It’s been a while since Spencer Pratt was truly a reality TV villain.
He first made headlines as Heidi Montag’s provocateur boyfriend on The Hills, but over the years, he’s become an internet darling: Posting about his love for crystals and hummingbirds, speaking candidly about how his house burned down in the Palisades wildfire and supporting his wife’s music career.
Most recently, he competed in the new Hulu competition series Got to Get Out, which brings together 10 familiar faces (like Pratt and Omarosa Manigault Newman) in a mansion with 10 newcomers, making them all compete against each other. For 10 days the grand prize inches closer to $1 million, which they can split with their fellow contestants — or they can try to escape the mansion and run out with a portion of the winnings.
Pratt knows that the way he behaved on The Hills made an impact on reality TV, but he told Yahoo Entertainment he thinks “it’s mainly just producers” who took inspiration from his behavior, rather than the on-screen talent.
“It’s pretty basic, you know — you need an antagonist, and you need some type of drama, and you need somebody who’s willing to do it,” he said. “Back in the day, it was messages on a Blackberry. I’m sure nowadays producers text lines to whoever they know is down.”
“Producers know how to stir it up, and there’s always somebody like me who’s like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna pay me to say that? Sure! Deal!’” he said.
In the first episode of Got to Get Out, Pratt takes a more passive approach than he has been known to take in the past. During a big confrontation between competitors and a traitor, he calmly reminds everyone that it’s just a game. Of course, it could all be a ruse to lull people into a state of complacency.
It’s difficult to consider the career phase that Pratt is in right now without considering how he recently lost everything.
“That house was our stock; it was our bitcoin,” Pratt told the Cut in a February interview. “Every dollar we’ve hustled for in the last nine years. The Hills reboot, anything that makes money on any social media, we put into this house.”
With more people rooting for him now than they ever did at the height of his fame on The Hills or during his redemption era on social media, Pratt told Yahoo Entertainment that his goal is just to make “enough to buy my parents a house, and my family a house again as soon as possible.”
“Whether that means I try selling used luxury designer purses on TikTok live, if that’s going to do it, I’ll do that. Hopefully, it’s Heidi’s music — going on a world tour,” he said. “I’ll help however I can with that. Maybe it’s more television. Whatever it is, I don’t care, I just want my old life back.”
On the show — and during our Zoom call — Pratt wears a shirt with Montag’s image on it. Her song, “I’ll Do It,” went viral on TikTok, hitting No. 1 on iTunes and, according to Pratt, topped the charts in 15 countries. Its success came in part from fans streaming her music in support of the loss of their home in January, and partially because social media loves to give attention to resurfaced earworms.
“I’ve been wearing these shirts for … six years or seven years,” he said. “I’ve been wearing them for years because I always believed that her music was as good as it is now. There are people that are just supporting because they’re trying to help us — then there are our real, pre-our-house-burning-down, real Heidi music fans. So I, like them, want to share in that part of pop music history.”
Spencer Pratt, Steve Helling and Athena Suich in Got to Get Out. (Howard Gordon/Disney)
He said it helps that they’re comfortable and custom-made in Newport Beach, Calif.
“I work out in them. I sleep in them. I wear them every day,” he said. “I just love repping Heidi.”
Pratt said that before their house burned down, he had at least 200, and his closet was “all black shirts.”
“Then, when our house was burning down, my evacuation bag — I even filmed it because I didn’t think our house was really going to burn down — it was just Heidi shirts and like three pairs of shorts,” he said.
Now he has at least 30 — though he’s not sure if that’s the exact number, because he likes giving them away. He keeps a clean one on hand for fans in his backpack at all times.
“This is the OG one — the [Superficial album] cover,” he said, showing his shirt on Zoom. “They’re all different Heidi-related graphics.”
Catch Spencer Pratt and his shirts on Season 1 of Got to Get Out, which is now streaming on Hulu.
