‘The Challenge’ Star Nurys Says She and Olivia Are ‘Working Towards a Friendship’: We ‘Talk’ a Lot

The Challenge stars Nurys Mateo and Olivia Kaiser are putting their issues behind them. In an exclusive interview with In Touch, Nurys revealed where the two stand one year after their season 39 beef.

“Me and her actually do talk. We talk quite a lot,” Nurys dished. “We are not … I wouldn’t say best friends or anything like that, but we are definitely, like, working towards a friendship. It’s slow but it’s there. I’m happy for her.”

Olivia, 32, and Nurys, 29, were best friends before filming season 39 of The Challenge, but gameplay and a rumor that Olivia was bad mouthing Nurys behind her back tore them apart. They didn’t talk for months, but came face-to-face when they were both cast as part of the same team on season 40.

“We didn’t talk at all in our real lives until we got to the hotel [for season] 40,” Nurys admitted. “The only other person I had as, like, a girlfriend was Michele [Fitzgerald]. So you’re, like, trying to plan your outfits for the first few days – interviews, cast photos, all that stuff – and I was going to Michele being like, ‘Do you like this?’ Or she was asking me for advice. And so that also meant Olivia was there. But we kept the conversation very short, very sweet. Honestly, it was barely even a friendship. We kind of just were coexisting together.”

Nurys said she and Olivia wanted to wait for cameras to start filming before they had a real conversation about what went down. “Obviously we saw last season where a lot of ‘he said, she said’ happened because cameras weren’t around,” the MTV star explained. “It was a very hard thing because sometimes it seemed like she was remorseful and sometimes it didn’t. So I was very nervous if I should be accepting of her apology or accepting of a friendship. But I will say, we got into season 40 and I missed her and Michele. And she was very apologetic. So I wanted to accept her apology and forgive her. I definitely won’t forget because that would be silly of me to do.”

The Are You the One? alum revealed that the two “cried a bit” and “laughed a bit” and even “argued a bit” as they hashed things out. “It was such a great conversation in the end,” she shared. “We cried it out, we hugged it out, and then we were like, ‘OK, now we’re good.’ It did feel good to just, like, let some of that weight go.”

Unfortunately, Nurys was the female loser for era 4 in the first challenge on season 40, which meant she was automatically sent into elimination. Michele, 34, was safe because she was the female winner, which meant Nurys would be going against Olivia, Kaycee Clark or Jenny West. She asked to have Olivia as her competitor – partly because she felt she had the best chance to beat her, and partly because she knew it would be good TV.

“I knew nobody would want to see Nurys against Kaycee. Nobody wants to see Nurys against Jenny. The pay-per-view event that people are gonna come for is Nurys vs. Olivia,” she said. “Regardless of what the elimination was or what the outcome was, that is what they wanted to see, and that is what I wanted to give them.”

Olivia beat Nurys in a hall brawl elimination, sending Nurys home in the very first week. However, she’s hopeful for where things will stand between them in the future.

“One thing I’ve noticed so much is that these people [on the show] have such long years of history together, good and bad, but they will always stick together because they’ve gone through so much,” Nurys explained. “And if we’re going to be the next generation, we kind of have to be the people to stick together. It only makes sense for us moving forward to have each other’s backs the same way that they do.”

Nurys also confirmed that she and Michele are in a “great place” and that she was able to forgive her after season 39 because Michele “didn’t let me be mad at her.” She added, “Michele was apologetic over text, over Instagram, in her interviews. We talked so much that we let it go quickly. I knew for a fact that she was sorry for the things she did. It was very hard for me to hold a grudge. I think that’s why it was easy to hold a grudge with Olivia because me and her never really spoke outside of 39.”