Paz de la Huerta tells her life story and makes pictures in Hollywood

“I am technically a princess,” says Paz de la Huerta over lunch at the Chateau Marmont — her castle, if you recall her appearance in Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Born in New York City to Judith Bruce and Spanish aristocrat Ricardo Ignacio de la Huerta, Duke of Mandas y Villanueva, De la Huerta doesn’t hold an official title. Born to nobility; ultimately powerless.

Yet in New York’s SoHo, where her family settled in the 1980s, she was royalty of another kind. Larry Gagosian lived above the family, and when they moved to Tribeca, Miramax — the distribution and production company founded by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein — rented the apartment next door. De la Huerta attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn with Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke. At school, she met designer Zac Posen and became an early muse. She babysat Lexi Jones, daughter of David Bowie and Iman, and appeared in a film nominated for best picture at the 2000 Academy Awards — all before turning 21. Paz de la Huerta is a real downtown princess.

Paz wears her own Dolce & Gabbana dress, stylist’s own vintage Louboutin shoes.

She now sits comfortably inside the courtyard of the Chateau, 13 years after “Video Games” made iconic the TMZ footage of her stumbling away from a Golden Globes after-party hosted at the hotel. At the time, she was working on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” and the incident almost got her fired. Clear-eyed and steady today, she finishes her earlier thought while piling salt on her arancini: “It’s forbidden for the aristocracy to speak to the press. But in my case, I had no choice.”

Let’s begin with that night at the Chateau. Writer Jay Bulger’s infamous 2010 profile for New York magazine described her as someone who “excels at creating, and causing, drama.” An understandable reputation, given that was the year De la Huerta alleges Harvey Weinstein stalked and assaulted her. In 2011, she approached a journalist about the alleged assault. “Somehow,” she says, “Weinstein learned I had spoken out right before that night.”

At the time, De la Huerta was taking Suboxone for opioid withdrawal. Mixing it with alcohol can be fatal, yet drinks kept appearing in her hands. “There’s the back door for drunk celebrities,” she says, pointing behind me as a waiter approaches, then turns away. That night, she was kicked out the front, where paparazzi awaited. For a while, the scene tarnished her credibility.

Friends told me to brace myself for the petulant movie star, the diva. What I find is a woman early to our date, eager to talk. Her long, Modigliani face has softened over time, more beautiful than in pictures. A scoop neckline and string of pearls frame her often-photographed bust. Her dress, with banded sheer sleeves and an embroidered bodice, recalls Adjani in “Queen Margot,” but the thigh-high slit makes it distinctly Paz. The look flirts with the 15th-century-inspired French Gothic arches behind her. She orders another arancini, covering it with so much salt it spills onto the phone next to her plate.

When she recounts her life, De la Huerta speaks openly, often repeating details. Sometimes she lunges forward to emphasize, shaking the four-top wicker table, giving the impression that hardly anyone has believed her. Sexual assault is discredited when details fumble, as if memory isn’t elastic and unreliable. But De la Huerta’s timeline is always the same. She punctuates stories with smoke breaks, ignoring the poor air quality, and taking them frequently.

Los Angeles is burning, a tragedy so vast it renders Didion’s prose on the Santa Ana winds unhelpful. The images I saw from New York were apocalyptic, the GoFundMe links constant. In Hollywood, it feels as though nothing has happened. I assumed De la Huerta’s latest duo show with Jaxon Demme at the gallery Spy Projects would be canceled. Yet, here we are.

De la Huerta has flown into town from an undisclosed location. In 2021, she ran away from her father in Madrid, ditched her lawyer, and flew to Los Angeles to retrieve her Weinstein settlement. She then rented a farmhouse “near Paris,” as her artist bio states. She operates from a private Instagram and Proton email. “If I stayed in America,” she says, “I would’ve gone bankrupt.” Her paintings, like Francisco Goya’s “Black Paintings,” were created in exile, the two artists centuries apart and finally free from the Spanish aristocracy. De la Huerta’s bright palette recalls Marc Chagall, the painter who fled to New York when the Nazis invaded France.

On Instagram, she posts in a constant finsta-like stream — long captions of horrors she has faced mixed with past shoots and aspirational images. On Oct. 10, 2024, De la Huerta posted a black-and-white still of Helena Christensen in a 1992 Revlon commercial. The caption reads: “I want to take photos like this. I have some photo shoots coming up, but I am feeling the need for some glamour in my life, and I am looking for a modeling manager.” I’m lucky to know many talented photographers, so I messaged her to say I could be of service. Sebastian Acero was set to photograph, Fern Cerezo to style, and Sonny Molina to bless the hair.

It was through photography that I discovered De la Huerta — her brazen sexiness, often captured in Purple magazine, collided with my adolescence. I gazed at her the way she looks at Helena Christensen. Frequently photographed by Terry Richardson for Purple, she asserts that he was never inappropriate with her. That’s her truth, though it may not reflect another’s experience. (Richardson has faced accusations of sexual assault as recently as 2023; he denies all claims of non-consensual sex.)

The list of photographers who have shot De la Huerta reads like the greatest hits of the turn of last century: Terry Richardson, Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller, Mario Sorrenti, Bruce Weber. De la Huerta has lived a life of pictures, and when everything was lost, it was the pictures that remained.

Around age 6, her parents split. Her father, described by De la Huerta as drunk and abusive — claims that he has denied — moved back to Spain. De la Huerta moved with her mother from SoHo to 311 Greenwich St. in Tribeca. In Barney’s portrait “The Lipstick” (1999), we see a teenage De la Huerta as the punky Lolita applying rouge in her bedroom as her mother looks on. Behind Judith Bruce, a French door is slightly ajar. That door, De la Huerta alleges, connected their apartment, 3C, to 3B, rented out by her mother to Miramax.

Paz wears her own jewelry, stylist’s top and bottom, stylist’s own vintage Louboutin shoes. Rocky wears Primrose Vintage LA top and overalls.

In 1998, Billy Hopkins, a casting director from Miramax, approached De la Huerta and her mother on the street in front of their apartment about a role in “The Cider House Rules.” A complaint filed in Los Angeles by De la Huerta and her then-lawyer Aaron Filler in 2019 states: “Miramax selected their next-door neighbor — 13-year-old Paz De La Huerta — to star in Cider House Rules, so it is indisputable that senior executives at Miramax — almost certainly Harvey Weinstein — were well aware of Paz.” In the same complaint, De la Huerta alleges a series of intimidations and assaults that she said took place in 2010 and 2011 between her and Weinstein. These alleged events would take place years after they met on the set of “The Cider House Rules.” Last year, Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction was overturned by New York’s highest court — a case built on multiple testimonies and allegations. De la Huerta has since been organizing a GoFundMe to restart her case against him. “It is crucial that someone big takes this story on, someone my family can’t pay off,” says De la Huerta, “someone like Amal Clooney.”

When Luis Bobadilla, one of the muses of our team, picks me up from Union Station, Madonna’s “Live to Tell” — De la Huerta’s exhibition title at Spy Projects — plays. The synchronicities in L.A. keep accumulating, and I’ll learn this is even more true around De la Huerta. A devout Catholic, the artist makes paintings that are heavy with sporadic, jagged symbolism. Larry Gagosian sold Basquiat upstairs while De la Huerta was a baby below, and her work sometimes has the effect of childlike depictions of what she learned by osmosis.

The narrative of her 10-painting offering is as follows: A princess is cursed with never receiving the love she’s given. A butterfly breaks the curse, providing her with a baby girl, born with the love the princess badly needed. Think of Sarah, the conspiracy daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Jaxon Demme’s sculptures in the gallery’s center are princesses encased in chrome and wire, still waiting for the butterfly to arrive and the suffering to end.

“Which is your favorite?” De la Huerta asks me at the opening. I point to the large painting in the middle that bears the phrase: I thought I had to grieve you. Words spoken by a therapist who encouraged her to paint as a way to heal. “I thought I had to grieve you,” he’d say after long stretches of silence from De la Huerta — instances when she’d be committed and recommitted to mental hospitals.

Paz wears Swarovski jewelry, stylist’s own dress tailored by Bontha, underwear tailored by Bontha, stylist’s own vintage Louboutin shoes. Rocky wears stylist’s own top, shorts and belt.

Inside the painting is a rendering of Kenny the Tiger, the famous inbred white Bengal. “That’s what they do in the royal family,” she says, pointing. “Incest.”

This story is hard to tell: It’s her story — uniquely, terribly hers.

In 2020, De la Huerta traveled to Spain for what would be the last time, to screen “Puppy Love,” a film that won her awards but still hasn’t had a wide release. She hadn’t seen her father in a decade, so she booked a hotel near him in Madrid. Her friend Miguel Morillo later recounted the night in an email: he, a mutual friend and De la Huerta spent the evening in Madrid, talking about movies and life before ending the night with a sleepover at her hotel. In the middle of the night, someone began banging on the door — “Paz, open the door,” a man’s voice demanded. De la Huerta said it was her father. Frightened, de la Huerta pleaded with him to come back later, then asked her friends to leave.

At the opening, all is well. A cooler full of beer below a cheese table signals where I am: the show of an early-career painter. De la Huerta is drinking only the cameras and eyes that are on her. On this night, she is Rita Hayworth. The day before, I’d encountered a hardened grace reserved by life for a select few. What I see on this night is the spell of hair and makeup; I mean this as glamour, a way to make others see what you want them to see. On her private Instagram, she posts long captions about reversing the aging process, and tonight, I watch her do it.

In attendance is De la Huerta’s friend Marilyn Manson; sexual and domestic violence charges against him had just been dropped earlier that day. She insists on his innocence more than once, and my stomach turns. I want to believe her as I do everything I’ve written above, but I can’t. I’ve seen women speak against Manson with the same urgency and detail that De la Huerta has shown me.

Why do we believe some people and not others? During #MeToo, I dated someone who lost their Condé Nast job over similar accusations. I chose to believe their innocence. I cannot ask De la Huerta to turn her back on her friend, just as she cannot ask me to turn my ear from Evan Rachel Wood’s testimony against Manson. Whenever he comes up, I change the subject.

These images, that light. The reason we’re in Hollywood is to make pictures. A month prior, on Zoom, De la Huerta told me and photographer Sebastian Acero that this would work best if it felt like a movie. She set three characters: Whore, Mother and the Ghost of Marilyn Monroe. Through fashion, hair and makeup, she would direct herself into three viable paths her life could’ve taken. We begin with Monroe and end on Whore. When I told her the order, she smiled: “So, we’re starting at the end.”

In the final completed role of her life, Marilyn Monroe plays divorcée Roslyn Taber in “The Misfits” (1961). In it, Clark Gable asks her, “Why are you so sad? You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met.” As a child, Monroe went to the movies to project dreams of a father onto Gable. Knowing everything we do about Monroe — and how much is still unknown — the film’s penultimate scene is grating. Gable and his crew of men tie up a distressed horse while an equally distressed Monroe watches. She runs, screaming at them, at the camera, at the world: “Horse killers! Killers! Murderers! You’re liars! All of you, liars! You’re only happy when you can see something die!” The scene unsettles Monroe fans, knowing it was her husband, writer Arthur Miller, who perhaps plagiarized her intimate words for the screen.

As Linda in Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void” (2009), De la Huerta delivers a scene that evokes a similar feeling for me, that feeling that the actor’s reality is braiding with the film. Linda, a dancer at a club called Sex Money Power, is working when she learns her drug-dealing brother has died. His spirit hovers over the entire film, witnessing the wreckage of his absence. Linda, left without her only friend, crumbles when the person who gave her brother up tries to apologize. She can only scream: “I don’t wanna be here, I don’t wanna be here with these evil f–ing people! They’re f–ing evil!” A video on De la Huerta’s private profile, posted on Jan. 12, shows her being driven around in a van. Laughing, she says, “Gaspar was right — my memoir should be a comedy. But I’m angry with Gaspar because he hasn’t written a statement against my father.”

For the ghost of Monroe, De la Huerta insisted on wearing a red rose-printed Dolce & Gabbana dress she bought herself as a birthday gift years ago. She says it was the dress she wore during a near-death experience. In the great purge of her old life, this dress is something she decided to keep, because it protected her. She wants to wear it at Monroe’s grave, because she says it could’ve been her. What does she mean? “The dead actress,” she puts it simply.

Paz wears her own jewelry, stylist’s own top, bottom and tights.

The night before our fitting, I dream my father is staring at me menacingly in a loud club. I am begging my friends to leave, but they can’t hear me over the music.

When it’s finally time to see the Dolce & Gabbana dress at our fitting, I tell her about the dream. I ask for more details about the night her dress saved her. De la Huerta says she was taken out to dinner by the people who manage her father’s money, on the occasion of her birthday, and felt something terrible was imminent. Later that night, in a club, she begged strangers to help her hide. No one listened. My dream connection goes ignored as her focus zeroes in on the dress zipping up. Our patient stylist, Fern Cerezo, does their best, but the zipper won’t close — the gap is too wide.

“I’ll be thinner in the morning, but don’t worry, I won’t make myself throw up.”

Should I be worried about that?

The next morning, after the “Misfits” wig goes on and makeup artist Kennedy’s Warhol paint is stamped, I watch over Cerezo’s shoulder as De la Huerta steps into the dress. The zipper goes up with ease.

It’s raining on the drive to Westwood Memorial Park, where Monroe is buried. At first, I take it as a good sign — then I’m told of mudslides. We Google Monroe’s favorite music and settle on Ella Fitzgerald. De la Huerta requests “Love for Sale,” a song learned back when she hoped to become a lounge singer. She turns around from the front seat and counts Fitzgerald’s different loves from the chorus: old love, new love, every love but true love.

She plays it on repeat at the grave. We hand her the white roses she requested — “It’s customary” — and watch in whispers. “Quiet!” De la Huerta shimmies toward Monroe in homage. More lipstick goes on, and she kisses the name plaque. On her knees, she bows, splaying her arm in praise. Marilyn Monroe, the guardian angel of all working girls. A saint whose image still works and sells in smoke shops, tourist traps and museums.

A family tries to visit the grave but instead watches De la Huerta perform from across the street. The rain stops and the sun comes out on schedule for the next look.

Paz wears Manolo Blahnik shoes, talent’s own jewelry, stylist’s own bottom, tights and gloves.

Monroe experienced three miscarriages in her lifetime; De la Huerta has lost two children. Her desire for motherhood is evident — not just in conversation but in the narrative arc of her show at Spy Projects. For our photo shoot, she requested a child to act out a maternal scene with her.

Fortunately, our head producer, Palma Villalobos, had a connection: Rocky Mosse, age 8. For this look, De la Huerta is referencing “Domestic Bliss,” Angelina Jolie’s 2005 editorial with Steven Klein for W Magazine. We are lucky to have Justin Bontha — tailor to Rihanna and Madonna — on set to tweak a caftan that Cerezo crafted from polka dot fabric.

By the pool, De la Huerta is playful with Rocky, and this time, the audience is allowed to make noise. Our laughter emboldens her. “You’ve got to sleep for 15 days, Rocky!” Because it’s almost “Mommy and Daddy day.” Rocky stamps his foot in giggly indignation. If he does his homework, she says, he doesn’t get to eat. If he doesn’t do it, he gets candy.

She plays bad mommy like a John Waters muse; I think we need to see De la Huerta in a comedy. She nicknames her scene-mate “Rocko” in a Long Island accent from 1985. Rocky protests this new name. De la Huerta accuses him of hating her. All is said with an air toward entertaining us, but something else hovers over the interaction.

Back in the makeup chair, robe on, she thinks out loud while her lipstick is being wiped off: “I don’t know what I’d do with a son, you know? I’m so feminine.” Some of us AMABs on set joke that our mothers said the same.

We’re back at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where De la Huerta is staying and Monroe once lived as a model. The doorman is very friendly and asks if there’s a party going on. “It used to be a party place,” says De la Huerta, lighting her first indoor cigarette of the shoot. At the fitting, I had asked if she was in a smoking room. She laughed, then mocked me as she blew out the window. “Is this a smoking room?”

Her best friend James Orlando has been her right hand the entire shoot, a quiet and supportive presence. It was Orlando who paid for the Iboga, the West African psychedelic De la Huerta credits with rewiring her brain, allowing her to live without a pill in her body.

Orlando met De la Huerta on set for a Bullett Magazine shoot in August 2010. In a video interview for the issue, an off-screen voice asks her, “What was your first acting experience that did not involve a camera or a stage?” She lists a few things — playing dress-up with her sister, negotiating with her father, and learning how to manipulate him to get what she wanted. If it was a dress she wanted, she’d do “anything and everything to get it.”

Behind the camera, something about her answer unsettled Orlando. Maybe it was that moment, or maybe it was the way De la Huerta walked around naked at the Bullett offices, but his judgment was already forming.

In 2007, De la Huerta directed a short film called “Pupa, Papa, Puta.” The tongue-twister translates to “Doll, Dad, Whore.” The creator of the film’s lead, a doll, is a violent man. It’s only when the doll shatters that she can come alive in the form of De la Huerta, her own self-directed star, naked in broad daylight, sweeping up the pieces.

At the Hollywood Roosevelt, she’s channeling Anouk Aimée in “Lola” (1961), her current style icon, and whom she believes she most resembles. She’s energized, still speaking in the Long Island accent from earlier, lighting cigarettes constantly.

As we set up for the next shot, room service delivers a bottle of wine. To be clear, De la Huerta has never claimed sobriety. Orlando advises her not to drink on camera, as any good friend should. Through the lens of harm reduction, a glass of wine seems benign, certainly less harmful than opiates. But the details of excessive drinking that she attributes to anxiety and depression in her 2019 complaint against Weinstein ring in my ears. If you believe her — and I do, completely — it’s hard not to think about.

De la Huerta calls herself a method actor, and watching her now, I don’t see someone with a drinking problem. I see an artist doing what artists do: opening the wound, peering into it, and extracting what she can.

Cerezo dresses De la Huerta in a white petticoat and matching corset until she tosses off the top and demands total silence. To keep talking among ourselves, we hide in the bathroom, where I spray her perfume — Queen Nzinga by Marissa Zappas — on my wrist. From outside, I hear De la Huerta giving Sebastian Acero a striptease to “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains. Jerry Cantrell’s guitar weeps on the track for Layne Staley, who died of an overdose at 34. No matter how much of De la Huerta’s story you believe, it’s a miracle she has lived to tell it. Her 40th birthday was this past fall, a benchmark that might make an actor nervous, but De la Huerta still dreams, wishing to sell paintings, make films and star in fashion campaigns. At one point, she tells us she’ll fly us out to dress her for a future wedding, wherever it is that she lives.

We try one more look, but she vetoes it. The shoot is over. Sonny Molina quickly throws De la Huerta’s hair up for a dinner date she’s late for. Once dressed, she pulls me over to share a secret. It leaves me unsure of what to do or how to forget it. She says it’s something to keep in mind, you know, “as you write my story.”

Devan Díaz is a writer from Queens, N.Y.