Johnny Bananas breaks down the big rules twist ahead of 'The Challenge: Total Madness' premiere

A Q&A with the star making his 20th appearance.

Like everyone else, Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio is back home as the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing continues.

In fact, between his constant appearances on The Challenge and his hosting duties for 1st Look, it’s the longest he’s been home uninterrupted in quite some time.

Although he’s not thinking about retirement from the show he’s won a record six times, he did have this to say in a conversation with For The Win ahead of Wednesday’s premiere of Total Madness on MTV: “I kind of needed this break a little bit, and I know that’s not necessarily true for everybody. But I will say after this last season of The Challenge, a break was definitely needed.”

“Every season that goes by, a little piece of me dies,” he added, “and I know I’ve only got so many of these in the tank, and I will say after this last season, I felt every day of 37 years old.”

But the hunger for that elusive seventh title hasn’t gone away. It’s just that he has to train twice as hard and in smarter ways to compete with younger castmates. And of course since The Challenge is sport, he compared himself to a veteran pitcher.

“When they lose their fastball, they have to get crafty and they have to locate their pitches better and more filthy. They have to change up their game to coincide with what their body allows them to do.”

Here’s more of our Q&A with Bananas:

How did the new rule about needing to win an elimination to make a final change the game, and how did it change for you specifically?

It didn’t change it at all for me. If anything, it leveled the playing field. I’ve been saying for a while, there are certain players — I won’t throw anyone under the bus here, but everybody who watches knows — who go in and based solely on their intimidating political game or physical game, they’ll never be voted in. They can play the middle of the field and just be wishy-washy and make it to a final. Then there are the people who have to work, i.e. me. Out of 20 seasons I’ve been on, there have been two or three where I haven’t gone in. So I know every season, I’m going to go in, maybe multiple times. It made people who get a free ride earn it. I think it’s a great twist and it really reset and reshuffle the deck from last season when you had 12 or 13 people in a final and only four had seen elimination.

Did it change the strategy for others? I imagine you have to think about whether you want to go in now or later.

Completely. Every season you do, you have to change your strategy. The one common theme, however, is stay out elimination. That’s your goal. This season, it’s like having to retrain a dog to not be aggressive. (You think) “Well, wait a minute, now I have to go in.” So what you see is instead of people fighting not to go in, is people fighting to go in.

Like you said, people were fighting early on, and then I thought, what if there’s a twist and there’s a purge or you have to go in again? Everyone had this premonition at different times about when to go in. There were so many more twists to elimination than there have ever been. … Every season coming in, I’m always wondering what they’re going to do different. They made us fight for oxygen this season because we lived in a bunker. So they had to check the oxygen levels every day to make sure it was 21 percent oxygen or we would suffocate.

I saw that! You were living in a place without windows! And was there no swimming pool as usual?

We had an above-ground pool in a silo that was probably 40 degrees at its warmest.

Can I get a quick scouting report on the rookies?

In my opinion, it was a pretty good rookie class. Fessy is a Division I college football player, guy’s an absolute monster. You have a guy from Survivor and Big Brother, Kaycee won Big Brother. So you had this new group of rookies. There’s a large Big Brother contingency — Fessy, Swaggy, Bayleigh, Kaycee — that all knew each other. Not only do you have people who play an intense mind game, but they know each other. It was an alliance that was ready-made. It was a dominant rookie class. They didn’t make things easy for us.