Yana Eva Thönnes is riding high on the success of her recent play, Call Me Paris, which premiered at the Biennale Teatro in Venice back in June. For Thönnes, creating the play evoked the painful memories of coming of age during a notorious decade when female stars were hounded by the paparazzi and under constant surveillance, courtesy of emerging social media platforms. Since 2014, Thönnes has been creating research-based work that tackles misogyny, rape and domestic violence. She says, “many FLINTA* people are affected by this shit,” and so continues to explore different ways to tell traumatic stories. Case in point: Julia was a 15-year-old girl from Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne. She was Paris Hilton’s doppelganger. Thönnes says, “Julia was sexually abused by an older man who filmed the abuse and called the tape One Night In Paris, due to Julia’s similarity in appearance, and using Paris’ sex tape as a blueprint.” Leading up to Call Me Paris showing at the Schaubühne in January, we caught up with Thönnes to get the backstory behind this evocative piece.
When did you first have the idea to create this work?
When I came across Julia’s doppelganger case and read Paris Hilton’s memoir in 2023, the Noughties came back to me as a striking time. Those were my teenage years. I was wearing Miss Sixty low-rise jeans and a G-string. I looked like all these kids who are celebrating Y2K fashion now. I see these kids, and I see myself being 13 or 14 years old. At that time, One Night in Paris was the porn movie everyone in my school watched. It was the porn movie of the decade, and it taught us teenage kids what sex supposedly should be like. So what does it mean when, as Paris states in her memoir, this movie was published by her ex without her consent? What does it mean that a movie trained us about, which Paris says, “It felt like I was getting electronically raped!” So what does it mean for a 14-year-old me to grow up with this idea of sex?
Was there a specific moment or realisation that triggered the process?
When I came across Julia’s case, I could feel how many of her experiences I had shared as a teenager, at such a young age. We know the numbers on sexualised violence and how omnipresent it is. Talking to my friends, co-creators and audience, I realise on a personal level how many people, especially FLINTA*, are affected by this shit and what it means for our lives. It hurts so much. It’s a pain that’s so hard to express because sexual violence leaves such chaotic, twisted marks on you.
How does the theme of memoir play into the script?
In the piece, Julia, now a grown-up woman, meets the man who abused and raped her in front of the camera when she was 15. Mainly, because she ‘looked like Paris’. Now, Julia wants the tape that the man called One Night in Paris. She wants a confession from him. She wants to know what happened to her image, that part of herself. She also needs proof it really happened. Traumatic memory is such a fickle thing! They meet in a Hilton hotel room. Quickly, the meeting spirals out of control. An act of violence occurs. Now, the man lies face down on the ground. There is a lot of blood. How did Julia end up here? How did she become Paris? In bits and puzzle-like pieces, she remembers in associative, almost dream-like, nightmarish logic, who gave her that name: Paris. And how all these little steps happened – sentences, gestures, expectations, smiles, admirations, poses – that led to this abuse. So, remembering is part of the piece itself. If you’ve experienced sexual violence, you want to know how it could happen to you. Often, traumatic memory is blurry; there is no proper story, there are fragments, smells, sounds. You remember: and then, suddenly, I was in there, and there was the camera, and I had no shirt on. Julia tries to navigate through this blur, these fragments with us.
For survivors, there is no such thing as catharsis in rape. So don’t come if you want ‘your catharsis’.
What is your personal relationship to Paris’ story? Are you a fan?
Of course, Paris is hot! To me, it’s so bitter to see how even Paris, with all her privilege and money and power, didn’t get to have any agency in what was done to her by her ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon. Paris couldn’t get the rights to the sex tape, she couldn’t make it unseen, she couldn’t stop the sales, she couldn’t win the case. Salomon reduced her to that image and profited from it, and she couldn’t make it undone. If a woman like Paris is powerless against this form of exploitation and abuse, it’s so obvious how powerless we all are in fighting it. I admire Paris for sitting down on Saturday Night Live weeks after the sex tape was out there, joking about it – how she twisted that narrative.
You grew up during the 00s. How do you feel that decade impacted the notion of celebrity culture? Especially considering it was pre-MeToo and pre-Instagram?
The 00s are the times of the ‘it girl’: Lindsay, Britney, Paris. It’s when technologies, such as the internet, digital cameras and camera phones really hit, and that dramatically changed how celebrities were created and how these girls were viewed. Also, pre-MeToo – this era was shamelessly misogynist. These girls were in their teenage years, being observed, up-skirted, commodified, broadcast, sexualised and slut-shamed. And everyone loved to watch that. Everyone loved to hate the ‘stupid girls’, as even Pink famously sang about the ‘it girls’, especially Paris. These women were stars, but they were also just teenagers back then, girls really – and they were really treated so badly, and, as Paris says, “How do we not see that the treatment of ‘it girls’ translates to the treatment of all girls in our culture?” Flipping the phone around and creating the first selfie, as urban legend has it, Paris and Britney did, was a move to get agency back – to supposedly be in control. To control your own image. To tell your own story. Well, we can see on Instagram how that turned out.
Who do you think this work appeals to? Do you see many younger Gen Z women interested in the topic?
Yes, in general, we do see a lot of females in the audience. I assumed it would be a Millennial piece really, but there are a lot of Gen Z and even school kids, meaning Generation Alpha, which felt almost weird to me until I thought: yes, true that. It’s a Gen Alpha piece, because they are 15 now – Julia was 15 when the abuse happened. So it’s also, sadly, a piece about being a teenager. But honestly, I keep hearing from many FLINTA* people, no matter the age, that this show has everything to do with them. Men react differently – estranged, shocked and angry. Some ask for ‘their catharsis’. This made me laugh, really. But I highly suggest you go and see it and sit down and talk afterwards, because I would say the piece has so much to do with men, since the perpetrator is a man, as it is in most cases of sexualised violence. And for survivors, there’s no such thing as catharsis in rape. So don’t come if you want ‘your catharsis’. Be ready to fasten your seatbelt.
How did it feel to have Call me Paris premiere at the Biennale Teatro in 2025?
Simply crazy. When Willem Dafoe decided to co-produce the work, I couldn’t believe it. It was a huge honour to show our work at the Biennale. Standing on a rooftop over San Marco with a decent drink in my hand, I wished Paris herself would come join us!
Call me Paris, Jan 7-9, Schaubühne, German and English with German and English surtitles
