The star of The Hills is going a little stir crazy. Kneeling on her seat, Lauren Conrad is spinning the swivelling chair around in the boardroom of Holt Renfrew's corporate headquarters, saying something to her publicist, who is not really paying attention because she's busy checking her BlackBerry.The reality TV star was in town Saturday to launch the latest collection in her clothing line and it's been a packed day of interviews. She snaps back into professional mode when the interview starts, but the short chair ride is a reminder of just how young the 22-year-old is.
"Sorry, I've been in this room for hours," she says in her slight California accent. "And I'm a little sleep deprived."
Oh, we know. Anybody who's watched The Hills knows all about Conrad's busy life of friends, boys, clubbing and, of course, the drama that ensues on this pseudo-reality show.
Whatever your take on how fake it is, the reality is The Hills returned for the second half of its third season last week after a three-month break and set record ratings: 4.7 million U.S. viewers (220,000 in Canada, becoming the highest rated show in MTV history in the U.S.; MTV Canada's third highest).
The episode featured Conrad and her fellow Teen Vogue intern Whitney Port jetting off to Paris to help with the Crillon Ball. Hills-torians know that Conrad missed her chance to go to the City of Light at the end of the first season to stay and live with Jason Wahler, her boyfriend at the time. So going this time was a dream come true, although as with everything in Conrad's life, there's the reality we see, and the one that she lives.
"Paris was amazing. The city itself was great, but it was a little overwhelming, because we worked the entire time," she says. Of course, she'd go back in a minute and preferably without cameras – as if it would make any difference.
Conrad is so hot that she's in that strange zone of celeb-reality where even when the MTV cameras are off, she's fodder for paparazzi and every utterance she makes sends the celebrity blogs into overdrive.
Just recently, she had to clarify comments about friends Brody Jenner and Audrina Partridge that she says were misconstrued in Us Weekly magazine, and had to deal with the (eerily well-timed?) surfacing of naked photos of Partridge. That was the one topic that was declared off-limits for this interview.
The other rumour that has the Web buzzing is comments she made about a possible The Hills movie, which again, she says, were taken out of context.
"There's no movie in the works. I think it'd be too difficult to do," she says. "The way they film the show, they have to hope for things to happen. You know, a movie, there's a formula to it, there's a beginning, a climax and an end. Our show is like hope for the best. Or worst, I guess."
Little comments like that make it evident that Conrad is savvier than she's made out to be on TV. She says she thinks her producers and editors do a great job of making her life seem interesting, even though she says a regular day with her would be pretty boring.
"They take a very small percentage of my life, add music, edit it and colour-correct it, and make it look awesome," she says.
One interesting thing that her fans will never see on the show is the work that she puts into her clothing line.
"That's a mutual decision. I like to separate my fashion line from reality TV because I work really hard to separate myself from that mould that's been created. Whereas a lot of people, when they gain some celebrity, they stick their name on a product, they try to monopolize on their 15 minutes, which I understand – it makes money, it's a career move – but that's not what I'm doing with my clothing line.
"It's what I want to do when I'm done with television and I want that to become my main career, so I needed to be really careful with the way that I went about it."
After she finishes this trip to Toronto – which also included hosting a Saturday night at the Guvernment nightclub – she returns to L.A. to work on her holiday collection and continue filming the show.
As for The Hills, it's back to real life – such as it is – in L.A. As has been teased so far, Port is leaving Teen Vogue to strike out on her own, Conrad has to deal with Jenner (who she learned on her trip was out on the town with another girl) and then there's arch-enemy Heidi Montag, who looks likes she's finally broken up with boyfriend Spencer Pratt for good.
Asked if there's anything that perhaps we don't know about her, Conrad again tries to separate her life from the as-seen-on-TV version.
"I think the majority of the show is me sitting around very upset and seeming like a serious person," she says. "But I'm not a very serious person. I think that's one of the main differences. Like I do like to go out, have fun and not fight with my friends."
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