Hollywood Actor Turned Climbing Podcaster Is Making Struggle Relatable
Ryan Devlin wants you to know that he’s trying to send his first 5.13. His goal is The Force (5.13a), a power-endurance testpiece on tight pockets and small crimps at the Dark Side in the Red River Gorge, Kentucky. But Devlin’s no spraylord; in fact, far from it. The creator and host of The Struggle Climbing Show podcast, 150-plus episodes deep since Devlin launched it in March 2022, wants you to know this because he wants his struggle—and that of his top-climber guests, from Adam Ondra to Emily Harrington to Chris Sharma to Favia Dubyk to Lynn Hill to Allison Vest to Hazel Findlay to so many others—to climb his hardest to be relatable. It’s here, where the rubber meets the road at whatever grade, and in whatever way we are pushing ourselves, that the sport becomes most interesting. Because, as Devlin puts it, “We’re all going through the same thing.”
Devlin, 44, lives with his wife and kids in Louisville, Kentucky, two hours from the Red, with the packed schedule you’d expect of a climber-dad hustling to make ends meet: just enough time to hit the gym, MoonBoard, and do max hangs on workdays, with a day or two outside each week. But his life now is much slower than in the past two decades, when he worked as a Hollywood actor and producer, with guest spots on big-name shows like Veronica Mars, Grey’s Anatomy, and Cougar Town, as well as a five-year stint producing and hosting the MTV dating show Are You the One? and a gig as creator and producer of Idiotest on the Game Show Network. “Allison Vest and Matt Fultz are big fans of Are You the One?, and they kept asking me to talk about the show when they came on The Struggle,” he jokes. To this day, Devlin still gets recognized in public, mainly for Veronica Mars.
“80 percent of the roles I got were real bad guys,” he says. “They’re fun to play, since you get to stretch outside of what you would typically be in your day to day.” On Veronica Mars, Devlin played the irredeemable psychopath Mercer Hayes, who would drug and date-rape the women at his college and shave their heads, keeping a box of their hair in his dorm room. He also had fight scenes with the show’s titular character, played by the actress Kristen Bell—a good friend to this day—in which Bell stabbed him in the leg with a unicorn horn, and he tased her and punched her in the face. “When I’m grocery shopping, I’ll have people say, ‘Oh my God, it’s Mercer!’” says Devlin. “I was basically a kid when I shot that.”
Devlin grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, living the “upper-middle-class suburbia life.” He was a high-energy kid who got into acting in fifth grade, when his teacher, witnessing Devlin’s knack for causing trouble as the class clown, began to mentor him in acting. Devlin became involved with a local children’s theater group that put on productions like Charlotte’s Web and musicals, but left acting in high school to pursue ice hockey and lacrosse. He dove back into thespianism in college at Michigan State University, where he was in the filmmakers club, took acting and improv classes, and worked at local television stations. Devlin’s major was business with a restaurant-management focus; acting was more of an extracurricular gig.
After graduation, however, Devlin gave himself a year to make it as an actor. He turned down a competitive job at a Midwest restaurant group—telling himself he could pursue the position again later—packed up his mom’s car, pooled his savings from his bartending job, and moved to Los Angeles. There, he landed a job tending bar at the Chart House in Malibu, a seaside restaurant where celebrities and Hollywood types gather. Like something out of a script, Devlin met his manager after she left him her card at the bar. In the meantime, Devlin had been taking acting classes and gotten his Screen Actors Guild card, landing his first two, non-speaking roles—in a Bud Light and a Lenscrafters commercial.
“My story is unique and not unique at all,” he jokes. “My manager [who represents him to this day] decided to represent me with zero credits to my name, fresh off the bus from Michigan.” He was only 23, but quickly started booking more work—and never came back for that restaurant-management job.
Devlin looks back on Veronica Mars as one of his fondest acting memories. He was filming with fellow actors Kristen Bell, Ryan Hansen, and Chris Lowell in San Diego, and the young cast quickly formed a little community. “Going to do that show felt like camp,” he says. “Each day, you’d meet down in the hotel lobby for a bite, all riding in the van together to set, and after you wrapped, you’d hang out around the set or all go out to a movie or the mall.” (He and Bell went on to form This Saves Lives, a give-back company that donates proceeds from its snack bars to fight childhood hunger. It’s part of the philanthropic work Devlin’s always done, including his current partnership with the Honnold Foundation to offset carbon produced by making The Struggle, and the two weeks each summer he was a volunteer counselor at Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang camp for children with serious illnesses.)
Memorably, Devlin also played a character in the multi-camera sitcom Grounded for Life called Mocha Joey, a hyperactive type perpetually hopped up on coffee who talked with a fast, high-pitched voice. “It was silly, but the audience loved it,” he says. “It wasn’t grounded and it wasn’t gritty and it wasn’t Daniel Day Lewis, but it was frickin’ fun and I got immediate audience feedback, and I loved it just as much as I’ve loved the dramatic or more ‘serious’ roles.”
Devlin began climbing in 2010 at the Rockreaction gym in Santa Monica after he wandered in, curious, one day en route to his regular gym, where the treadmill and weights just weren’t cutting it to quiet the usual stressful thoughts we all have. Bouldering was immersive, however, and his connection with it was immediate. From there, he and two college friends began taking trips to local Southern California crags: Joshua Tree, Tahquitz, Suicide, Malibu Creek, Echo Cliffs, and the seaside slab of Point Dume. Devlin’s focus was multi-pitch trad climbing, a discipline that remains close to his heart, with ticks of iconic climbs like White Punks on Dope (5.10a) at the Needles and Epinephrine (5.9) in Red Rock.
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Devlin started The Struggle in 2022 when he found himself with more downtime after stepping back from the Hollywood rat race. (He and his family moved to Louisville in 2017; one of the first things he did there was found a nonprofit forest preschool.) Devlin, a self-described “restless type A,” saw a need for a podcast that kept a tight focus on the things in climbing he cared about—so he created it.
“One thing missing in other podcasts was structure—the conversations I was listening to were very interesting, but tended to be wandering,” Devlin says. “I wanted to get to the goods, and I didn’t want to spend three hours wading through it.” He created a chapter structure that his episodes, kept to a lean 60 to 80 minutes, would follow: training, nutrition, tactics, mental game, and purpose. “Every show has the same chapters because I wanted to compare between athletes the differences in each area of climbing focus,” says Devlin. “I wanted the episodes to be nutrient-dense, with good, actionable takeaways for my own training and climbing.” Each episode also leads off with what struggle means to the guest. On a recent episode, the pro climber and YouTuber/filmmaker Anna Hazelnutt said that struggle, for her, was a “combination of hardship but also the grit to get through it,” and then shared that her recent social-media fame has let her embrace her innate high sensitivity and big emotions, things that had left her feeling ashamed and misunderstood as a child.
Devlin is currently working on a video series, Strugging With…, on which former guests of the podcast come on: so, Struggling with Alex Honnold, Ravioli Biceps, Alex Megos, and so on. In the show, Devlin goes with athletes to the crag, filming everything. “It’s one part climbing show, one part Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” says Devlin. “I spend a day out with them; we struggle and fail and laugh, and then we end each episode in an ice plunge to get them out of their element.” On the Honnold episode, both he and Honnold fall at the chains—too pumped to clip—on their respective projects in the Clear Light Cave near Las Vegas, a classic “struggle” moment. “It’s not about doing the thing; it’s about the moments between the climbing,” Devlin says.
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The Interview
Climbing: How did you get into climbing?
Ryan Devlin: I’d always been a climbing kid—I used to climb to the top of every tree in our yard and jump between the treehouses we’d built. I’d climb the trees during windstorms, just to ride them. My parents would yell at me to come down because they didn’t want me to get struck by lightning. It [was] similar to any climbing: the climber knows that they’re safe and in control, but from the outside you put all these scary thoughts into them.
I was 30 years old when I started actually rock climbing. [When I went into Rockcreation…,] I pulled onto one boulder problem, and I was hooked. My mind was turned off, and I wasn’t thinking about any stressors or work or financial things; I was just fully in the moment. Not too long after, two buddies from Michigan State moved out who were trad climbers, going to Tahquitz and Suicide and Joshua Tree every weekend, and they invited me out. I threw up on the approach to my first route outdoors [the four-pitch Fingertrip (5.7) on Tahquitz]; the approach was 45 minutes straight uphill on switchbacks, and these guys were moving. But I was psyched. I love sport climbing and I love the movement, but feeling a full day of connection in nature is what’s in the soft center of my Twinkie heart.
Climbing: On your podcast, you often talk about the Red River Gorge. Did you move to Kentucky specifically for the climbing?
Devlin: I didn’t, actually. We’re both in the business—my wife, Kara, is a screenwriter—and we had our son in Santa Monica. We knew we wanted to adopt another child, and we started thinking about what it was like to raise kids in Los Angeles, and the cost and the pollution and the congestion and being far from family. We thought, “Hey, let’s move to Kentucky”—which is where Kara grew up, plus her family’s here. We decided that it would be healthier and a better way of living.
We moved here in 2017; we went from paying $4,000 a month to rent a three-bedroom house in LA to buying a four-bedroom house in Louisville, and our mortgage is $1,000 a month. When you don’t have to work as much to make ends meet, you don’t have to run as fast on the treadmill. After we moved, we found that we could work a little less and be more present with our children. And then, as it turns out, the Red River Gorge is pretty frickin’ awesome!
Climbing: Did you dig the Red right away?
Devlin: I wasn’t much of a sport climber, and it was hard for me to get comfortable initially. I had a very, very deep fear of falling, having climbed so much trad and not wanting to test my garbage placements. [On Devlin’s first trad lead, a 5.5 on the Blob at Joshua Tree, all his placements—nuts—lifted out, and his friend, upon seconding the pitch, said, “Congratulations on your first free solo!”] So I had to put a lot of intentionality around getting my mindset right and facing my fear of falling—and now I can climb at my limit and take swing after swing. Coming from doing slabs and jam cracks, I also wasn’t used to the endless pockets and steep style at the Red; but I didn’t care too much, as I wasn’t that into performance climbing until a few years ago.
Climbing: Is that where the idea of The Struggle came from—your “baptism by fire” at the Red?
Devlin: Basically, I’m uncomfortable when I have too much downtime. And when we moved out here and were able to work less, I found myself with a lot more downtime. At first, I channeled that into the area’s first and at the time only forest preschool—an outdoor preschool for kids ages 3 to 6, open year-round in all weather. [The nonprofit Thrive Forest School, held in the Creasey Mahan Nature Preserve, is going strong today, though Devlin handed off the directorship a year and a half ago.] I started that because my son’s preschool kept the kids inside when it rained, and we’re big on just being out in all the elements. We needed somewhere for him to go.
After the school was up and rolling, I needed to do something else, and since I wasn’t acting as much, intentionally—or maybe unintentionally; the phone wasn’t ringing either!—I got into performance climbing. I met up with a group of guys who were also into trying to get better and train and get out to the Red. As part of that, I started consuming every piece of climbing media available. In devouring all the podcasts and YouTube videos, I recognized that I was missing something. There was something in a climbing show that I wanted that wasn’t available, and so I created it.
Climbing: A big part of The Struggle is an acknowledgment that the process is the same for all of us, regardless of the grade. What brought you to that realization?
Devlin: Two aspects resonate for me. One is the universality of a climber’s experience. When I was trying to break into 5.11 at the Red, I went through, experienced, and ultimately struggled with the same things that I’m struggling with now as I’m trying to break into 5.13, [and] the same things Jonathan Siegrist was struggling with when he was trying to break into 5.14 and 5.15. Or Michaela Kiersch when she was trying to send La Rambla. It’s very universal; it’s scalable. And what comes with that is relatability.
Oftentimes we put our heroes on these pedestals: “They’re gifted.” “They’re a genetic freak.” What you see far too often on social media is just the green check mark or a tiny little bit of struggle, and then, “Oh, I sent the thing!” We miss out on so much of the process that—as I’ve heard from so many of the world’s best climbers—is the same for all of us. If somebody is struggling with their training or their recovery or their nutrition or their mental game—perhaps they share a fear of falling like Tom Randall, who has been very open about that—that’s relatable. I feel like, “OK, we’re on this journey together. And you’re not just this untouchable god who goes out and sends everything.”
Climbing: You often talk about the Red on the podcast, and your goals out there. What’s your motivation for sharing these routes, like Jesus Wept [5.12d, which Devlin sent in autumn 2023] and The Force [a 5.13a he has been working]?
Devlin: Early on, I wasn’t sharing my journey at all, and I started getting listeners sending me messages like, “What are you climbing on?” And so I started to weave little things in here and there. Now it’s become a bit of a runner for the show. Hopefully, I’m striking the right balance—I’m self-conscious about whether it’s applicable to a lot of people, but I have found joy in sharing my journey to push the grades and get better.
But it cuts both ways. Sometimes, I’m like, “Why did I announce that I want to climb my first 5.13? Talk about struggle, you know?” The Force hasn’t gone down, and I thought it would…Mainly, I just hope it’s motivating for listeners, me talking about the process and my training and so on. It’s like, “Oh, if I want to get better at this thing, I can, too.” It’s not like there’s some secret sauce.
Climbing: Do you foresee doing The Struggle for a while?
Devlin: Yes, I love doing it. My wife jokes that I’ve taken the longest, hardest road possible to meeting my heroes, but I’m sure I’ll keep going. I’ve got a deep background now as a host and a producer […] and I want to keep giving back to this climbing community that I’ve gained so much from. The podcast is more of a calling right now than acting—this could be my job, if it could grow a little bit. I’m pouring everything I have into it, just trying to make it better and make good content and work with cool climbers. I see a path here, and I’d love to be on the path for The Struggle to be a full-time job.
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