“We both caught on very early that The Simple Life had a formula,” Richie says over hot tea and toast with butter and jam. “They would drop us off at our jobs, they would leave, we would mess it up, they would get mad, we would laugh, we were in skirts.” (It’s true—rewatching a few key episodes ahead of our interview, I was struck by how frequently both women attempted farm work in tiny pleated skirts and short shorts.) “The producers were like, ‘We don’t really want you to wear jeans, we want you to wear dresses.’ It was entertainment. Both Paris and I are from LA. We understand.”
Hilton, too, has talked openly about leaning into the vapid baby-voiced stereotype we devoured, and—in what might be one of the longest performances in showbiz history—can still keep it going if that’s what the situation calls for.
“For me, it’s definitely a character,” she says between bites of the aforementioned McCarthy salad (no bacon, light on the cheese, both Thousand Island and ranch). “When Nicole and I got approached to do The Simple Life, they described it as Green Acres meets Clueless, so I knew what the audience wanted—that blonde-airhead type of character. So I really played into that with questions like, ‘What’s Walmart?’ I always knew what I was doing because I’m not a dumb blonde. I’m just very good at pretending to be one.”
Which brings us to the present, and the project we’re gathered here today to discuss. Despite what misleading headlines would have you believe, the two aren’t pairing up for a Simple Life reboot to re-wreak havoc in Podunk towns across America.
Instead it’s a three-part reunion show that pays heartfelt homage to the people involved in the original series but also—because it’s Paris and Nicole—has a bit of an unexpected madcap element.
“What we have decided to do for the reunion is to make our song, ‘Sanasa,’ into an opera,” says Richie. An opera?
“We just wanted to do something different than all the other reunions,” Hilton says. “The Simple Life was so innovative and so new to the world. It’s such a special show to celebrate, and we just wanted to do it in the most extra and extravagant way. And it’s funny because we’re going to be fish out of water in this as well, because us being in the opera world is…,” she trails off.
(For the uninitiated, “Sanasa” is a song the women wrote as kids; it became something of a viral inside joke during The Simple Life.)
“Together we came up with this amazing treatment, and then we had pitch meetings with all the big networks,” Hilton says. “Everybody wanted it. Bidding war.”
The women decided to go with Peacock, and the reunion will air December 12—almost 21 years to the day that The Simple Life premiered. Still, Hilton and Richie, both 43, are wives and mothers, and have multiple successful business ventures. (Nicole is a working actor and has been running House of Harlow 1960, her fashion label since 2008. Paris has a career as a singer and DJ, is deep into her advocacy work that protects youth against the inappropriate use of restraints and isolation in treatment facilities, and is about to launch her 30th fragrance). They’re also very, very famous. Why even do this? As they infer, the project is a testament to their friendship, and also a love letter of sorts to the people they met along the way.
