He’s coming clean! Stephen Colletti claimed that MTV wanted him to be a part of The Hills: New Beginnings — and hoped to see him spark a romance with Audrina Patridge.
“Every year, the producers would hit me up, ask me if I wanted to do a show, ask me if I could find a way to do the show,” Colletti, 36, said during the Tuesday, January 31, episode of his “Back to the Beach” podcast with Kristin Cavallari. “When they started doing The Hills: New Beginnings, they hit me up. And at the moment, we were working on finding [my show] Everyone’s Doing Great a home. We were trying to sell it. So I was like, ‘I’m going to take a meeting. If there was a world where if I show in a couple episodes of The Hills and Viacom or one of their platforms buys the show, I’ll f—king do it.’”
While the One Tree Hill alum shared that the deal “didn’t work out that way,” he confessed that the reality reboot had plans for him to cozy up to 37-year-old Patridge.
“[They] we’re like, ‘Couldn’t you see yourself having a little something with, like, Audrina? It seemed like you guys have good chemistry, and you know her, right? So it’s not totally unrealistic to think that you’d maybe go out on a date.’”
Colletti said that he wasn’t sure being on the show would have been a success since “the only connection I had to [The Hills] was [Kristin] or Lauren [Conrad]” and the cast were “not people I hung out with.” The 36-year-old Uncommon James founder, however, disagreed.
“Yes you could [have been on The Hills], Stephen. You would take over that show,” she quipped.
“You tell me whether or not you’re going to buy my TV show, and I’ll let you know whether or not I’m going to come on The Hills,” Stephen joked about MTV’s offer.
The California native ended up only making one official appearance during The Hills’ initial run in 2007 — Colletti showed up to one of Lauren Conrad’s parties — but he starred on its sister show, Laguna Beach, from 2004 to 2005.
The Hit the Floor actor became a fan-favorite on the series when viewers wondered whether he would keep dating the Very Cavallari alum or pursue a relationship with longtime pal Conrad, 37.
While their teenage romance eventually fizzled out, Colletti and Cavallari remained close over the years, launching their “Back to Beach” rewatch podcast in July 2022.
The duo have since gotten candid about the intervention of producers and how the high school-based reality series wasn’t as “real” as it claimed to be, even saying that their alleged “love triangle” with Conrad was misconstrued.
“I had a huge problem with this because look, obviously they created this show around this love triangle and there’s moments where you and I were broken up,” the Summer Forever star explained. “And they had learned about Lauren and I hooking up and being very good friends and, you know, obviously stuff happened at certain times, but at no point ever whenever we were together would I step out on you in that way. That made my blood boil a little bit.”
Cavallari, for her part, said that she felt MTV “put us in a box” for the “entire first season.
“They decided ‘OK, this is how we’re gonna make Stephen look and I don’t care what’s really going on in his life,’” she said. “‘We are gonna continue to hammer that home and keep going back to that same storyline.’”