Skateboarding sensation Ryan Sheckler has opened up about shooting to fame on his MTV reality series Life of Ryan in 2007 – and it doesn’t sound like it was all it was cracked up to be.
Now 31, Sheckler got candid with In Depth with Graham Bensinger about why the popular reality show “rocked” him to his core and left him “borderline traumatised”.
Reflecting on a moment in which Sheckler was filmed ending a relationship with his girlfriend at the time, the skater said he then realised the intrusive nature of the series, and after three seasons decided to walk away.
“That’s already a very intimate piece of your life that you don’t want people to know about or see,” he said.
“So, we break up once and then cameras are on, we break up again, cut. Now, the mood’s really awkward. And then, you know, they come over to me and they’re like, ‘Hey, that wasn’t enough. We need to do it again.'”
“And so that’s where the show became acting and it became like this thing where it was like, ‘This is not what we signed up for and this is not what it started out as.'”
To add to this, Ryan said that his nickname among crew became ‘Cryin’ Ryan’ after the then teen was seen distraught upon finding out his parents were getting divorced.
“They were making fun of me for crying about hearing that my parents were gonna get divorced, and I heard about it on camera,” he claimed of those who worked on set.
“That was the first time I heard about it. So I cried.”
Despite calling it quits in 2008, Sheckler admitted that the series left him with emotional scars that continued into adulthood, saying the show “broke my heart”.
“I didn’t get into a relationship after the show until I was 25 years old,” he said.
Sheckler elaborated: “I didn’t want to have to go through a breakup again. I have a heart, man, and I have very strong emotions and I do not like hurting people’s feelings… To blatantly have to hurt people’s feelings over and over again for the sake of television—for ratings literally—no, it rocked me.”
Despite the tribulations he faced, Ryan said he still wouldn’t change a thing.
“It served its purpose,” he said.
“I learned the lessons I was supposed to learn from doing it, yeah, I wouldn’t take it back either. Bro, I was 17 years old. I was a kid. I was a kid that got an incredible opportunity, was in a very interesting part of my career, where it just seemed to be going up and up and up, and I figured this was the next best step.”
Check out Ryan Sheckler on In Depth with Graham Bensinger:
