Last week, Paris Hilton's My New BFF headed to Las Vegas, and the girls were tasked to do a showgirl routine for Paris. The crash course, and the lack of sleep, has made things a little complicated for some. As the girls head down to the spa, Paris suddenly springs the challenge—letters with rumors! Some didn't take things as well as the others, and eventually Kiki was sent home because of her attitude.

Watching the series for the past few weeks, you can't help but notice that Paris is looking way beyond the ditzy partygoer-slash-fashionista we've been so used to seeing in the media. Just look at the way she TTYN'ed Kiki—so serious! If she admits to one thing, it's her attempts to move past that careless image and look a bit more… responsible.

“I've grown up a lot, and I have a great relationship [with Benji Madden],” she said in an interview with The Village Voice. “I was living like I was still a teenager. Now I realize I have a lot of responsibilities on my plate, and I'm running a huge empire. I don't go out as much anymore. I've been to so many parties for so many years, it gets really old.”

So is her reality show a way to it? Some say it's scripted; she thinks otherwise. “Just the parts when I'm on my throne, but everything else is real,” she said. “I'm really friends with the girls—they text me every day. There are offers to do spin-offs of the show in Australia, Germany, Dubai, Russia … I just do things that interest me and live life to the fullest. I don't do it for any other reason.”

Proof two: Repo! The Genetic Opera, the film where Paris plays surgically-enhanced painkiller addict Amber Sweet. “It was very uncomfortable, with different prosthetics every day,” she said of her experiences while shooting. “I looked like Freddy Krueger. I could not even look in the mirror, it was so gross. But it was also really cool to do something completely different than what I'm usually typecast as. This was not another typical blonde. Plus it was a musical.”

However, she's sad to see some parts of the film get cut off. “Darren [Lynn Bousman] had to cut so much because the movie was four hours long,” she said. “There was this cool song, ‘Come Up and Try My New Parts'. In the song, I'm talking to the grave-robber, and I want some of his Zydrate, which is a futuristic drug I was offering favors for it. It'll be on the DVD.”

Everything, of course, has the future in mind. “I'm a businesswoman, I'm a brand, so everything I do is to escalate my brand and give it more exposure,” she said. “If you want to be in this business, you have to be in the media.”