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It’s been nearly two decades since Spencer Pratt was introduced to (or unleashed on) the world, as Brody Jenner’s best friend via Fox’s short-lived Princes of Malibu, a reality show that L.A. native Pratt had developed and sold in his early 20s. Two years later, in 2007, Pratt and Jenner infiltrated season 2 of MTV’s The Hills, the Laguna Beach spinoff about a glamorous friend group in the Hollywood Hills, by dating Heidi Montag and Lauren “LC” Conrad, respectively. That’s where Pratt cemented his place as a chaotic reality-TV villain — the constant antagonist to star Conrad — and wrote a whole new blueprint. Since then, his arc has been unpredictable and surprising, most recently with the announcement on Jan. 7 — the anniversary of the Palisades Fire, which claimed his house — that he’d be running for mayor of Los Angeles.
Community activism may be top of mind these days, but Pratt is open about the fact that fame and money have driven most decisions he’s made, from staging paparazzi shoots and faking divorce filings with Montag to appearing on shows like 2009’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! “I was never thinking of it like ‘villain’ in a negative way,” he tells Us. Then things got away from him. “Throughout the fame journey, it gets heightened, and then you’re emotional and making emotional decisions. It goes sideways.”
He points to a particularly low time after The Hills wrapped in 2010, when he and Montag lost touch with reality, “worrying about the Galactic Command and trying to fight evil.” They moved to Costa Rica, where he was arrested for gun possession; for a while, they lived in a state of suspicion. The next few years were populated by stints on shows like Celebrity Wife Swap (2014) and Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars (2015), and a vague sense of irrelevance.
Then in 2017, unexpected popularity on Snapchat revealed a new version of Pratt. He was carefree, funny, a new dad, running a successful crystal business, obsessed with hummingbirds and always listening to Taylor Swift’s Reputation. He still doesn’t totally understand how he went from most-hated to Snapchatter of the Year (yes, that’s a real award he won), but he doesn’t take it for granted.
“In that little piece of time, everywhere I was going, people were like, ‘I love your Snapchat! I love you!’” he recalls. “I thought it was just the most Groundhog Day-esque, boring content. But some people messaged to say they loved it because they knew exactly what was going to happen every day. That was the best time; energy-wise, financially, it was so good.”
Good but short-lived: Covid shut down Pratt Daddy Crystals, and the 2025 Palisades Fire claimed the Pratt home (as well as his parents’), where he and Montag lived with their sons, Gunner, 8, and Ryker, 3. That pushed him into Villain Era 2.0, only this time, Enemy No. 1 isn’t LC, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he blames for the fires. (Pratt, Montag and other Pacific Palisades residents are currently suing the city of Los Angeles and the LAFD for mismanagement.)
This July has Us asking a very important question: Where were you when the series finale of The Hills aired? The Moment There were plenty of occasions over the years that had fans of the MTV hit grabbing their BlackBerry to debrief with their friends over BBM: Lauren Conrad not going to Paris or the […]
He covers all of it — every phase, from pot stirrer to community activist (with a combined audience of more than 4 million across Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram — in his memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain (out Jan. 27 from Gallery Books). “When you start reading and you really go through everything, it all makes sense how I lost the plot,” Pratt tells Us about his journey. The process of writing and reflecting “made me very upset, mad and also appreciative that I am where I am. I could be dead.”
Talking to Pratt across two lengthy interviews raised as many questions as it answered. Decked out in Montag merch — his wife is also active on social and continues to work on her music career — he got emotional discussing the loss of his home but also joyfully confessed that his LC impression for the audiobook recording was deemed “too mean.”
We tried to figure out, as best we could, the real Spencer Pratt, meta implications and all: Us Weekly has, of course, been along for his entire ride, covering the ups and downs of the Speidi-verse for years. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment,” he says about sitting down with Us.
The Hills Are Alive
Pratt’s villain origin story evolved out of the sense that he was using Montag when they were on The Hills — that she was a damsel in distress and he the big, bad, opportunistic wolf. He challenges that characterization. “The Hills didn’t show Heidi’s dating game. They didn’t really show the Heidi I met,” he says. “If they had, it would have been so much more empowering for women, because she wasn’t ever a sucker or a victim. She was hip to the game and was like, ‘I’m having fun. I don’t care.’”
Pratt and Montag were a team, and a falling out with Conrad made them feel like they had to play their part. “Once there was the separation of Heidi and Lauren, we didn’t have a choice. We have to be unlikable if you want to get the paycheck,” he says.
As in other memoirs by Hills alums — including Audrina Patridge and Pratt’s sister, Stephanie — Confessions details the postproduction tools used on the show to reframe and re-create scenes for maximum drama, including Frankenbiting (patching together disparate audio clips) and Automated Dialogue Replacement. He says, for example, that he and Montag filmed the notorious season 2 scene — in which he kicks Montag out of his car for refusing to move in with him — 12 times. Also? They were already living together.
Which doesn’t mean he was an angel — or is one now. Between seasons 2 and 3, Montag got a call from a panicked Conrad about rumors that her ex-boyfriend Jason Wahler was shopping an apparent sex tape. A giddy, eavesdropping Pratt texted celebrity blogger Perez Hilton about it, hoping Wahler would be the new bad guy. Asked whether he would leak the sex-tape rumor today, Pratt says, “100 percent” — but with a better strategy: “Could I have gone to NBC News?” he ponders.
Some fans may be disappointed that he doesn’t express more regret. Others might find it refreshing. For Pratt, he’s just a product of his environment, “I’ll play in the gutter,” he says. “The thing about reality TV and this type of fame is it’s not classy. I’m being judged as if I’m Timmy Chalamet.” He says his “tier of what’s right and what’s wrong” is distorted.
Losing the Plot
For a time, Pratt could manage the fame, saying he and Montag didn’t even watch The Hills. “I was in a fantasyland of what we did and what ended up on TV, post-Frankenbiting and editing,” he says, pointing out the pair weren’t even asked to be guests on The Hills: The After Show: “We would’ve been like, ‘No, that’s not real,’” he says.
Willingly giving up control of an edit for years suggests Pratt doesn’t care about public perception, but here comes another contradiction: He admits to voting in Us’ reader polls “for a scary amount of hours” over the years to skew them in his favor, but says he did it to show how “bogus” results could be.
Pratt and Montag’s final episodes of The Hills covered Montag’s 2009 plastic surgeries — she famously had 10 procedures in one day — and Pratt’s over-the-top antics (sample dialogue: calling Montag’s mother “just a vagina”). The audience seemed to collectively agree that they’d gone too far, but Pratt says, “If anything, I watch it, and I’m like, ‘Man, I should have been crazier.’”
He does acknowledge that the pair’s post-Hills paranoid period was not good. “We were like space cadets… thinking we were trying to help the universe and the multiverse — way past spiritual,” he says, revealing that the twosome had a “spiritual bodyguard” who encouraged them to microdose LSD and other hallucinogens for “protection.” He now says, “You just can’t lose touch with reality, because you still have to live in the flesh and be a normal citizen. We’re not in spaceships … I’m aware of balance now.”
Rich Man’s World
Money comes up with Pratt naturally and often. He admits that he would have even left Montag at the altar for the show if she were on board and the price was right: “I think every single person in the entertainment business thinks exactly like me, they just learn to not say it because it’s not appropriate.”
In fact, he’d still do “pretty much” anything for the paycheck. “I’m a mercenary,” he says, quickly clarifying that he’s an expensive one: “Millions of dollars. I need money to rebuild a house. I’m not talking little checks.”
He says, for example, that he turned down a full-time role on E!’s House of Villains (though he did guest-host when Joel McHale was unavailable). “But if they came with a real check,” he adds, “make me the billboard!” (It feels important to mention that Pratt was not paid for this interview.)
The only part of his life that’s not for sale — and inspires some regret — involves his family. His sister, Stephanie, entered The Hills in season 3, and the siblings had a turbulent ride on screen and off. “In a perfect world, I would have taken a lot less money to not have any family on the show,” he says. “That’s definitely the line.”
In his book, Pratt writes about Stephanie, who has struggled with substance abuse since high school, but makes a point to mostly retell stories she included in her own book. “I try to think of it as just the truth,” he tells Us. “It impacted my life.”
As recently as 2019, Stephanie said the two were not speaking, but the siblings sat next to each other at Thanksgiving 2025, and he says, “we’re the same we’ve always been… minus [she doesn’t have] a financial reason to attack myself or my wife.” Pratt acknowledges that the statement sounds “unfortunate,” but it’s part of the game. “That is this dark underworld of fame that we’ve all grown up in now.”
If that’s true, doesn’t he worry about how his kids would be affected by a reality-TV return? You can probably guess the answer. He says he’d tell his sons, “‘I’m glad you like the new house we were able to rebuild. It has a little plaque in the front of it: This house was built by villainous behavior on television.’”
A New Era
In fact, he’d prefer the low-stakes drama of The Hills to his recent reality, wherein he takes meetings with federal officials to discuss the city’s and state’s fire negligence. He describes his community work as “too real… I want to get back on a reality show that is completely fake and play pretend so badly.”
Although Pratt writes that fame can be an “expensive loneliness,” the fires exposed a new layer of isolation. “It’s worse than ever now because I still need to use fame to rebuild what I got to,” he says. “I’d be at peace if my insurance hadn’t dropped us and I was rebuilding our house right now… I feel the most untethered to anything. The only things left are my kids and Heidi. And my parents, but they’re such a wreck that you can’t call my mom without her crying. I am in an abyss.”
He optimistically views this era — potentially the beginning of his political one — as an opportunity. “The only way I see God letting my parents’ house burn down and my house burn down is that God knows it’s the only way to turn me against a system that lets this happen to tens of thousands of people,” he says. “In a best-case scenario, I would have helped at least 10,000 people to get 70 percent of what they got taken from them. That would be poetic.”
For someone who has built a career on provocation, self-promotion and playing the long game of notoriety, Pratt’s bid for mayor represents an unexpected turn. “The ending that I am hoping for is justice for the people of Los Angeles. It’s the same reason why we filed the lawsuit — to get to the truth,” he explains. “Winning the mayor’s race will be a victory for truth and transparency, which is what I’ve been fighting for this whole year. The end goal is the same: to shine a light into the darkness.”
