Lily James and Sebastian Stan on transforming into 1990s Pam & Tommy
The new miniseries seeks to tell the inside story of the most infamous sex tape scandal ever with depth, and while it sometimes misses the mark, it’s ridiculously fun.
Imagine back to 1995. Paul Keating is prime minister and Bill Clinton holds office in the US. Toy Story, Goldeneye and Die Hard: With A Vengeance are top of the Blockbuster charts (and, yes, there are still Blockbuster stores). Jerry Seinfeld is trying to order soup correctly in season seven of Seinfeld, and Joey and Chandler have just become mates bonding over episodes of Baywatch in Friends.
It was a time of fanny packs, mullets, the Big Day Out and Pamela Anderson in a red bathing suit; Baywatch is one of the most popular television shows in the world, watched by more than one billion people in almost 150 countries. It was also a time when some tech-savvy people are starting to plug into the internet, pulling at the strings of concepts such as privacy, drastically unravelling them to the point we find ourselves at now. This is the world in which we find ourselves in the new miniseries, Pam & Tommy.
Produced by Hulu and streaming on Disney+ on Wednesday, the eight-episode show is a raunchy, amped-up-to-11 look at the private lives of Pamela Anderson (Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) before, during and after a sex tape was stolen from them by a disgruntled carpenter (Seth Rogen) and distributed across the early worldwide web with the help of a seedy porn director (Nick Offerman).
It’s become common knowledge in 2022 that anything you record, or that is recorded of you, has a pretty high chance of seeing the light of day. But back in 1995, if you were young, in love, newly wed and living life really fast, the idea of filming a sex tape for private consumption wouldn’t have inspired too many privacy concerns. And after all, if a Hi-8 videotape – the type of thing that can only be played in an old school camcorder – did get misplaced, the scope of people to whom it could leak was pretty tight. At least, that’s what Anderson and Lee thought.
It turns out that wasn’t the case at all. In the late ’90s, Anderson and Lee’s private sex tape, and its eventual spread across the globe, would lay the groundwork for our modern understanding of privacy, the internet, celebrity culture and ownership, to the despair of the Baywatch star and, to a lesser degree, her rock star husband.
And, while the series does try to explicitly build a bridge between the sex tape scandal and our understanding of privacy now, that’s not the only reason why we would recommend this show. The best of Pam & Tommy comes from the actors going to new levels of on-screen transformations in this nostalgic, seedy ’90s playground.
First, there’s the headline-grabbing Lily James as Pamela Anderson.
“I don’t believe I really met Lily James until the end of the shoot, to be honest,” co-star Stan says. “I actually didn’t even see her outside of the blonde hair. I’d seen her work before and in my opinion she’s unrecognisable – performance-wise, as well. She’s giving you something completely different than she’s ever done before.”
For his part, Stan had to become the tatted-up, nipple-pierced bad-boy rock star who was able to win Anderson’s heart. To prepare, Stan went for runs listening to playlists of interviews with Lee to tap into the cadence of his voice. He even learned to play the drums from scratch using YouTube clips of Lee’s performances.
“We were both terrified, obviously,” he says “These are big shoes to step into. Pamela obviously for her. For me, I don’t have a tattoo on my body, so the idea of somebody so different for me, it was terrifying.”
The results are clear, though. James’s performance brings a much-needed sweetness and innocence to an otherwise debauched tale, and she delivers on the promise of taking us behind the curtain of what it must have felt like for these misunderstood stars to be so exposed out of their control. One episode in particular sticks in the mind solely thanks to James’s quality: when Anderson hits back at Jay Leno on his talk show, after being quizzed about how she really feels about her most private moments becoming public fodder. “What’s it like?” James’s Anderson responds, her gaze hardening. “It’s horrible. It’s devastating.”
To James’s vulnerable portrayal of the blonde star, Stan’s Tommy Lee is the perfect foil. Whether he’s stomping around in nothing more than tiny animal-print underpants or violently confronting anyone who gets in his way, the man most famous as Captain America’s best friend hams it up perfectly as a self-centred rock star.
Likewise, Offerman delivers beautifully on his character’s mulleted, ’90s-ified porn producer promise. “It’s this guy who exists deep in the bowels of the Valley porn industry in the mid-90s, so there’s the horrible taste of the aesthetic of the day,” he tells The Australian, “I mean, just smoking a tobacco pipe, and keeping all of my accessories in my fanny pack? That was the story for me. I was like, ‘This is f..king gross’.”
Rogen, on the other hand, has a puzzling role in the series. In the original Rolling Stone investigation first published in 2014, which detailed the tape heist and distribution, we get a glimpse into the character of the real person, Rand Gauthier: “Once in a while, he’ll tell someone he was the guy who stole the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape. Almost no one believes him. But he likes the fact that he contributed this small token to the world, and he’s always enjoyed watching the tape itself.”
Doesn’t sound like a guy with much remorse or understanding, does it? And yet the show spends an awful amount of time trying to make us relate to him. Rogen’s performance is sound, but by the end you’re left wondering why he would want to play this sordid, irredeemable character in the first place and, for me, his considerable airtime is indicative of the show’s faults.
As Stan says: “It wasn’t our business but clearly they were also the victim of this American crime, if you want to call it that. And unfortunately, at some point, seemingly, we’ve stopped thinking of them as human beings because we project different ideas on to them.”
But if the show were trying to see them as human beings, maybe we wouldn’t spend so much time with Rogen’s irredeemable thief, the least human of them all and the man who brought them down out of petty spite? And, on another note, maybe we wouldn’t spend a lot of early run time of the series gratuitously reliving the actual sex that made up the tape?
While it’s crudely hilarious to see Stan’s Tommy have a full-frontal conversation with his penis in an early episode – “It’s tipping the hat to the book that he’s written, Tommyland, where he talks very openly about having conversations with his penis, and so that’s how that ended up in there,” shares Stan, by way of explanation – one too many unnecessary sex scenes undermines the show’s argument that only Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee should be able to decide how and when they should be sexualised.
Overall, Pam & Tommy is a fun, well-acted series that does deliver moments where its message hits home but, ultimately, it tries to have its cake and eat it too. The result is a bit of a mess that still tastes good — when the cake hasn’t hit the dirty floor.
Pam & Tommy streams on February 2 on Disney+.
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