Never question Nicole Richie‘s devotion to her bees. The Beverly Hills homesteader — she was raising chickens and jarring her own honey long before the term “tradwife” was coined — is wrapping up a story about how her father, Lionel Richie, banished her beehive from his property when she makes the depth of her passion crystal clear.
This anecdote of the “All Night Long” singer’s unwanted insects is quirky and just revealing enough to be part of Richie’s chat show arsenal. I’ve heard it before, though not the part about what happened next. She didn’t relocate the bees to her own home. They went to live on their beekeeper’s property in the San Fernando Valley, which sounds a lot like the proverbial farm upstate. The bees are alive and thriving, I’m assured, and producing more of her small batch sweetener as we speak. But she senses skepticism over how active of a role she plays in the process. “If a mother sends their child to boarding school,” she poses, “is she no longer their mother?”
“How often do you visit your bees?”
“A lot.”
“What is ‘a lot’?”
“Often.”
“Like, how often?”
“You’re questioning my parenting skills, and it’s insulting. I hate this interview.”
Richie shakes her head in disappointment and turns her attention to a cooling carafe of coffee. She’s playing, obviously, though I am briefly terrified that she’s serious. Her ability to take a bit to the absolute breaking point rivals that of any Saturday Night Live castmember. In the years since the 2003 launch of The Simple Life made her a household name almost overnight, Richie has embodied many identities — reality star, tabloid fixture, style icon, entrepreneur, satirical trap musician, lamentably underutilized actress — but the thread that’s held this bizarre tapestry of a career together has always been the quick wit and dry delivery that keeps people on their toes.
“I can’t think of a great comedy actor who isn’t funny in real life,” says Tracey Wigfield, the Emmy-winning writer who cast Richie in her 2017 NBC sitcom Great News. “Growing up in L.A., surrounded by entertainment people, that probably played a part. But she’s just inherently funny. She sees the world in a weird way. She’s a natural.”
Richie books relatively steady acting work. Earlier this year, she appeared in a remake of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead and starred alongside Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard in Summer Camp. Her jewelry line turned lifestyle brand, House of Harlow, is heading into its 17th year and remains her professional focus. The two children she shares with husband Joel Madden (of Good Charlotte fame) are teenagers now but still a few years from leaving the nest. And let’s not forget those vaguely frequent trips to the hive. All that’s to say, at 43, this woman is busy. Yet now, well over a decade after she established herself as a strategic multihyphenate, she’s taking a rare look backward. She doesn’t sound particularly eager to reflect on the years during which she was just famous for being famous, but she’s savvy. Playing the nostalgia card is usually enough for a winning hand in Hollywood, so, on the heels of The Simple Life‘s 20th anniversary, she and co-star Paris Hilton are getting the band back together. And that band is sort of The Beatles of reality TV.
“Without Paris and Nicole, there probably would not have been a Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” says Simple Life co-creator Jonathan Murray, who went on to produce the 280- episode family docuseries. “In fact, Kim’s first TV appearance was guesting on The Simple Life.”
Paris and Nicole: The Encore premieres Dec. 12 on Peacock. It’s not so much a reboot as it is a high-concept reunion. Instead of again embedding among Middle America’s working class — a more complicated prospect today than it was back when America was still bound by post-9/11 kumbaya unity — the pair of childhood friends will now attempt to stage an original opera. Really. They’ll also slip back into their familiar dynamic, two terminally goofy women who thrive (or at least entertain) when outside their comfort zone. The big difference now is that Richie knows exactly what she’s getting into.
“I find it fun to play into the public’s perception of me, so that’s what I do,” she says. “I make everything bigger, more ridiculous. That was never the plan, just where I landed in life. Because I’m not really interested in people knowing the real me. Why would I need that?”
One fact about Richie that’s most likely real is that she starts every day with a text: “I’m awake.”
She and six of her closest friends use a group chat, appropriately titled “I’m awake,” as a medium to say “good morning” and overshare until it’s time for bed. And, no, nobody else on the thread is famous. “If Joel asks, ‘Who are you having dinner with?’, I just say ‘I’m awake,’” explains Richie. “Referring to your group chat has become this way of saying, ‘These people are my constants.’”
Most mornings, Richie announces “I’m awake” by 5:30. She likes to start her day early, drop her kids off at school and drive to House of Harlow’s DTLA office. She does not mind the hourlong commute from Beverly Hills, approaching Los Angeles traffic like a game to be won. And she’s early for our breakfast at The Polo Lounge, where staff are again on the offensive about the dress code. A confirmation email had already cautioned the Beverly Hills Hotel commissary’s zero tolerance policy on crop tops, and a host spends two minutes talking somebody on the phone through the wardrobe rules that do and do not apply to children. Even Richie, a lifelong regular, isn’t immune from heightened scrutiny.
“A while ago, they told me I had a tear in my jeans, but they’d let it slide that once,” she says. “The tiniest rip. I hadn’t even noticed. They must have spies.”
Concealed midriffs should be expected for any establishment charging $28 for a bowl of oatmeal (her order), but this is Los Angeles, where the arc of the sartorial universe bends toward casual. It’s been the opposite trajectory for Richie. Her public identity was forged in the era of velour sweats and garish trucker hats. Perched on an upholstered booth, wearing an oversized sweater and raw denim that doesn’t betray even the hint of a loose thread, Richie’s aesthetic these days, to further exhaust the adjective of the year, is demure. Her high-end jewelry line, more affordable clothing collection, cozy relationship with the fashion press and judging gig on the Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum design competition Making the Cut erased all lingering associations with Juicy Couture — almost.
“My daughter asked me if I had any of my old tracksuits for her,” Richie says with a sigh. “My God, who knew we should have saved them? The 2000s are, surprisingly, having a moment.”
The Simple Life is part of the aughts’ unlikely renaissance. Despite its relative scarcity on streaming services — episodes are available for purchase but not included in any subscriptions — it’s become a fruitful source of TikTok fodder. Old audio of Richie is frequently repurposed for memes; an especially popular clip finds her describing her ideal partner. (“I don’t like good-looking guys,” a 22-year-old Richie tells a living room full of women in Altus, Arkansas. “I like them to be really skinny and pale and look like they’re dying.”) She says she keeps an employee between herself and social media, but her children and their friends are eager to share whenever a new clip makes the rounds. “They don’t necessarily feel a connection to it,” she says of her kids’ experience watching the show. “Obviously, they know it’s me — but they also say, ‘It’s so not you.’”
If The Simple Life were taken to market today, the logline would be something like, “Nepo babies roughing it.” Hilton, of course, is the heiress to the hotel empire that shares her name and Richie hails from music royalty. She’s not embarrassed that her family opened doors for her — “Of course that helped me,” she says. “That’s how I got the show!” — but it’s not what kept her in the room. Murray, the godfather of reality TV who also co-created The Real World and Road Rules alongside his late producing partner Mary-Ellis Bunim, remembers his first meeting with Richie vividly.
“Fox had already been in talks with Paris, so we just started bringing in different friends of hers for interviews, including her sister [Nicky Rothschild, née Hilton],” says Murray. “When Nicole walked in, we knew we had comedy magic. It was like watching Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Paris would set up Nicole and she’d come in with these one-liners. No experienced comedy team could’ve written better material.”
“To be with Nicole is to be entertained every second,” offers Hilton. “I’ve been laughing with her since we were 2 years old. On the show, everyone got to see why.”
The Simple Life was a net positive for both women, though it came at a cost. Its five-season run coincided with a period of intense, often sexist public scrutiny focused on Richie in particular, epitomized by a 2006 Vanity Fair profile that devoted the bulk of its 5,000 words to Richie’s weight and appearance. “I’m not angry about anything,” she says of that time. “I think there are and were much more mature 20-year-olds than I was, but boundaries were not necessarily something that I was encouraged to have.”
Hilton is not a member of “I’m awake,” but she and Richie refer to each other as family. They spent their childhoods together. They bought pet rats from a now-shuttered tropical fish store in Beverly Grove and named them after castmembers of Beverly Hills, 90210. They performed at piano recitals at the Hotel Bel-Air. And, when they were 7 years old, they wrote a song that consisted of just three syllables — “san-a-sa” — sung over and over and over. This inside joke would not be worth mentioning had the good people at NBCUniversal not bankrolled a three-part TV special about it. The Encore is about turning “Sanasa,” gibberish the two sung exhaustively on The Simple Life, into an opera. “We were never going to sit down on a couch to recap what we did before and be like, ‘That was so fun,’” says Richie. “That’s not something I want to do. But mixing us with the musical elites for that same fish-out-of-water experience? That’s interesting.”
Elites is not a stretch. They worked on Sanasa with Thomas Adès, easily one of the most accomplished and lauded classical composers of the 21st century. “We tried to reach [Gustavo] Dudamel, but he was unavail,” Richie adds of the outgoing Los Angeles Philharmonic music director and conductor, who’s already soft-launching his next act with the New York Philharmonic. “I mean, what’s he doing? What’s his problem?”
At 16 and 15 years old, respectively, daughter Harlow and son Sparrow are not much younger than Richie and Madden were when they first entered the spotlight. For Hollywood kids, they’ve largely stayed off the radar, only appearing on a red carpet with their parents for the first time in April at the Los Angeles premiere of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. When I ask Richie how she feels about the possibility of either of them pursuing a public life at some point, she appears unfazed and possibly unconvinced by the suggestion.
“My kids are amazing people who are very clear about what they like and do not like,” she says. “They are definitely people with boundaries, which I so respect. I’m just there to encourage them to lean into what interests them.”
One boundary Richie will push is their patience with her unbridled enthusiasm for Christmas. Richie loves the holiday. A few nights before our mid-November meeting, she attended Mariah Carey’s Christmas concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Her home is already half decorated, and she’ll be finished by the day after Thanksgiving. She also refused to acknowledge their doubts about certain traditions when they were younger, a hard line she maintains to this day. “I’m never going to say ‘There’s no Santa,’” she explains. “I still move the Elf on the Shelf every night, and they just roll their eyes on their way out the door. The eye-rolling is part of the joy, anyway.”
Richie seeks joy with abandon. It’s in the iPhone slideshow she shares of pets current and past (Speedy, her late bearded dragon, is immortalized in a short film she set to a Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack). It’s why she’ll head to the office she probably needn’t physically work from as soon as we get the check. It’s why she’s still hungry for more acting opportunities, whether the part is offered — “I’ve noticed I always end up in a tight dress” — or self-generated (she’s currently writing her first feature script, a horror-comedy for her to star in). And then there are her beloved bees, and you’d best believe she harvests that honey herself. There should be some left to hand out at Christmas, even if this year’s stock was depleted by Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish New Year’s customary apples and honey collation presented a prime marketing opportunity. “I got very Martha Stewart about it,” she admits. “I’m like, ‘Here you go, put it on your table, make sure the label’s facing out.’”
Stewart is someone Richie admires as an entrepreneur and as the personification of a lifestyle. She’s the reason Richie was one of the first to jump on the urban chicken bandwagon, a status symbol she loves to flaunt on the social media she doesn’t manage. But Richie might have an edge on the domestic goddess in one arena. She recently placed first in the annual honey competition held at her beekeeper’s farm.
“That was a blind taste test, by the way,” says Richie. “This wasn’t me standing there like, ‘I’m famous, pick my honey!’ I’ll tell you where being a nepo baby does not help me: the bee community.”
