Former Playboy bunny Holly Madison has opened up about filming the reality ‘Girls Next Door’ series at the Playboy mansion, and suggested that playmates were treated like Hugh Hefner’s children.

Holly lived at the infamous Playboy mansion in LA for seven years, and has spoken publicly about the “dark side” of her time living with Hefner.

During her time there, filming started for a reality series ‘The Girls Next Door’, which broadcast the lives of three playmates; Bridget Marquardt, Kendra Wilkinson, and Holly.

Now, speaking on the Kardashian Kolloquium YouTube channel, Holly has opened up her experience on the TV show.

“For me, it was really strange and probably not what it would be for anybody else, because I had no control over the situation,” she began.

“I was already living in this situation that was very cult-like, that I’d been in for three years… I was like, ‘I can’t leave until I build myself a life on the outside’, because I’d seen so many women leave and then go into these dark places.”

Initially, Holly admitted, news of the reality series raised the possibility of finally escaping to chase her dreams working in front of the camera, but she soon grew dissatisfied with the playmates’ lack of control.

“They didn’t pay us for the first half of the season, they just thought we would do it for free because you’re there,” she continued.

“They really treated us like children, like we were just like Hef’s kids and we were expected to work because we were family. It was really weird.

“I didn’t think it would be a hit, I thought people were going to laugh at us. I thought the best thing I could get out of it was, ‘oh, he might want to put us in the magazine now because we’re kind of famous.”

And, with reality TV only just beginning to take off at the time, Holly recalled that she had been unsure of what to expect.

She noted: “In a way on that show I was not giving much of myself… I knew it was a good opportunity, but I was also super scared of it because I wasn’t comfortable in the situation I was in, so I was like, ‘oh my god, we’re going to expose this to the world’.

“So I tried to be so plain, and so boring and offer nothing in the beginning because I thought nobody could really criticise me if I’m just bland. Which, spoiler alert, they will still criticize you.”

The show, Holly explained, was “loosely based on reality” but the former playmate admitted that scenes were sometimes re-shot, with the girls all playing up to the characters they had been assigned.

And, despite her aspirations of working in TV, Holly confessed that the programme had done little to settle her self-doubt about her advancing age.

“At the Playboy mansion I used to see all the memos come in, when they would review the candidates for playmates,” she remembered.

“And they would always say, ‘she’s 28’, 28 was like the death mark. Every once in a while they would have a playmate who was older than that, but it was pretty rare.

“And I wonder how much that affected me, spending my early 20s constantly hearing, ‘you’re kind of done by 28’.”

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