Spilling the MTV tea! The Laguna Beach cast is opening up about how much of the early 2000s reality show was scripted — and how much of it was real.
“It was softly scripted, so the story lines were real. I mean, think about yourself in high school, right? You’re 18, you fight with a friend, but then you move on in a week or two, right? And it’s over. But [on the show], we lived that out for, like, three months or three episodes,” Alex Murrel exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, November 1.
Lauren Olsen, known as “Alex H” on the show, echoed her former costar’s sentiments, explaining that they would often have to rehash old drama for the sake of the series.
“It would be, like, the end of the summer, so, like, July [or] August, and then MTV would come and be like, ‘Hey, we need to re-talk about a conversation that happened about prom. So, we’re gonna meet at the beach and I need you girls to talk about the drama that happened,’” Olsen recalled.
The reality TV veteran added that producers would even ask them to recreate their looks from past episodes by wearing the same clothes and doing their makeup the same way. “I just remember at that time it was so annoying because you’re like, ‘I don’t even remember how I did my hair or my makeup,’” she said.
Although Olsen said the cast didn’t “have a script to read lines from,” she admitted that it still felt like manufactured reality at times. “MTV had an angle and they made sure that they obtained that,” she said.
Murrel went on to confess that the show’s infamous love triangles — including the drama between Stephen Colletti, Kristin Cavallari and Lauren Conrad — were blown out of proportion.
“It was very contrived. Like, they knew that there were story lines and they built upon those, and timelines were split and cut apart. And because it was shot like a soap opera pretty much, it was hard for viewers to understand if it was reality,” she said.
Murrel added that she feels the same way about her own love triangle with Jessica Smith and Jason Wahler. “[It was a] high school relationship. It was, like, a week or two,” she quipped.
Scroll through to see everything the Laguna Beach cast told Us about how the reality TV show was fake at times:
