exit interview. So congrats! You get to interview Chris on one of the first day of a loss in his reality television career. I mean, even at the very end of that, and I had him beat by 30 minutes, 40 minutes. I mean, the man was crying. He was in tears. Pieces were stuck. I had a lot of time to solve this. And the problem is, even at the very end, I told him, I was like, “That’s not going to go there. You kick it in, it’s going to get stuck.” Because that exact puzzle piece had gotten stuck that way for me a couple different times, and it took a lot of effort. These were 100-pound pieces. It was so heavy. It took a lot to get those unstuck.Even my team thought that I was going to just drop these pieces into the center, and that was going to be the final lock for the puzzle piece. And I had in my mind [that] you solve puzzle pieces by following a thread. And I had decided that that path on the way to solve that puzzle was not it, and I needed to do it a different way. Even though I had told my team, “It’s not going to fit like that.” And lo and behold, Justin’s last piece, he kicks it the same way I said it wasn’t going to work down, and it slid up in underneath that frame. And he just got it. He got it before I did. But 49 out of 50 times, I’m kicking his ass in the arena. It’s just a puzzle. If puzzles are based on IQ, then Christian Hubicki would have gotten his puzzle in three minutes, and he wouldn’t have gotten voted out of Survivor 50. So puzzles are equalizers; they’re just a crapshoot. You can prepare only up to a certain amount. You can be really bad at puzzles and solve it in five minutes. You can be really good at puzzles and it takes you an hour; that’s just how puzzles work. So I just I hate that I got out on puzzle. Who has a guy’s elimination puzzle at the end of a season of The Challenge? You go for bangers! People are waiting to see bangers. They’re not waiting to go out on a puzzle. It’s just really frustrating. But it is what it is.You speak about those pieces only fitting one way. And you really only had one path of your own towards the end of the game, considering you were the only man left on your team. You even vent this episode about how you have no options besides constantly going into elimination. Talk me through that frustration, considering your situation came from all the disqualifications that went down last episode.Well, you’ve got to think about this. Sydney, number one girl, goes down with an ACL tear, gets pulled from the game. Cory, my number one guy, goes home for medical reasons for his daughter. 24 hours later, three other guys get removed from the game, and I’m literally the only guy left. I gain captaincy back, and then teams merge, and I lose my captaincy again. And then we go into the challenge, and we win the challenge. And then it doesn’t matter. I still go in, and then I lose on a freaking puzzle. Just mind games throughout the end of that season. It was so, so frustrating.Again, I feel like I would have still picked Justin a bunch of times because, on a physical challenge, I have him beat. On a hand-eye coordination [elimination] like I won in USA2. I have him beat anything grappling in the air vertically. I literally retired Wes Bergmann on something where we have to hang. I felt like a lot of things thrown at me I can win. But the one thing I didn’t have control over inside of the arena was a puzzle. And lo and behold, that’s what I got. Let’s just talk about this for a second. When in the last 42 seasons has someone won a challenge as a team or individually, and it not mattered? That they still have to go into an elimination? If the season’s called Cutthroat, what’s more cutthroat to you: Having a team win and it not matter and still go in, or having the losing team have to nominate two of their people to go in against each other, whether it’s a guy or a girl? That’s cutthroat to me: Team against team blood. Not, “Hey, you’re gonna win and it doesn’t matter at all. You still have to go in and compete.” That doesn’t even make sense to me.So to answer your question, yeah, the triple DQ threw everyone for a loop, including the people calling the shots on what the heck the rest of the season was gonna look like. It’s just so frustrating. But the biggest takeaway is just the reality that there’s so much more serendipity in it when it comes to success than people realize. Like you can be doing everything right, and things outside of your control happen to you, and it still doesn’t allow you to reach the goal that you were working your ass off for. Sometimes you can get voted out on Day 8, and because the format is the format, you end up winning Survivor. So there’s just so much more serendipity. I can’t be too hard on myself because I have had wins in my past because a lot it fell down to serendipity and chance and just fate. I’ve also played a better game than I have in three seasons of reality television, and it wasn’t enough to win.Related: ‘The Challenge’ Star Deb Chubb Reveals Where Her Showmance with Will Stands Today (Exclusive)You talk about “the people calling the shots,” and I’d be remiss not to bring up Tori and Michele. Talk to me about your secret alliance, and how it came to a head during your last days in the game.I feel like if there’s one thing that I would have liked to see more is our relationships. But Tori literally was faking an ankle sprain in the first three days. Because she was like, “I’m gonna get picked by someone else unless I fake an ankle sprain. I want to be on your team.” I was like, “Okay!” [Laughs.] So she’s hobbling around the house with a fake ankle sprain to be on my team to be available for me to pick. So I think that we had a really good secret alliance going. We bounced a lot of ideas off of each other and kind of leveraged each other’s relationship to keep each other safe. I mean, I literally put Michele and Tori on the same team with Bananas and other vets so that they could keep each other safe. Tori’s a competitor, and I don’t necessarily mean that as a compliment right now. Tori is cutthroat, and she’s going to be someone who plays a game that looks good on paper, and you think you’re hunky-dory. But when it comes to her winning, she’s going to do what she can to outmaneuver you and beat you, and that’s what happened to me. I was just not on her team. And so when it comes down to winning the money, she wanted to trim the fat. And what was interesting is I was doing the exact same thing on the other side. She didn’t want CT in a final to drag him around and carry that weight. We did want CT in a final! We did want them to have to drag him around and carry that weight. So what do you do when you’re in an alliance where you’re literally at a stalemate on what you want? And unfortunately we had to use Lete as a bargaining chip, and I hated that that happened.We had a very honest conversation, me and Michele, where she felt threatened. And I’m like, “How do you think I feel?!” Now Tori’s making me see that I’m a mercenary for her dead weight. She wants me to take out CT. Okay, well, we also have really strong players. Do you want to have a strong player? And the next time this comes around for you, it’s up to Tori. Let Tori decide what she’s going to do. And so I wasn’t the only person on Team Gray trying to look out for me. Everyone on the team wanted to keep me till the end because I’m an asset to run a final. So it definitely deteriorated at the end there. And again, with the triple DQ and then Cory leaving, we wouldn’t have had to be in that position. But everyone’s game got completely turned upside down because of that.What was the dynamic like on the new Gray team, considering how leery things were with Cassidy, plus the new members from the old Blue team?I mean, a lot of hormones! A lot of hormones on Team Gray at that point in time. I mean, being a girl dad and being married for 10 years, I know when to stay out of it. I know when to just keep my head down and not get into it. But yeah, there was so much drama and emotions were so high. Those girls were really really trying to protect themselves. And what ended up happening was I knew I wasn’t going to be captain. And I knew the reason Michele popped off on this challenge was that, right before that, we had to pick captains, and then we found out that it didn’t matter. Well, shoot! If I had known that the next elimination was going to be another guy’s elimination just after four guys left the game, then I would have fought hard as hell to be captain! But I didn’t know. We thought, “Okay, four guys. So the girls are going to be on the chopping block, and who do we want to have available?” And we wanted to have Anna Leigh as an option, and we knew that Cassidy was going to try to keep Anna Leigh safe. And so, if it wasn’t going to be me to be captain, and it wasn’t going to be Cara Maria to be captain, then how do me and Cara Maria work together to kind of find neutral ground? And Adrienne was the best neutral ground that we had. And I knew that, if it came down to the brass tacks who I wanted to run a final with, it would have been Adrienne, Cara Maria and Lete, just because I knew what they were capable of. And I respect Anna Leigh, and I respect Cassidy; I don’t have anything against them. But this is a team format, and there is a pecking order on your starting five. And so if we were to put Cassidy in the captain position, then Cara Maria and Lete were going to be on the chopping block, and I didn’t want that to happen.Let’s bring things back to where our conversation started. Now that you have made your debut on the flagship, would you want to come back to the show?I mean, three for four sounds a lot better than two for three! [Laughs.] But if it comes down to it, I mean, I think that there’s other there’s other shows out there I’d love to do. I’d love to do Traitors. I’d love to do 99 to Beat. I’d love to play another game. I think the biggest thing for me is just film time. It’s really, really hard to commit for six to eight weeks on anything, you know, even Survivor. It’s got to be the right timing. And I’ve said no to The Challenge several times before. But then they shortened the production time, and that gave me a little bit more peace of mind that I wasn’t going to be out there for 11 weeks or whatever. So I think, if the timing’s right and the opportunity comes around, you might see me again. But I think the curtain has closed on my Challenge tenure. I’m good. I think I’ve done what I needed to do.
Related: The Real Reason Why Josh, Nelson and Leo Got Kicked Off ‘The Challenge’
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