Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt started last week with their house burning down. They ended it with Montag’s 2010 album Superficial hitting number-one on iTunes. If anyone’s prepared for the extreme highs and lows of life, though, it’s Heidi and Spencer.
When Montag called me on Friday, Superficial hadn’t reached this peak yet. I was honestly surprised she called me at all. When I reached out to the reality star and singer days before to schedule an interview about her music, the Los Angeles wildfires hadn’t yet happened. By mid-week, I expected her to understandably cancel our conversation, but even in the face of a life-changing tragedy, she honored the commitment.
“It comes in waves,” Montag says about how she, Pratt, and their young sons, Gunner and Ryker, are coping. “Obviously, we’re so grateful we made it out and we’re safe and don’t have any lung damage and there’s minimum trauma for the kids. But it comes in waves that we really lost everything: all our memories, everything we worked so hard for. It’s a lot to unpack.”
The couple is dealing with the aftermath of the fires like many families. They’ve temporarily relocated, and Montag’s enrolled her children in new schools. At two points during our chat, she leaves to call Gunner’s school, then calls me back with sincere apologies that aren’t necessary. “I can’t even imagine what you’re going through,” I say.
“In life, you just gotta get back up and take it day by day,” Montag says. “We have the kids, and we’re blessed to have food and water—even if we don’t have clothes.”
One thing Montag and Pratt still have is social media—and online, they’re bringing necessary levity to those affected by the fires. Pratt’s TikToks in particular have been necessary viewing. (If you’re familiar with his beloved hummingbird-Toks, you already knew this.) “You think these will work again?” he wrote on a post showing the remains of the family’s washer and dryer. When he finally reached 1 million followers on January 9, he posted a video captioned “dark humor” and said, “Who would’ve thought all I needed was our house to burn down to finally hit a million? Can’t believe I didn’t think of that sooner.”
But over the weekend, something else happened. Pratt’s earnest posts asking fans to stream Superficial—in honor of its 15th anniversary re-release—gained momentum, and by Sunday, it reached the top of iTunes. Whether fans bought the record to support Montag and Pratt post-fire (they’re candid about not being the “rich celebrities” people think) or for pure nostalgia’s sake, it was official: Montag was the “number-one pop star in the world right now,” as declared, touchingly, by Pratt.
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Superficial received a very different response upon its initial release in 2010. At the time Montag and Pratt were two of the most reviled celebrities in Hollywood. Dubbed “Speidi” by tabloids that ruthlessly covered their every move, the couple played villains on MTV’s reality-soap phenom The Hills. The show, which chronicled the vacant-faced drama of beautiful 20-somethings in L.A., is truly a bygone-era relic. It represents a time when supermarket magazines and sleazy blogs determined who and what mattered. When status in Hollywood was marked by paparazzi photos outside of clubs and Balenciaga Motorcycle bags and making us feel terrible about our bodies. When a tiny Perez Hilton article could make or break your reputation. Every relevant celebrity in the 2000s (or at least their press teams) knew this and quietly played the game.
But Heidi and Spencer were unapologetic about their love and desire for fame. They gleefully staged paparazzi shoots, promoted Montag’s music by kissing in front of cameras, and chewed scenery on The Hills with made-up storylines that bolstered ratings. At its height in 2008, 3.9 million people were watching The Hills live. (For comparison: 2.3 million people watched the Succession premiere in 2023.)
The couple’s high-octane antics earned them the harsh designation of “fame-whores,” as if enjoying having your photo taken is a moral offense. In 2010, comedian Chelsea Handler grossly dubbed them “Herpes 1 and Herpes 2” on her nightly talk show. “Speidi” quickly became synonymous with everything seemingly wrong in Hollywood: greed, vanity, excess.
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But Montag saw things differently. “I’ve always just been really grateful. I’m a fame-grateful [person],” she says. “It’s such a blessing that anyone would pay to take our photos. I didn’t grow up rich…I was this small town Colorado girl who had really hard-working parents. So I really appreciated it. And it was just enjoyable. It was fun. There’s nothing wrong with having fun in life, and sometimes that’s taken the wrong way.”
Fun ultimately was the motivation behind Montag’s most notorious late-aughts moment: getting 10 plastic surgery procedures in one day. She appeared on the cover of People magazine in January 2010 afterwards with the headline “Addicted to Plastic Surgery,” a heavy, grim way to describe an experience Montag actually felt great about at the time.
“I definitely was really made fun of for my chin and things like that, but was that the reason I decided to get plastic surgery? No,” she says. “It was because I always wanted it, and I was offered it for free by a top plastic surgeon. I’m like, ‘Amazing, OK, because I can’t afford it, and that’s huge.’ And so what an opportunity to have free cosmetic surgery by one of the best surgeons in the entire world.”
“Thrilled” with the results of her surgery, Montag felt even more ready to drop Superficial, which she and Pratt put $2 million of their own money into making. “I definitely wanted to be a pop star as a kid,” she says. “I thought I’d go the Madonna route. That was definitely my goal.”
Montag and Pratt hired a dream team of hitmakers like Cathy Dennis (a ‘90s pop star turned songwriter, whose credits include Britney Spears’ “Toxic”) and Stacy Barthe (behind Rihanna’s “Cheers (Drink to That)”) to get the best material. She was so confident in her product, she boldly declared Superficial was better than Michael Jackson’s Thriller. And to her credit, the record slaps. It’s 12 tracks, no skips. Every song sounds glossy and expensive, with addictive hooks right on par with the decadent club bangers Kesha and Katy Perry were pumping out at the time.
But the public decided Montag’s fun was over. She was ridiculed for her plastic surgery and lost lucrative business deals because of it. (“We can’t work with you, you’re now ‘Surgery Girl,’” she recalls one brand saying to her.) Meanwhile, Superficial was lambasted by critics and sold only 1,000 copies its first week. Surgery recovery was brutal, as well—Montag tells me she “almost died” from complications.
“It just was a really challenging time,” she says. “It was challenging to navigate so many different things and different relationships and the healing that it took, the toll that it took, physically, mentally, emotionally. It was a lot more than I was ready for…I just really refocused and re-shifted everything I had been thinking about and wanting.”
So the couple moved to Costa Rica briefly. Montag chucked all her designer clothes and prioritized “meditating, praying, and taking it one day at a time.” In the decade that followed, she and Pratt found equilibrium. They moved back to L.A., had children, and popped in and out of TV on reality shows like Celebrity Big Brother and Marriage Boot Camp. A Hills revival in 2019 was short-lived. All the while, Pratt’s growing TikTok presence began showing him in a new light; he was goofy, playful, and Taylor Swift-obsessed. Fans felt endeared to him.
And to Montag, as well. “I’ll Do It,” a standout track on Superficial, went viral as a TikTok sound in 2023, as did old interview clips of her proudly and candidly discussing her plastic surgery (which no celebrities did in the 2000s). She even interpolates one of these interviews on her new song “Great 1,” where she lists all her procedures out to Ryan Searest.
“That’s just part of who I’ve always been and part of who I’ve always wanted to be. I wanted to be transparent and honest about whatever we were going through,” Montag tells me about why she felt so comfortable discussing her surgery back then.
Speidi’s honesty may be what fans are noticing and appreciating about them all these years later. “She was so real for this,” one fan captioned a viral clip of Montag saying she’d “rather be getting a paycheck for being famous than working at [her] parent’s restaurant.” Perhaps Montag and Pratt were never “villains,” as 2000s media had us believe, but just two people who manifested fame, achieved it, and ecstatically relished in it the whole way through. It’s a mindset Charli XCX glamorized to great effect on her album Brat, with lyrics like, “I used to never feel embarrassed when I called the paparazzi. Everyone else does it constantly.” That may be true, but only two people have been owning that publicly since the beginning: Heidi and Spencer.
In a way, Superficial finding success is culture’s way of apologizing to them—for finally recognizing that their love of fame and plastic surgery and clubs was never wrong or evil. Frankly, we just didn’t know how to have fun.
“We spent all our money on this album…For it to finally get friggin’ number-one in America 15 years after?…For it to finally come out and be—” Pratt said on TikTok, bursting into genuine sobs. “It feels so good.”
Montag feels good, too. “It’s really refreshing to have everything we did be vindicated years later and to have people see what we were seeing and have a different insight and perspective,” she says. “Not everyone gets that. It’s really nice to have had that all unfold within time. People always say, ‘Time tells all,’ and it does.”
“Does it feel good to have the last laugh?” I ask Montag, referring specifically to her chart success.
“It really does,” she says. “I never thought it would; I never thought it was important. And getting it, it does feel good and it’s empowering.”
Christopher Rosa is the senior editor for NBC Entertainment and a former Glamour editor. Follow him at @chris.rosa92.
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