53 MINUTES WITH ...Spencer Pratt

The former reality-TV star lost his home in the fires and ascended to a new level of fame.

- BRIDGET READ

ON A BEACH in Santa Barbara, the former reality-TV star Spencer Pratt is sipping a skinny margarita and recounting how he and his wife, fellow reality veteran Heidi Montag, lost everything. His son Gunner's art, Montag's collection of Hermès espresso cups. His own collection of crystals.

His hummingbird sanctuary. His chargers.

His gym equipment. The giant Martin Schoeller portraits of Pratt and Montag that once hung in their living room.

All a pile of toxic ash, destroyed in the Palisades firestorm.

"It was so scary," Pratt says over FaceTime, wearing a PALISADES STRONG hat and a TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT Sweatshirt, of the day the fires broke out. On the morning of January 7, Montag evacuated with their children from their house in the hillside down to Pratt's parents' house on the bluffs. Pratt's father, a dentist, drove up to help him fight the fire. "My dad wouldn't leave. I was just yelling at him. I had to grab him and literally, physically, put him in the car and then drive him away," Pratt says, leaning back in his lounge chair. Later, he caught his father on security cameras sneaking back to try to put the fire out again.

Even as the fires were still burning, Pratt posted a series of videos of himself watching them come closer and closer. In the days after, Pratt and Montag were nearly the first celebrities to publicly confirm they had lost their home. Now, as it was with Tom Hanks and COVID, Pratt has the dubious distinction of being the famous face of a disaster. And he's working it: "I'm the thirstiest, hungriest person in the game," he says.