Pamela Anderson had a secret. Revealing it has blown our minds

Seeing Las Vegas during the day, says Pamela Anderson, is like seeing a woman without make-up. “It’s more vulnerable and revealing,” she says. “More intimate.” Anderson, who is speaking to the press at the San Sebastian Film Festival, knows of what she speaks: she is not wearing any make-up herself. This is how we see her in The Last Showgirl, her first real acting role, as she stands on a casino rooftop with her hair whipping round her face. She looks as pale and clean as the desert in the dawn. Even her voice is like a crackle of wind in the spinifex.

The Playboy pin-up and Baywatch star is now 57. She used to be all eyelashes, lip-liner and breast enlargement, but she didn’t bother wearing make-up to one public appearance – Paris Fashion Week in 2022 – and felt so good about it that she hasn’t bothered since. “I’ve taken it upon myself to completely peel it back,” she says. For our interview, she wears a modest white blouse and plain dark skirt; she could be a lay nun. “I want people to see me as a person and then as an actress,” she will later tell NPR. “All my life experience was just research. It was boot camp.”

Anderson’s boot camp famously included becoming a Playboy centrefold and bimbette surf lifesaver C.J. Parker through five years of Baywatch, in which she was the star attraction: many international broadcasters had deals allowing them to buy only the episodes in which she appeared.

She grew up in a tiny town on Vancouver Island called Ladysmith. At 19, she was spotted at a sporting match and signed up as a Labatt’s beer girl. Then Playboy flew her to Los Angeles to try out for their cover. She was 22; it was the first time she had been on a plane.

Pamela Anderson in Baywatch.Credit: Getty Images

That was the start of the Pammy story, a tabloid saga that kept giving. She would go on to appear on 13 Playboy covers: a record. Her numerous rocky marriages, most famously to rock star Tommy Lee in 1995 – when she was at her Baywatch peak – rewrote the book on celebrity scandal. A tape of the couple having sex had been filched and was all over what was then a sparkling new phenomenon, the internet. That nightmare announced the end of any kind of privacy for pop culture celebrities. For both the press and public, racy Pammy and her thuggish husband were fair game.

Lee subsequently went to prison for six months after kicking her while she held their second baby, then aged just seven weeks. Her focus became motherhood, but she was never far from the tabloids. For years, she had tried to make her fame work for her: abandoning a career she didn’t want, she took up causes and became an eye-catching campaigner.

Here’s Pammy at the Kremlin, putting the case against seal exports to President Vladimir Putin’s henchmen; there she is visiting Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. “Activism helped me get through those years,” she says. “To give some meaning to the life that I had.”

Pamela Anderson delivers lunch to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in October 2016.Credit: Getty Images

All that boot camp had its first pay-off in 2022, when Anderson was asked to play Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway and won rave reviews. Later that year, however, the limited series Pam and Tommy came out on Hulu in the United States and was a smash hit, going on to score 10 Emmy nominations. Anderson never saw a minute of it. It was very much on her side, but that didn’t matter; nobody had consulted her before rubbing “salt in the wound”, as she said.

Worst of all, the Pammy story was back in the headlines and she was being pursued by tabloid reporters. At that point, she decided to go back to her farmhouse in Ladysmith. “I went home to find out why I had been making some of these choices, and with destructive relationships,” she later told the film industry magazine, Deadline. “I wanted to figure out: who am I? I wanted to be myself.” She baked and made pickles and jam.

Pamela Anderson with her son, Brandon, in a picture used in their documentary, Pamela: A Love Story.Credit: Netflix

With her son, producer Brandon Thomas Lee, she made a documentary to counter the Hulu series called Pamela: A Love Story. Then the script for The Last Showgirl found its way to her. “And I was just so inspired and so grateful. I had thought, ‘maybe this is it; maybe I’m never going to get that chance’. I always knew I could do more – or I wanted to do more, at least.” For her Playboy centrefold interview, she had said she wanted to be a good mother and win an Oscar. “That was a joke!” she added, hastily. “That’s funny. But I still don’t know what I’m capable of.”

The Last Showgirl, directed by Gia Coppola of the famous clan (her grandfather is Francis Ford; Sofia is her aunt; Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are her cousins), centres on Shelly, an ageing dancer who has spent her career with Le Razzle Dazzle, a spectacle of rhinestones, feathers and female flesh based on a real show that recently closed its doors, the Jubilee! revue.

In Shelly’s eyes, they are the direct descendants of the Paris Lido, a breath of European culture. Once synonymous with Vegas, these cabaret shows no longer exist; theirs is the last revue on the strip. Shelly, a single mother who has made a mess of the rest of her life, is about to lose the job she adores, one that makes her feel beautiful, valued and seen. Where will she go? She lives from one pay cheque to the next. Her world is splintering like a smashed glitter ball.

Gia Coppola, whose previous films include Palo Alto and Mainstream, says her grandfather would sometimes go to Vegas for inspiration and take her along, telling her it was a good place to write because it was open 24 hours and you could always get a burger. It fascinated her.

Pamela Anderson with The Last Showgirl director Gia Coppola. Credit: Getty Images

“I think Vegas feels so much like a metaphor for the American dream. All that glitter is not gold; people go there to be in show business, to fulfil their dreams of being in the spotlight, but there is this harsh reality of no retirement plans and low wages where you can’t actually support yourself. At what point do you give up your dreams?”

When she saw a play by her cousin, Kate Gersten, based on interviews with the former Jubilee! showgirls, she jumped at the chance to turn it into a film. She just had to find the right Shelly. “It was when I saw Pamela’s documentary I knew she had to be Shelly, that no one else could do it,” Coppola says. “Because I saw a woman who was bursting at the seams of wanting to express herself creatively. So I searched high and low to find a way to get in touch with her.”

Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl.Credit: AP

It wasn’t easy, but she eventually managed it by contacting Brandon Lee, who became an executive producer on the film. Nobody, Anderson says, had ever sent her a script before. The two women Zoomed. “I kept saying to her, are you sure?” says Anderson. “Are you sure you want me to do this? Like, I know I can do this …” No one had ever realised, she says, that even back in her Baywatch days, she would spend hours between shoots sitting in bookshops, reading Tennessee Williams and wondering how to jump that track. “And I was so grateful because I feel like I’ve been carrying this secret almost my whole life.”

Coppola’s chosen world is the dressing rooms and backstage corridors where the dancers rush to change their vast, complicated costumes between acts, bicker, and cry on each other’s shoulders. Shelly has a daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who grew up with her schoolfriend’s family – a more stable proposition than her flaky, feathered mother – and rarely speaks to her. Her best friend is brazen broad Annette, who is trying to sustain a gambling habit on the proceeds of cocktail waitressing. Annette is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who had just won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once when she accepted the role.

“She’s a legend,” says Coppola. “I was like, ‘there’s no way she’s going to want to do our movie’. We were essentially a student film: every department is headed either by someone in my family or my friend. But she was so excited by Pamela and really wanted to do it.” Curtis gives a performance entirely without vanity, having insisted that she peel off her leotard in the changing room to show exactly the degree of disguise a woman of her age needed to measure up as a waitress. “I was so grateful that she and Pamela were willing to both be vulnerable and raw with all of that,” Coppola says.

Anderson says of Curtis: “I was afraid to meet her, too. Really afraid. But she takes you in her arms and looks you in the eye, and you know you are in this. There is no going back, you are in it with her! I feel like I have known her my whole life.” Coppola brought her key cast to dinner with Anderson, who gave everyone a job, peeling or chopping.

“A big part of this movie was about the family, both blood relationships and the family you create in the workplace,” says Coppola. “Your chosen family. And a showgirl production feels very like a movie set in some ways. You’re with people for a long time. We all ate together in the casino. It’s very insular.” There were a lot of tears, says Anderson, when the short shoot – a mere 18 days – was over. “We were so attached to those characters.”

Does her resurgence indicate a new attitude to women’s bodies – including ageing bodies, even formerly famously “perfect” bodies – in the world of movies? “It’s a great question, but I’m just living it,” says Anderson. “I’m 57. A lot of my career was about physicality and it’s been a journey. But part of the reason I’ve done this experiment with myself, with peeling it all back, not being defined by what people do to me but by what I do, is about passion. It’s about not becoming bitter, still finding joy in the process, in life and in this business. That’s something I related to in Shelly.” As the curtain falls, Shelly remains a true believer.

Now, Anderson says, she feels she is at the beginning of her career, even if she is working in reverse. “Playing on Broadway was the beginning of cracking this egg open. I think if you have some kind of trauma in your life, you look for ways to express yourself and heal. Part of that is through art.” Some people write poems, some people paint. “I’ve been able to express something pent-up – I don’t know if it’s anger or pain – and put it into this role.”

But she doesn’t want to sound pompous. “I mean, I’m just new at this. I don’t want to be the one trying to tell anybody how this works. I still feel I’m in that zone of trying to prove I’m capable of more, so I’m not expecting anything, I just want to work as hard as I can, to work harder than anybody.”

She has been surrounded by people who thought she couldn’t do anything more demanding than Baywatch; she admits to thinking that herself. “It’s very easy to pigeonhole somebody. So you’ve just got to keep blowing everyone’s minds.”

The Last Showgirl is in cinemas from February 20.

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