Though reality TV was what made her famous, Kristin Cavallari said she was “really unhappy” filming Laguna Beach during her high school years.
The mom of three, 29, reflected back on her 2004 ascent to fame in a Q&A with mommy blog Momtastic. “Laguna Beach was really our lives being manipulated,” Cavallari claimed, adding that she and her fellow castmates — including Lauren Conrad, Lo Bosworth and Stephen Colletti — were “put in situations we never would have been in normally.”
“It’s funny because on Laguna Beach I came off like the person who really had my s–t together,” Cavallari recalled. “But I was a mess — like most teenagers. I was really unhappy. There’s a saying that you have to learn to love yourself before anyone else can love you, and it’s very true.”
After the series ended, Cavallari took a brief hiatus from the small screen, only to return to the spotlight in 2009, on MTV’s Laguna spinoff The Hills. At the time, the network touted Cavallari’s addition to the cast with the phrase, “The bitch is back,” which she anticipated.
“I looked at it strictly as a job; we filmed three different scenes, three days a week,” Cavallari told Momtastic. “I had my life on-camera and a completely different life off-camera. I knew the character they wanted me to play, and this time I was game. Since I looked at it as a job, it was fun to play up the villain character.”
Ultimately, she found happiness after “becoming comfortable in my own skin by really figuring out who I am.”
This isn’t the first time Cavallari has openly discussed fabricating story lines for the purpose of reality television. In a December 2013 interview, the star told Bethenny Frankel: “I faked relationships, faked fights. I don’t care anymore — I can tell you. At this point, it’s been so many years.”
