Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt Share Their Cringiest ‘Girls Next Door’ Moments (Exclusive)
Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt are getting candid about some of the moments from Girls Next Door that they now look back on awkwardly.
Sitting down with ET for an exclusive interview, the former Playboy Bunnies talked about everything from their new podcast — Girst Next Level — to Holly, 44, recently disclosing an autism diagnosis after years of secretly suspecting she may have been on the spectrum.
Going back and forth as they asked each other ET’s prepared questions, Holly looked to Bridget, 50, and quizzed her former co-star and current co-host on what she had found the hardest to witness as they rewatch their show, which ran from 2005 to 2010 and also starred Kendra Wilkinson.
“So, together we host the podcast Girls Next Level, where we take a trip down memory lane and pull back the curtain from the Girls Next Door, for you — I think I know what this is — what is the cringiest scene of the show to watch back?” Holly asked her podcast host.
“I haven’t been through all of them yet, but for me, it was right off the bat episode two and it just showed me like being jealous of the other girls to the point of trying to sabotage their pictorials and trying to get people drunk — and that was never, ever like what I was trying to do. These were my friends, I was happy for them and it just — it really, it was very hard to watch,” Bridget said. “It was hard at the time, but I kind of put it out of my mind and forgot all about it. But when we started rewatching, it was very hard for me to rewatch and I almost didn’t wanna do the podcast anymore because I thought, ‘How am I gonna even explain this?'”
She continued, “How can I even — like what can I tell people when I’m edited to look like this and it isn’t how I truly felt or what I was actually doing? I just felt like no one was going to believe me.”
Holly’s own answer was a little less serious and more a self-critique of a skill she was attempting to learn, albeit not so well.
“For me, I get super embarrassed — I mean there’s a lot of deeper, cringier things, as well — but I also get super embarrassed in the episode where I’m learning how to speak French and my accent is so bad or, like, if I’m getting a word wrong or something,” Holly told Bridget. “I’m like, ‘That wasn’t me.”
During a previous episode of their podcast, Holly and Bridget agreed that one of the most cringeworthy scenes in the entire show happened in season 2 episode 5 when the three Playboy Bunnies traveled to San Diego to meet Kendra’s family, including her grandparents. Also on the trip was Hugh Hefner, whose age resembled that of Kendra’s grandfather and grandmother.
“It’s so awkward to me even watching it back because you’re seeing two men, who are peers age-wise and like they could sit down and start talking about World War II together, you know? And even as I’m watching it, even Hef to me seems uncomfortable,” Holly said in the episode.
Bridget agreed and said of all the “uncomfortable” parts of the episode, she found it most disturbing when Hefner, the girls and Kendra’s family sat down to watch homemade videos of Kendra growing up.
“The worst for me too is cringey about the childhood videos,” she said. “Even though part of me thinks it could have been innocent, I can’t be sure. And the fact that it — just the fact that it can be taken different ways, it should have been avoided.”
In the episode, Kendra said of the interaction in her family’s living room, “I think Hef loved watching that video — that home video. I think that was like the highlight, I think, of the whole trip.”
White chatting with ET, Bridget and Holly also asked each other about the first time they met and their immediate impressions of the other person, as well as their recent projects including their podcast and ID’s The Playboy Murders series.
“My first impression was that you were very guarded and kind of a lone sheep. But at the same time, I completely understood why you would be that way. And even though I hadn’t been at the mansion that often, I felt like I kinda just got it,” Bridget said. “That your spot there was something that other people were trying to get from you — it was very competitive, it was a dog-eat-dog world and I could see that right off the bat, so I kind of understood it.”
“Well, one of the first times I met you, you were wearing that amazing Carmen Miranda costume and you were handing out the Jack Daniels bottles and I was like, ‘Oh my god, she’s so fun,'” Holly said.
As for The Playboy Murders, which Holly acts as an executive producer on and recently debuted its second season, she said there almost was a situation in which she didn’t take it on at all.
“I was totally hesitant at first when my agent told me about it. I was like, ‘I do not want to do another Playboy-related thing, like, I’m up to my ears in it. I don’t want to.’ But then he’s like, ‘OK, well, just look at the deck and the cases they want to do and let me know,’ and when I saw what cases they wanted to cover, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I would watch this show,'” Holly said.
The series finds the former Playmate “recounting the shocking intersection of murder and mystery within the world of the popular adult men’s magazine, Playboy.”
“There were so many cases I’d never heard of before that I was so intrigued by and there’s nothing better than being part of a show that you would actually watch,” Holly continued.
For more from Holly and Bridget’s sit-down with ET, watch the video in the player above.
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