'Siesta Key' Cast Then vs. Now: See Photos Before They Were Famous

Nowadays, the cast of MTV’s Siesta Key boasts some of the biggest names in reality television. However, prior to July 2017, Juliette Porter, Madisson Hausburg, Chloe Trautman, Kelsey Owens and the rest of the gang were just a bunch of kids hanging out in Florida.

Well, sort of … even before the Siesta Key cast was on television, they were always a wildly entertaining group of friends. So much so, former cast member Alex Kompothecras and his dad, Gary, decided they deserved a TV show.

“I go, ‘You guys are really having a hell of a lifestyle,‘” Gary previously told a news outlet in Jacksonville, Florida. “I said this would be a good reality show. Plus they’re good kids, so that was the main thing, they weren’t bad kids. I said this would be a good story because when I was growing up, you had Father Knows Best, you had My Three Sons, you had people with values and I didn’t see that in the TV of late.”

On a whim, Gary paid for a local production company to shoot a pilot. At first, no major networks were showing interest. In fact, it took a full year to get Siesta Key off the ground. “MTV called up out of the blue and said, ‘Listen, this is what we’ve been looking for,’” he explained.

Of course, so much has changed since the first season of the series, including Alex’s involvement in Siesta Key. Ahead of the season 3A premiere in June 2020, he was fired following resurfaced racist comments on social media. “We’ve made the decision to cut ties with Alex,” MTV tweeted in a statement at the time.

Season 3 aired from January to March before taking a two-month hiatus. As a result, Alex had already participated in all the filming for upcoming episodes. With that, MTV decided to edit the second half of the season to “minimize his presence.”