'Laguna Beach' star Kristin Cavallari says she and Lauren Conrad were 'never friends'

• "Laguna Beach" star Kristin Cavallari is cohosting "Back to the Beach with Kristin and Stephen."
• The podcast will look back on the '00s reality show including Cavallari's feud with Lauren Conrad.

Kristin Cavallari and Lauren Conrad were presented as bitter on-screen rivals on "Laguna Beach," but according to Cavallari, the pair were just "never friends" and not usually around one another before the show.

"Lauren and I have had a lot of great times together, but we just were never really friends," she told Insider in an interview. "To be honest, MTV put us together, but before that, we were never really around each other."

Cavallari — who founded lifestyle brand Uncommon James and starred on the now-defunct reality show "Very Cavallari" — will be hosting the Dear Media "Laguna Beach" rewatch podcast "Back to the Beach with Kristin and Stephen" with her friend, ex-boyfriend, and "Laguna Beach" co-star Stephen Colletti.

"Laguna Beach" first aired on MTV in 2004. The reality series followed the lives and loves of well-off high school students in Laguna Beach, California, for three seasons.

Colletti was positioned at the center of a love triangle including Cavallari and Conrad on the teen docuseries and viewers were so invested in the perceived competition for Colletti's heart that they picked sides by declaring themselves "Team Lauren" or "Team Kirsten." (Beloved early oughts teen brand Hollister even sold t-shirts advocating for each side of the drama.)

Heidi Montag, who co-starred on the "Laguna Beach" spin-off "The Hills," said on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast in August on 2021 that she spent a fun weekend with Cavallari and Conrad in the Bahamas at one point and Montag was hopeful it would lead to her then-friends sparking up a friendship of their own afterward — but it didn't happen: "After I left they became enemies again," said Montag.

"In a social setting, we definitely had a good time together, but she and I never, we just were never friends. There's nothing more to it other than that," Cavallari told Insider. "It just is what it is."

"I think not everyone has to be friends and not everyone is going to like each other. And I think that that's perfectly OK. As long as everyone's respectful of one another," the reality star continued.

"The difference on the show is I definitely wasn't respectful of her," she admitted. "Because I felt like at the time she was trying to steal my boyfriend."

Cavallari wrote in her book "Balancing In Heels: My Journey to Health, Happiness, and Making It All Work" that she learned producers were encouraging her boyfriend to hang out with Conrad to ramp up the drama but at the time she felt threatened and behaved accordingly.

Today, she says she handles her problems differently. Scenes of an 18-year-old Cavallari calling Conrad a "dumbass" to her face during their rivalry do not reflect how she solves conflicts at 35.

"As a kid, that was all I knew how to do," she said. "But now as an adult, I don't like everyone, but I'm not going to be mean. I think as long as we can treat each other with kindness, we don't all have to be best friends."

"I think that being on TV at a young age definitely forced me to grow up in certain aspects of my life," she added.

On the rewatch podcast, listeners will be able to hear what that growth sounds like as well as learn behind-the-scenes secrets about the show. "Back to the Beach with Kristin and Stephen" is now available on streaming services. Check out the trailer below.