Stephen Colletti Is Having A Full-Circle Moment

Stephen Colletti had no idea what he was signing up for when MTV came to his high school in 2003 to start casting for Laguna Beach. “It was really sold to us as a documentary about kids in high school,” he says. “In my mind, I thought it was going to be like a two-hour special or one episode of a bigger show, where every episode is about a different high school around the country.”

Instead, two seasons and 28 episodes later, he was a teenage heartthrob on one of the original reality shows. “I still don’t quite grasp that. It’s not something that I’ve spent a lot of time and thought over,” he says about the dreamboat label. We’re sitting at Snafu, a dive bar in midtown Manhattan, and as we chat, I’m 90% sure one member of the Tuesday evening happy hour crowd tried to take a not-so-subtle flash photo of him from across the room. Colletti doesn’t notice.

As he remembers it, at the time, his younger self had no idea what to do with the Laguna Beach fame. It was the early 2000s, years before the Jersey Shore and Housewives franchises took over. “It still blows my mind,” he says, thinking about those early days, while we wait for our orders (a tequila soda for him, a Stella on draft for me) and make a dent in the complimentary bowl of popcorn sitting in front of us. “Now there’s more of a blueprint. But I was still forming a frontal lobe at the time. I couldn’t process my emotions sometimes. So, truly understanding what was happening at that time, it was completely over my head.”

His typecasting — the popular boy at the center of a romantic rivalry between Kristin Cavallari and Lauren Conrad — came as a surprise to him, too. “I really couldn’t believe how focused they were on the love triangle when the show first came out, because it wasn’t happening the way that they were telling the story,” he says. “I thought no one would believe it, but we didn’t have social media back then to clarify. We weren’t doing press. We were just on our own, telling people on the street, ‘MTV took this or that liberty.’”

We just thought it would be fun to hang out with MTV and they would pay for some stuff. We played with fire a little bit.

Now, at 40, Colletti’s able to look back on it all with the kind of nostalgia that inspires reboots and reunions. But it wasn’t always like that. “For so many years, I had reservations about going back, watching the show, and reliving it. It was a scary thought through all my 20s. When you’re a teen, and you’ve got this big power in MTV, taking your life and sensationalizing what was going on… it left me in a very uncomfortable place,” he says. “We were so innocent — we just thought it would be fun to hang out with MTV and they would pay for some stuff. We played with fire a little bit.”

But 20 years later, he felt ready to dive back into that world for The Reunion: Laguna Beach, which started streaming on Roku on April 10. “Sometime in my mid-30s, I felt like, ‘All right, I’ve matured into an adult here. I can put aside the feelings that reality TV gave me,’” he says. “I’ve made peace with the show. Now watching it takes me back to such a simple time, going to the surf shop, working at the water park, going to the beach, and doing a little bit of school in between all that.”

In 2022, he and Cavallari started a rewatch podcast, Back to the Beach. Initially, they wanted to end the show in 2023 by bringing everyone back together. It didn’t end up happening in time for the podcast finale, but it was in the works ever since. Finally, it all came together in the fall of 2025, only a day after Colletti returned from his Paris mini-moon with his wife, NASCAR host and reporter Alex Weaver. “The jet lag was real. That, and sitting on that stage, already felt like a twilight zone,” he jokes.

The two-hour special invited Colletti and the rest of the original cast to revisit their hometown and even have one last group bonfire on the beach, allowing Cavallari and Conrad to have an overdue one-on-one conversation on camera. “That was really special. It felt really full-circle, like, let’s put a bow on this whole experience,” Colletti says.

We didn’t want it to be some table-flipping moment or confrontation of, ‘Why did you do this?’

For him, the reunion needed to be a “feel-good watch” — the kind of show that inspires you to go back through your yearbook and reach out to some high school friends. “We wanted this to be a positive reflection,” he says. “We didn’t want it to be some table-flipping moment or confrontation of, ‘Why did you do this?’ It was more about highlighting how far we’ve come.”

Since leaving behind the “Come Clean”-themed world of Laguna in 2006, Coletti has taken on plenty of projects — from playing Taylor Swift’s love interest in the “White Horse” music video (an opportunity he previously called one of his “coolest gigs to date”) to joining One Tree Hill’s cast. And yes, he’d be down to appear on the Netflix reboot. “It’s in the hands of Sophia [Bush] and Hilarie [Burton]. It’s their show, and it’s going to be great because they’re the right ones for the job,” he says. “I actually don’t know exactly where it’s at right now. If they asked me to come back, I would 100% do it, but it’s got to make sense for them.”

He has stayed on good terms with plenty of the One Tree Hill cast, and he even teamed up with James Lafferty for Everyone Is Doing Great, a comedy about post-fame life, which is coming back for Season 2 soon. He can’t share too many details about the project just yet, but he’s excited about it. “We’ve been working on this little independent TV show for a while, and we’re so happy to actually get it out to a wider audience globally.”

For Colletti, staying in the entertainment business was always the plan. He only auditioned for Laguna Beach in the first place because he was a fan of Carson Daly and wanted to get into hosting. Despite those aspirations, he wasn’t interested in reentering the world of reality TV for a long time. That is, until he got an opportunity to appear on The Traitors.

I wanted to be completely outside my comfort zone and challenge myself. I hadn’t wanted to say yes to a reality show in so many years.

The show originally reached out to Colletti for Season 3, but he couldn’t make it work with his schedule. “I realized, ‘Oh no, I would probably take that leap if I could,’” he says. “I wanted to be completely outside my comfort zone and challenge myself. I hadn’t wanted to say yes to a reality show in so many years.” Luckily, he got another shot with Season 4.

Ahead of time, Weaver, who’s currently pregnant with their first baby, gave him all the deets on his rumored fellow cast members. “My wife taught me about the Housewives. She was right. She said that Lisa Rinna was probably going to be on the show, and if she was, she would be a Traitor,” he says, before adding, “She keeps me in the loop, and she has clued me in a little bit on Bravo.” And yes, he’s up-to-date on the latest Summer House drama. “We’re Team Ciara in our household.”

Laguna was out of dumb luck. I was randomly plucked from obscurity.

Despite Weaver’s intel on Colletti’s castmates, he didn’t make too many waves on the show — or its reunion. “Going into both, I knew I wasn’t going to be a loud voice in the room. I knew that there were going to be some big personalities there, so I was just going to sit back and enjoy the show,” he says. That laissez-faire attitude meant he was able to leave the soundstage with all of his relationships intact. “I was more of a man of the people and had good relationships with everybody.”

Even with his diplomatic approach, some feelings still got hurt when he was listed as a One Tree Hill cast member, as opposed to a Laguna Beach star. But for Colletti, it was never that deep. (Plus, he was technically in more episodes of One Tree Hill.) “I’m proud of what I did to get One Tree Hill. Laguna was out of dumb luck. I was randomly plucked from obscurity,” he says. “I am still proud of that show and how far we’ve come; it won’t be the first thing I’ll tell my grandkids. I’d tell them about One Tree Hill first because I worked hard to get on that show. I worked hard to stay on that show.”

For any future opps, he now knows that the Laguna fans want some credit — and who knows, maybe he’ll head back to Scotland to right that wrong. “I want back in the castle,” he says. “I want to run it back, and I want to be a Traitor because they have all the fun.”