The word ‘comeback’ can feel negative, but in the case of Pamela Anderson that isn’t so. The former Playboy playmate and Baywatch star has not so much wrestled the narrative back in her favour, but put it in a headlock and pressed it to the canvas these past few years. A pop culture icon, she became notorious for a sex tape and a turbulent marriage to Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. Alongside this, she managed an inauspicious acting career, frequently playing herself in everything from the Borat movie to Scooby-Doo.
Reality shows followed (including the UK’s Big Brother), then in 2022, Disney+ released Pam & Tommy, starring Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as her hard-partying hubbie, a show concerning the theft and release of their sex tape. The Canadian-American Anderson was wounded by the mini-series, which she had no part of, branding the producers “assholes”. But rather than gripe, she took control. A book, Love, Pamela: A Memoir, was released in early 2023 alongside Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story – co-produced by her own son Brandon Thomas Lee.
After a run on Broadway in Chicago, playing leading lady Roxie Hart, Anderson is now back on screen with the role of a lifetime. The Last Showgirl casts her as Shelly, performer in a long-running Las Vegas show called The Razzle Dazzle that is set to be shut down. Co-starring with Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis and Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Dave Bautista, Anderson has never been this good, this moving, this poignant. It’s perhaps because she so intimately bonds with a woman like Shelly, facing extinction in a career she loves.
“She’s very different than I am, but the joie de vivre, the love of nostalgia and the crossroads and chapters in people’s lives and how you can reinvent yourself… there’s so much about the character that I could relate to on many levels,” she explains, when we meet over Zoom. “I could bring a lot of my life experience to the role to draw from, but she became her own person, and that was what’s so exciting about doing this, because I feel like I’ve just begun, and this is an experiment, but I love that people have responded so strongly [to] her.”
When we speak, Anderson is dressed in off-whites, her blonde locks tied up and a pair of studious-looking black-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. Behind her is a grand-looking glass conservatory, a major centrepiece of the beautiful-looking property she owns in the harbour town of Ladysmith, Vancouver Island, where she grew up. Joining her on the call is her director Gia Coppola, the granddaughter of The Godfather legend Francis Ford Coppola, whose cat is currently screaming uncontrollably in the background.
It was Pamela, A Love Story that Coppola first saw, convincing her that Anderson was right for the role of Shelly. “It just was an ‘aha’ instinctual moment,” she explains. “I mean, Pamela reminds me of a modern Marilyn where she was really an artist and craving to express herself, but pigeonholed by this other perception that doesn’t really reflect who she really feels she is.” What does Anderson think about being compared to the iconic Marilyn Monroe? “She doesn’t like when I say that!” chuckles Coppola, before Anderson can speak.
“Making ‘The Last Showgirl’ was very exciting, revealing and healing”
The actress blushes. “No, I don’t know… I do think that Marilyn didn’t get her dues, as an actress. I thought she was an incredible actress,” she says, name-checking 1961 Monroe classic The Misfits. “You’re dealt whatever the cards you’ve been dealt, and you do the best you can with the tools that you have… and I think there’s no perfect way to be a human, a person, an artist, a mother.” It’s another reason why she fell for Shelly, who is desperate to repair her relationship with her estranged daughter. “It’s a story about second chances, about a woman who has been discounted and discarded and is rethinking her choices in life. Who can’t relate to that?”
It was a breakneck shoot – just 18 days – but Anderson poured her heart and soul into Shelly. “It was very exciting, revealing and healing and all those good things,” she notes, explaining that she invited dancers from Vegas’ now-closed Jubilee! revue to hang out at her home. “They’re just so proud of the art form – and it really is an art form. It was a symbol of Las Vegas, and it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s out with the old and in with the new.” More than once, the film depicts these long-standing shows torn down to make way for glitzy new productions. “Beauty is perishable,” Anderson sighs.
So the story goes, Coppola tried to get the script (written as a play originally by her cousin-in-law Kate Gersten) to Anderson’s agent, who rejected it without the actress ever seeing it. Fortunately, she was able to reach out to Anderson’s son Brandon, through a “mutual friend”, the actress Kate Hudson. “Brandon was tough on me. He wanted to make sure that Pamela was in good hands. And I promised that I would take good care of her. And he was really wonderful, helping this get to Pamela’s hands, and putting it in the best light possible.“
These past months, The Last Showgirl has propelled Anderson right back into the spotlight. Earlier this year, she won over hearts at the Golden Globes, cutting her own fringe and wearing minimal make-up on the red carpet (something she began doing a year ago, when she attended Paris Fashion Week without feeling the need to slap on the mascara and lipstick). Competing in the Best Actress in the drama category, alongside such heavyweights as Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton and Angelina Jolie, it was the first major acting nomination of Anderson’s career. So, like Shelly, is she angling for a second chance?
“I feel like I’ve just begun,” she beams. “This is it. I mean, all my life was boot camp. This is where I’m starting. So, second chances, third chances, first chances… I don’t know. I just feel like your past does not dictate your future. I’m 57 years old, but I feel like I’ve just started my career, so I’m very excited for my peers to celebrate me or send me messages. And I’ve been getting so much great feedback from other actors and directors and people in this industry that I never thought I’d ever meet or talk to. So it’s been really exciting. It was completely unexpected, so I’m just cherishing it.”
Later this year, Anderson will act alongside Liam Neeson in a reboot of The Naked Gun, the detective spoof from the 1990s that starred the king of deadpan, Leslie Nielsen. “Oh my gosh!” she exclaims. “It was so hard to keep a straight face sometimes. But I hope it doesn’t disappoint! Liam is absolutely hysterical because, just like Leslie Nielsen, he’s a dramatic actor. You don’t really expect it, but that’s what makes him so funny. I can’t even tell you anything about it, because it’s so ridiculous. We need that. We need a good giggle.”
“I always say I got away with murder in a bikini, and I didn’t really apply myself to anything”
She’s also just shot Rosebush Pruning, a drama-thriller alongside Riley Keough, Elle Fanning and Jamie Bell, from the provocative Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz. Away from acting, when she’s not campaigning for various animal activist groups, she’s a homebody. She recently published her first cookbook: I Love You: Recipes From The Heart, inspired by the beautiful vegetable garden on her property. “I’m really obsessed with my vegetables,” she says. Coppola nods, alluding to the “amazing vegetable soup” that Anderson makes. “It’s very nurturing.”
It all seems a lifetime away from her whirlwind period in Hollywood, where she arrived from Canada as a 22-year-old, following brief spells as a fitness instructor and a spokesmodel for Labatt beer. After making the cover of Playboy, roles on TV show Home Improvement and then Baywatch, as lifeguard C.J. Parker, a part she played for five seasons, turned her into a star. Amid all this, she married Tommy Lee in February 1995 after knowing him for just four days. They had two sons, Brandon and Dylan, but divorced by 1998, after Lee was sentenced to six months in Los Angeles County Jail for felony spousal abuse.
“I always say I got away with murder in a bikini, and I didn’t really apply myself to anything,” she reflects. “I mean, I was a very imaginative child, and I had dreams and thought actors were born of other actors. I didn’t know how it worked.” But her dreams got sidetracked. “Even though I sat in Samuel French bookstore reading plays and trying an acting class, I was married very quickly, and then caught up in all of that. And, gosh, decades just flew by. I don’t even know what happened between Baywatch and Broadway. I don’t know. I know I raised two kids, and they turned out okay, but the rest of it was just madness, chaos.”
As she’s revealed in the past, she’s been through brutal moments, including a horrifying gang-rape when she was in high school by her then-boyfriend and six of his friends. But Anderson has never let such trauma overwhelm her, it seems. “I think happiness is a choice, and I think that being the victor and not the victim is an interesting choice when you’re playing a character or being a person.”
After all these years, Anderson is finally – finally – gaining the respect she deserves. “I always say we’re all fighting these invisible battles, and what we really relate to is what’s simmering under the surface,” she says. “Acting is a survival skill. And I feel like we’re all doing it all the time.”
‘The Last Showgirl’ is in UK cinemas from February 28