On a beach in Santa Barbara, the former reality-TV star Spencer Pratt is sipping a skinny margarita and recounting how he and his wife, fellow reality veteran Heidi Montag, lost everything. His son Gunner’s art, Montag’s collection of Hermès espresso cups. His own collection of crystals. His hummingbird sanctuary. His chargers. His gym equipment. The giant Martin Schoeller portraits of Pratt and Montag that once hung in their living room. All a pile of toxic ash, destroyed in the Palisades firestorm.
“It was so scary,” Pratt says over FaceTime, wearing a PALISADES STRONG hat and a TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT sweatshirt, of the day the fires broke out. On the morning of January 7, Montag evacuated with their children from their house in the hillside down to Pratt’s parents’ house on the bluffs. Pratt’s father, a dentist, drove up to help him fight the fire. “My dad wouldn’t leave. I was just yelling at him. I had to grab him and literally, physically, put him in the car and then drive him away,” Pratt says, leaning back in his lounge chair. Later, he caught his father on security cameras sneaking back to try to put the fire out again.
Even as the fires were still burning, Pratt posted a series of videos of himself watching them come closer and closer. In the days after, Pratt and Montag were nearly the first celebrities to publicly confirm they had lost their home. Now, as it was with Tom Hanks and COVID, Pratt has the dubious distinction of being the famous face of a disaster. And he’s working it: “I’m the thirstiest, hungriest person in the game,” he says.
Before the fires, the couple known as “Speidi” were survivors of the aughts reality heyday. They had starred on MTV’s The Hills, where they acted as press-hungry villains and amplified their notoriety with sideshow antics in the tabloids. The pair did whatever they could to hang on to what infamy they had, no matter how strange or desperate. In 2009, Montag underwent ten plastic surgeries in a single day. Pratt called the paparazzi on himself, then posed with a prop shotgun in a PALIN FOR VP T-shirt. A few years later, they reintroduced themselves as reality-TV whistleblowers, lamenting in interviews The Hills’s manipulative producers and the toll the surgeries took on Montag’s health. In 2018, they went back to MTV for a Hills reboot; it lasted only two seasons. They had their sons, Gunner and Ryker, and started their online business, Pratt Daddy Crystals.
Eventually, they scraped and selfied their way into buying a home on one of the most beautiful stretches of California coastline in Pratt’s hometown of Pacific Palisades. The split-level house, which they bought for around $2 million, had made the past 15 years of trolling worth it. “That house was our stock; it was our bitcoin,” Pratt says. “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. We kept saying one day our sons will have this and the property alone will be worth $15 million.” They didn’t live extravagantly, Pratt says. Instead, they nested, relaxed. They built out an office with their Us Weekly covers and Montag’s Playboy spread framed on the wall. Pratt tended to his hummingbird sanctuary on the terrace. “We traveled once a year to Heidi’s parents in Colorado. We went out one night a week to Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica. Yes, we spent too much money on Erewhon. But it all went into the house. I think a lot of people never got behind us because they thought we were these annoying rich people. They didn’t get that we were doing all these annoying things just so we could keep getting organic eggs and paying taxes in L.A.”
So after it burned, Pratt did what he does best: He hustled. One of Pratt and Montag’s biggest regrets from their time on The Hills was sinking $2 million into an ill-fated pop album for Montag called Superficial. In the days after the Palisades fire, Pratt thought, “Why can’t these songs that we spent all of our money on during The Hills not have their flowers right now?” The pair began incessantly asking supporters to stream Montag’s single “I’ll Do It.” Flavor Flav posted a video of himself listening to it. Then Diplo. Then Paris Hilton. Within two weeks, Montag had the No. 2 dance album in the U.S.; she eventually outsold Ringo Starr. Public opinion of the couple turned so swiftly that Bravo executive Andy Cohen issued a grave apology for calling Montag “trash” in 2011.
“You can’t call it a resurgence,” Pratt says of Montag’s sudden rise, sun glinting off the purple ametrine crystal hanging around his neck, the only one he saved. “This is her breakout.” Now that he’s his wife’s maniacal pseudo-manager, Pratt’s phone is blowing up. “I’m saying ‘yes’ to everything,” he tells me. “Yes” to a Pitbull remix. “Yes” to a box of free tequila from Don Julio’s grandson. “Yes” to a weekend in a five-star hotel paid for by a friend he made on TikTok, which is where he’s calling from right now. (He and Montag are otherwise subletting a place in Santa Barbara.) He films himself 5,000 times a day (his own estimate) talking about Montag’s music and the fires, taking breaks to repost fan videos and call his insurance company. He also couldn’t help getting into a few beefs in the press reminiscent of his Hills era: In just a few weeks, he’s called out Alex Cooper for allegedly declining to post Montag’s song, refused Cohen’s apology on Montag’s behalf (they’ll accept only a “personal” one), and claimed Taylor Swift left him on read. (All of the drama has been churning through Speidi’s old haunts: Us Weekly, E!, Perez Hilton.) He and Montag have also filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, saying the fire was avoidable with better prevention.
“Heidi is spending way more time living in the reality of having nothing, losing everything, having to start at zero again. So she doesn’t even think of herself as a global pop star. And I keep on wanting to shake her like, ‘Honey, you’re No. 1 in 15 countries,’” Pratt says. He’s having an easier time adjusting to what he sees as a cruel twist of fate: This tragedy has brought them to a level of fame he never thought, but always hoped, they might achieve. “It’s just this horribly amazing great time,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m just the happiest I’ve ever been in my life and the most upset.” Pratt estimates the pair may have made $150,000 so far from Montag’s music; still, he thinks he’ll need at least $5 million to rebuild in the Palisades. Then he’ll need millions more for his parents, whose house also burned down.
“That’s why my energy’s like, Get so rich that I can just come in and do what I gotta do to bring my world back,” he says, talking faster. He wants to help reconstruct the whole Palisades. “I would love to rebuild Gerry Blanck’s Martial Arts Center that’s been there for 43 years. It burned down. Rosie Nails that’s been there for 41 years. Mila Skin Care, 34 years. Heidi’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’re trying to buy this town?’ I’m like, ‘No, I want to help these people rebuild,’” he says. “‘So I can get my nails done. And get my town back.’”