Even though he was living in L.A. and hanging out with The Hills cast regularly—his first roommate was Frankie Delgado—Talan never appeared on the spin-off series.
“I would even be there when they filmed and just be over on the side and talk to the cameramen who had worked on Laguna Beach,” Talan revealed. “It was very odd. To be 100 percent honest, I was never asked to be on The Hills.”
But Talan does have two possible theories as to why he was never asked to appear. The first being that his inclusion “would’ve been a lot of Laguna all over again in a sense,” and he “didn’t really have a dramatic storyline with those people,” Talan reasoned, admitting he would have just been “a floater.”
The second explanation, however, is far juicier as Talan revealed he “pissed off MTV” after he was supposed to co-host TRL, only to purposefully miss his red-eye flight because his teenage self had different priorities at the time.
“Oh my god, I am going to sound like such a douche, but I was hanging out at the Chateau Marmont having drinks with some people,” Talan detailed, “and I was like, ‘You know what, screw it.’ I think somebody else was hosting it with me, so I was like, ‘They’ll be fine, I don’t need to go.'”
As Julia Roberts once said: Big mistake. Huge.
“Oh boy, was that a big deal,” Talan recalled. “They were pretty upset with me for a long time. It was a bad move on my part. I was a a young punk kid, I didn’t know any better.”
So upset, in fact, that his decision to bail on TRL likely cost Talan his own TV show documenting his music career—think Ashlee Simpson‘s eponymous 2004 Newlyweds spin-off—with with the network. (Joe Simpson was his manager for a time, by the way!)
“The guy at the top was like, ‘Oh, this is definitely not happening and I am so happy to kibosh this thing because of the TRL incident,'” Talan explained. “I’m not saying it would have happened either way, but he made it known, like, ‘We are for sure not in the business of Talan Torriero.'”
“So I don’t know if there was bad blood and maybe that’s why I wasn’t at all featured on The Hills even as a guest person or just because I didn’t really have a storyline,” Talan concluded. “It’s probably a mix of both.”