On the first morning of filming their seminal reality television show The Simple Life, a distraught 22-year-old Paris Hilton wanted to go home. Then the hotel heiress struck a deal with producers, agreeing to stay in the show’s rural Arkansas setting after they gave her and her best friend turned costar, Nicole Richie, the adoptive daughter of Lionel Richie, a rolling rack and mirror.
“They were like, ‘Don’t bring any tennis shoes; don’t bring jeans.’ They literally told us to only pack high heels, short skirts and little dresses,” says Hilton, dipping in and out of her signature baby voice. “So of course we would need a rack to hang all these beautiful clothes.”
“I’m happy we didn’t [leave],” she continues. “But I don’t think they would have let us, either.” Richie is quick to agree: “I don’t even think we could get out of there. We had no one to call. We didn’t even have phones.”
Their decision to stick around changed the course of their careers and pop culture at large. And now, Hilton and Richie, both 43, have embarked upon a reunion of epic proportions: Paris & Nicole: The Encore, a three-episode Peacock series in which they revisit their reality TV roots, using the original series as inspiration to tell the story of their lifelong friendship in an over-the-top opera.
On a rainy day in New York, the duo is ready to reminisce about those early days in the wild west of reality television. Sitting side by side in an office at 30 Rock, Hilton—wearing a rhinestone-encrusted polka dot dress—and Richie, swaddled in a fluffy black fur coat, look just as out of place in corporate America as they once did traipsing across the farm in their Juicy Couture tracksuits, or at clumsily delivering burgers on rollerstakes at the local Sonic. They are, of course, more accustomed to adapting to new environments by now; they’ve managed to find their light even under the conference room’s harsh fluorescents, looking glamorous as ever over Zoom.
Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, The Simple Life.From Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Photo.
Back in 2003, when the socialites turned moguls signed on to The Simple Life, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. “We said yes for the sole purpose of having fun. We had no idea that there would be a second season or a fifth season,” says Richie. “It was a real experiment. They didn’t tell us anything about the show, period. The only two [reality] shows at the time that existed were The Real World and The Osbournes, and this show was not that.”
The Simple Life’s fish-out-of-water premise plucked two high-maintenance young women out of the lap of luxury in Beverly Hills and dropped them off in the middle of nowhere, where they’d trade in their private jet for a pickup truck, working blue-collar jobs and living amongst the locals.
