Paris Hilton opens up about her life in YouTube doc This Is Paris – a far cry from the “character” that the hotel heiress has been playing for over 15 years in shows such as The Simple Life.

Hilton was at the Winter TCA press tour to discuss the film and it was a relatively frank conversation, one in which she didn’t use her ‘That’s Hot’ catchphrase once.

She told Deadline that it was an “emotional” and “raw” experience. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” she said. “In this film I discuss things I’ve never discussed before. I hope that people are going to see who I truly am.”

“It follows me in my real life, everything I’ve done before was me playing a character. I was talking about things that are very hard to talk about. It was an amazing experience but it was very scary. I was freaking out,” she added.

Neither Hilton, nor director Alexandra Dean, who previously directed Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, originally wanted to either be in or direct the doc. Hilton said she was initially very “reluctant” to take the meeting but that it’s a “real film”, handing full control to the filmmakers.

Dean, similarly, didn’t want to follow up her Lamarr film with the story of Paris Hilton. “When I first got the call, I said no. I had grown up in the UK and looking at Paris on the cover of every magazine and I thought she was that original influencer who had brought that influencer world upon us,” she said.

Dean drew comparisons between Lamarr, who was best known for being one of Hollywood’s leading ladies in the 1940s, but was actually an incredibly successful inventor, essentially responsible for the technology that lead to Bluetooth, and Hilton. “I completely did a 180,” she added.

Despite Hilton’s admission that the producers of Fox and E! reality series The Simple Life – it was produced by Bunim/Murray – would engineer that series to show Hilton and Nicole Richie as fish out water, she said it wasn’t a mistake. “I was in on the joke,” she said. “Sometimes it is annoying people assuming I am the blonde airhead that I played on the show, but I like proving people wrong.”

The doc, which is produced by Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman via Industrial Media’s Intellectual Property Corporation banner, launches on YouTube in May.

Source: deadline.com