Nicole Richie says a therapist would be needed on-site if they did ‘The Simple Life’ now.
The 39-year-old star has insisted that if they ever brought back the iconic reality show, which saw her and best friend Paris Hilton, 40, leave their luxurious lifestyles behind to live in modest digs, more psychological support would be needed because of the fact they had to leave their cell phones at home.
Nicole – who has Harlow, 13, and Sparrow, 11, with her Good Charlotte rocker husband Joel Madden – said: “It would be hard now because we’re older and we have travelled and we have been everywhere.
“I think that concept was so great because you were able to take people’s phones away for a month.
“If you took someone’s phone away right now, you’d have to have a therapist on-site and make sure they were OK. No one’s trying to deal with all that, including me. So, I think it would be such a different thing.”
The actress and fashion designer admitted she and Paris had no idea what they were going into when they signed up for the programme – which ran between 2003 and 2007.
She said: “There were only two reality shows before then. It was ‘The Osbournes’ and ‘The Real World’, and this show wasn’t that, so it was a completely new concept altogether.
“We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into or where we were going.”
However, she relished getting to live somebody else’s life and says it awarded her “a level of privacy”.
Nicole added: “One of my favourite things about ‘The Simple Life’ and one of my favourite things about doing it was, it really took us out of our everyday lives and put us in somebody else’s world. So I was always able to maintain a level of privacy and able to have my own life.”
While it’s unlikely her kids will appear on a new ‘The Simple Life’, Nicole wouldn’t have a problem with her kids joining other reality shows, as long as they were “good and authentic to them”.
She told ‘Entertainment Tonight’: “I think it would be a different thing going into it now, it just depends on what it is.
“But if my kids said to me, ‘I want to try this new thing that hasn’t been done before.’ You just say… Well, obviously now they’re preteen, so I’m going to say no. But yeah, if they’re 18 and they want to go do whatever it is, as long as it feels good and authentic to them, I’m fine with it.”