Being on “The Hills” for several years, Audrina Patridge may have looked pretty comfortable on camera. But, as the reality star says tells “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”, she and the others on “The Hills” often struggled with their appearance on the series. One difficulty she points to is the constant presence of cameras, which Patridge says led to a problematic coping mechanism.
“You have to pretend like they’re not there, so we would always go out to these clubs and restaurants and dates, and we’d have a drink before to take the edge off,” she says. “That’s what the show was about ― go to a club, get drunk and fight.”
As episodes aired, Patridge felt that people and situations would be misrepresented for the sake of adding drama. Though it was all for the show, Patridge adds that its consequences extended beyond the orchestrated storylines.
“They kind of started editing us in a way that it’s like, ‘It didn’t happen like that! You’re making me look bad!’” she says. “We were getting other jobs and opportunities based on the show, but sometimes how they portrayed us on the show, we were losing jobs.”
Once Patridge became a public figure, she also became tabloid fodder. Reading untrue things about herself, she says, was both upsetting and exhausting.
“You’re constantly defending yourself,” she says. “Even my family would question me sometimes. It’s like, I wasn’t ready for this.”
Another reality star speaks out:
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