Ryan Andrews has revealed taking part in RTÉ’s Ultimate Hell Week pushed him to make a huge life decision.
The 28-year-old was one of the final recruits on the series, which came to an end on Wednesday night.
Out of 18 celebrity contestants, the Fair City star successfully completed the gruelling final tests alongside Peter Stringer and Marc O’Neill.
Speaking on the Tis Yourself podcast, the actor opened up about his time on the show, and admitted the tasks were “ten times worse than what you see on camera”.
The series was filmed back in May, and Ryan confessed the experience pushed him to propose to his longterm girlfriend Michaela O’Neill.
The couple announced their engagement in August, after 15 years together.
Ryan said: “There’s a part in the show that’s when I thought about proposing. I was kind of going, this is really rough, this is horrible and it makes you think what you want and what’s happening and that’s the thing I thought about.”
“You go through something like that, it does make you think of what you want to do and that was the first thing.”
Opening up about his experience, the 28-year-old said he had “post traumatic stress” after filming the show.
“There are other things that happen in the show that genuinely were really traumatic,” he said.
“There’s one of two moments in the show that I’ve never experienced in my life. It gets to places, they go to deep.”
“They said we’re going to get your souls in a couple of hours, I didn’t even know what that sentence meant… But they get in and if you’re physically strong, they’ll get you mentally.”
“If you’re mentally strong they’ll get you physically. If you’re both, they’ll get you emotionally and that’s where they got me.”
Ryan admitted it took him a long time to recover from Hell Week, because it was so “extreme”.
He said: “It took me a while to be honest. Genuinely, it’s not talking saying ‘it was so extreme.’ It actually was.”
“To get back to normal life, to get back to eating. I literally ate a bowl of cereal every five minutes and I was eating with my hands, I was like a caveman.”
“Sweating at night, I wasn’t sleeping at night, I was jumping up in the middle of the night going, ‘they’re coming.’ Even thinking about it now I am actually sweating.”
“I love the sea and the sea plays a big part in this show. I was in the sea every single day, don’t feel the cold but I didn’t get into the sea til eight weeks later…”
“I had Post Traumatic Stress from it. They explain that and they had psychologists and all that at the end of the show that talk through things.”
“And some things that happened in the show that we actually needed psychiatrists for as well. It took a long time to get back to normal but definitely we got a lot of life lessons from it.”
