Inside the Reinvention of Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, From TV Villains to Devoted Parents 

The sweet natured fashion student from Crested Butte, Colo. and the budding L.A. producer she fell for on the second season of The Hills in 2007 turned themselves into household names by fully embracing their roles on MTV’s runaway hit.

Immediately cognizant they would never be the show’s protagonists—that part would go to relatable California girl Lauren Conrad, and then, following her mid-series exit, her Laguna Beach rival Kristin Cavallari—they accepted the part of Los Angeles’ resident villains.

And since they were eager to keep the show on the air, they leaned in hard. Like, start a rumor your castmate has a sex tape and undergo 10 plastic surgery procedures in one day hard. 

And it just about destroyed them. 

“I got caught up trying to be someone I’m not—someone that the audience and the producers wanted,” Pratt, 41, summed up to Vice in 2017. “I was just being more and more unnatural.

Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt’s Most Over-the-Top Photo Shoots

Following the show’s initial 2010 cancellation, the pair began grasping at straws.

Convinced their only chance at reality TV relevancy was to maintain the characters they created, they accepted gigs on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here, Celebrity Big Brother and Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars, the outsiders everywhere they went. “Mercenaries is pretty much what we are,” a resigned Pratt told Complex in 2015. “Call us in when you are ready for some action. That keeps the bills paid.”

The pair quickly burned through their Hills-era millions, dropping thousands on bottles of Screaming Eagle wine, Hermes purses and vacations for their pals. “I was giving people $15,000 checks, my friends that, like, we’re struggling,” he told Bethenny Frankel on her short-lived eponymous talk show in 2014. “We thought we were Robin Hood with not Robin Hood money.” 

And, frankly, that could have been the end of the story—if Pratt and Montag, 38, weren’t such skilled hustlers, a trait fans were reminded about once more after the couple lost their Pacific Palisades spread in the ongoing Los Angeles-area fires. 

Desperate to provide for his family and rebuild the life they share with sons Gunner, 7, and Ryker, 2, Pratt has leaned into his social media skills, urging his nearly two million TikTok followers to stream Montag’s music. 

And it appears today is where a new book begins, with Montag’s 2010 album Superficial surging to the top spot on iTunes. 

“Thank you for the overwhelming love and support of my music and really rallying behind us in this devastating time and making it such a blessing,” Montag shared on TikTok Jan. 12. “Thank you for helping support us, helping build us back up, helping to encourage us, give us that hope and faith and excitement in such a dark, dark time.”

While the rest of their story is still unwritten, their devoted fan base is ready to consume every bit of it, double-tapping on each and every one of Pratt’s TikToks, whether he’s discussing the treasures they’ve pulled out of the ashes of their former home or just giving a glimpse into Montag’s dinner prep with their boys. 

Because, yes, the pair have leaned into parenting with the same gusto they once reserved for staged paparazzi photos.

“Fatherhood has absolutely changed me,” Pratt told Flare mere weeks after his eldest son’s 2017 arrival. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I think I finally found my calling. Now all I’m thinking about, always, is how will this or that affect Gunner’s life. I think, how can I set up this or that so that Gunner can do this. And, oh I can’t wait to learn and teach Gunner this. Just everything now is about looking toward the future and making it good for him. It’s not about me anymore. I’ve retired my motivations and I’m on the Gunner Team.”

And while neither Gunner nor his little brother were around to catch Mom and Dad at the height of their fame, it’s unlikely they’d recognize the Speidi of old, with both Pratt and Montag acknowledging that parenthood has made them more serious about life.

“Kind of like the captain of the ship,” Montag explained to E! News last June. “I’m scheduling things, and I have to get everyone out on time, and ‘do you have snacks and water and this and that?’ So I feel like I’m always on this go-mode.” 

Of course, she’s well-versed in the art of going hard. 

At the height of their fame, circa 2008, Montag and Pratt were pocketing six figures an episode and earning a million more a year by tipping off paparazzi that they’d be going for, say, a casual walk on the beach decked out in their Fourth of July best. 

MTV

Montag was just as likely as Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston to grace the cover of a weekly mag and she and her husband were able to laugh off any hatred of their Hills personalities all the way to the bank. 

“We were more famous and [making] more money than Kim Kardashian,” Pratt bragged to Money in 2018. (Kim, of course, was barely a season into a little project called Keeping Up With the Kardashians at the time.) 

Then the wheels started to come off.

Shortly after their filmed-for-TV wedding in April 2009, the duo decamped to Costa Rica to shoot I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here with Pratt stomping off screaming, “If you give me a script, I’ll do what you want. I’m not a reality star—I’m on The Hills!” He’d come back, then quit again a week later when Montag began suffering stomach issues. 

“That’s where we lost the plot,” he admitted to AskMen.com in 2017, “in the jungle.”

Returning for the sixth and final season of the MTV juggernaut, they had fully disappeared into their characters, Montag quite literally, thanks to her decision to get 10 plastic surgery procedures at once, a move that nearly killed her. As she recounted to Paper in April 2018, “My security guards called Spencer and told him, ‘Heidi’s heart stopped. She’s not going to make it.'” 

As for Pratt, when he wasn’t lashing out at her family, he was dropping millions on crystals and, at one point, puzzlingly spray painting graffiti onto one of the walls in their home.

By the time The Hills finale aired on July 13, 2010, he had been booted from the show after threatening to kill a producer and had to crash the screening, dressed as an old man, to get inside. (He was forced out by security

Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt’s Son Gunner’s Baby Album

But the couple were already hard at work cooking up their next scheme. Eager to keep their unbelievable storylines going—or perhaps provide a conclusion to the (fictional) on-air fighting that began in the final season—Montag filed for a legal separation that June, hand delivering the paperwork herself and instructing an attorney to release a statement to People. 

The back-and-forth that followed played out on Twitter and, in an appropriate twist, included Pratt threatening to release a sex tape. And just as fans were questioning what to believe—was the breakup fake or had the entire relationship been made for TV?—the pair suddenly flew back to Costa Rica that August and announced they were working things out. 

“Clearly I care for her, but the divorce is a superficial title ’cause I didn’t cheat on her,” he told MTV News. “And then she divorces me to clean her image. That doesn’t fly with me. As much as I was like, ‘Do it,’ I never thought it would work. You can’t be Speidi and then all of a sudden get a divorce. She’s still serious about it because she’s trying to divorce what is Spencer Pratt. She still loves me.”

Back in the states in September 2010, Pratt issued an apology. 

“Divorce can be a trying, draining, and emotionally devastating experience for all involved,” he told People. “Despite these hardships, most individuals manage to conduct themselves with dignity and maturity. I did not—I failed spectacularly. I horribly embarrassed the one person that meant the world to me. For my outrageous and infantile behavior, I offer Heidi my most sincere apologies.”

Naturally, she accepted. Responding, again through People, she revealed, “We are back together trying to make things work. Costa Rica really put things in perspective. We do love each other and realized we do want to spend the rest of our lives together.”

Splash News

So their marriage was in tact, but their bank accounts? Not so much.

“It’s really easy to spend millions of dollars if you’re not careful and you think it’s easy to keep making millions of dollars,” Pratt explained to Money. “The money was just coming so fast and so easy that my ego led me to believe that, ‘Oh, this is my life forever.'”

His biggest regret, he told E! News, wasn’t necessarily being the bad guy, but not stowing away the millions it had afforded him. “‘Cause I would be laughing all the way to the bank being hated, you know, a multimillionaire right now, but I didn’t see The Jersey Shore coming out of left field taking reality TV to a whole other level that I wasn’t prepared to go to at the time.”

With few options, the couple moved into a beach home belonging to Pratt’s parents in Carpinteria, Calif just outside Santa Barbara. Some 80 miles removed from Hollywood, the spinoff they were expecting never materialized and the paparazzi grew less interested. 

Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag: Romance Rewind

“Reacclimating off that high of that fame and lifestyle was really hard,” Montag admitted to Complex in 2015. “We had these expectations of, ‘Oh, we’re going to have our own show.’ My expectation of life and where I thought we were going to be is so different from our reality.” 

Their unassuming ocean-side spread was a literal shrine to their celebrity with walls of their magazine covers and a replica of their 2009 book How to Be Famous built out of Legos, but Pratt was living his personal nightmare: irrelevancy.

Sinking into a deep depression, he self-medicated by consuming two pies a night. “I was 250 pounds I have a photo of the scale,” he lamented to People. “That was more of like a depression eating because I was like f–k, I live in Santa Barbara. I’m not famous in Hollywood.”

Then he found salvation in the form of Snapchat.  

Pratt was an early adopter to the social media platform that allows users to upload vignettes of their daily lives. He’d churn out some 30 to 50 stories a day from the mundane (eating breakfast burritos) to the somewhat surreal (using a pair of glasses to feed his beloved hummingbirds) and his legion of followers would tune in, some 11 million more than watched The Hills 2010 finale. 

“Everyone was just responding to every video like, ‘I love this,’ ‘thank you,’ and it just made me feel so good,” he told Money. “I was depressed—but then all of a sudden in my Snap DMs, I’m having so much more positivity and love. It was just like, ‘Wow, this is the greatest fricking thing ever.'” 

That he was getting praised for this unedited, somewhat unfiltered version of himself blew his mind. “I feel like the reason why people hated me so much is because they only saw a manufactured couple minutes of me,” he said. “It was very empowering to be able to produce myself finally and be able to show who I am and break out of the mold.” 

Better yet when he found a way to monetize it. The platform became a way for him to hype his side hustle as a crystal purveyor. Hand-carved by a man he calls “the Picasso of the crystal game,” they go for anywhere from $120 to $300 a pop and each new batch sells out within an hour of him announcing it online. 

An influencer once more—he was named Snapchatter of the Year at the Shorty Awards in 2018—he spends hours a day responding to followers (“People write me essays, like longer things than I’ve written in college. I’m like, ‘God, this is incredible. You just spent this much time to write me?'”) and has branched out to podcasts (Make Speidi Famous Again debuted in 2018, then came Speidi’s 16th Minute in 2023) and an MTV series on YouTube called Spencer Pratt Will Heal You. 

“I have the hottest show on,” he told Money of the snaps that started it all. “It’s right in my hand, and I don’t have to listen to anyone.”