My Day With Paris

With a starring film role and a new British reality show, the pop tart has the rare opportunity to take her career up a notch. But will she take it? She talks with The Daily Beast’s Tom Tapp.

Paris Hilton is smoking. She’s walking around the room in fishnet stockings and high-heeled black boots with her cleavage exposed, and puffing on a cigarette. This is how she’s decided to meet the press for her latest film, Repo: The Genetic Opera. A futuristic Goth musical, Repo is set in a time when the human race is afflicted by a plague of organ failures.

The crisis gives rise to the all-powerful GeneCo, a company that trades in organs new and used. It also begets a plastic surgery chic, where people trade faces like they do cars. Hilton plays Amber Sweet, one of three heirs to the GeneCo fortune, controlled by her sadistic father (Paul Sorvino).

For her next promotion, Paris has been shooting Paris Is My BBF, the second season of her reality show where she flies to London to find a new best friend. We wonder if there will really be a true winner in the end.

It’s a role that has Hilton marching around looking pouty/sexy, singing as the film’s screeching industrial metal soundtrack whines away. Her performance is perfunctory, but serviceable—it’s mostly about costume changes and playing up her kittenish vibe to get the plastic surgery she craves.

It’s a similar scene today: Hilton is clearly playing up her assets for the media. And she knows her audience. Most of her interviews will likely be blog boys from horror and sci-fi websites. As always, Paris comes ready to please.

After giving out methodical directions to an assistant, she puts out the cigarette and sits on the couch very close to her interviewer. That famous coy smile crosses her face. As the interview begins, her voice takes on a girlish pitch.

“It was fun to be different from being a blonde,” she says, staring off sideways. “Amber is a tragic character. You feel sorry for her.”

Though it’s hard to think of Paris Hilton, arguably one of the most famous and wealthy heiresses on the planet, as understanding tragedy, perhaps she’s growing. One wants to believe that Paris has decided to take on truly serious role, to cozy up to gravitas for a moment.

Then she continues: “Probably the hardest scene to film was when my face falls off. I felt like Freddy Krueger. I looked in the mirror and was like, ‘Ew.’ It was gross.”