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Toward the end of The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson stands alone and exposed on a stage, while, for perhaps the millionth time in her life, a man appraises and assesses her. Anderson’s character Shelly is auditioning for a Vegas show, trying to hold onto a job she has loved her whole life. But as she blinks under the bright spotlights, the director, played by Jason Schwartzman, tells her, “What you sold was young and sexy. You aren’t either anymore.”
This may be fiction, but, says Anderson, “I could feel it in my body.” The script told her to yell at that director, “I’m 50!” But in that moment, Anderson decided to insert her real age into the line: “I’m 57 and I’m beautiful, you son of a bitch!” As that scene played at the Toronto Film Festival premiere, from the darkness of the theater came calls of, “Yes girl!” and “Love you, Pamela!”
Anderson’s business of late has been one of truth. She left Hollywood and returned home to Canada. She made a documentary, Pamela, a Love Story. She began appearing at events sans makeup. “I went home to find out why I had been making some of these choices, and with destructive relationships,” she says. “I wanted to figure out, who am I? I wanted to be myself.” She had always been an actress, but her creative ability had so often been eclipsed by that old notion: a woman must first be whatever is considered “young and sexy” to be valued in the industry. The world cast her in a box that began with her 1990 breakout Playboy shoot, but inside, Anderson knew herself to be an artist, a creative soul.
Those old, limited assumptions of Anderson ran deep. Her agent passed on The Last Showgirl without even telling her. “He thought it wasn’t right for me. He thought I couldn’t do it,” she says. “At that point, I was being offered nothing. But also, I’d kind of given up too, in a way.”
But behind the scenes was a woman who had watched Anderson’s documentary and truly seen her: director Gia Coppola. “Because I was turned down within an hour, I knew that she hadn’t even seen [the script]. And I just needed to find a way to get to her,” Coppola says. “I saw a woman that was bursting at the seams of wanting to express herself creatively.” In Anderson’s documentary, Coppola had found herself “so impressed with her knowledge of art house cinema and art and philosophy.” She just knew that Anderson could play Shelly.
In the Kate Gersten-scripted The Last Showgirl, Shelly has been forced to offer herself up for that audition because her long-running show, Le Razzle Dazzle, has closed. It was considered out-of-date; actually, she was considered out of date. But Shelly loves dancing in Vegas. For her, Le Razzle Dazzle was a nod to the Parisian Les Folies Bergère, and an elegant and timeless evocation of feminine freedom. It had been a kind of agency and visibility in the midst of single-parenting. Until it’s taken away from her and she finds herself at a loss.
“Obviously, there were similarities with Pamela and Shelly’s character traits,” Coppola says. “She seems so much a woman that was turning her frown upside down and making lemonade out of lemons, and that’s so much of what that character does. It was this bubbly, bright spirit sometimes, in a way, to protect themselves. I saw that with Pamela, and although there were similarities because she wanted to express herself as an actress, I think that there was enough of a difference that it was going to feel exciting to her as a role and not just as this documentary approach.”
Fortunately, Anderson’s son, Brandon Thomas Lee, who executive produced her documentary, happened to stop by her agent’s office. He noticed the script on a pile marked ‘pass’ and grabbed it. When Anderson read it, “I felt it,” she says. “I had to do it. I felt Shelly right away. I knew it was right. There is something karmic there because if Brandon hadn’t made that documentary and Gia hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
Finally, Coppola and Anderson connected. Anderson recalls their first “really funny Zoom meeting. I was telling her, ‘Are you sure you want me to do this? I know I can do this.’ And she goes, ‘No, no. I want you to do this.’ We just spent a lot of time with me selling her and her selling me. And then by the end of it, we both realized, OK, we’re doing this. But I just couldn’t believe it.”
Now, Anderson describes the film as “a story about a woman who’s been discounted and disregarded. She’s fighting back in her own way, rethinking her choices in life. I think it’s just representative of so many of us working against the odds to do what we love.” Dave Bautista stars as Eddie, Le Razzle Dazzle’s stage manager, and Shelly is buoyed by the friendship of Jamie Lee Curtis’s sardonic and unapologetic cocktail waitress Annette, and by fellow Razzle Dazzle dancers, Mary-Ann (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka). As shooting began, with Coppola at the helm, Anderson says, “It was such a beautiful sisterhood on the set. It was so wonderful to have all these women supporting women.”
Much has been made of Anderson’s personal life and of the tabloid fame phenomenon she experienced through her five-year stint in the ’90s in Baywatch and particularly during her tumultuous marriage to rocker Tommy Lee, the father of her two boys. In 2022, Hulu released limited series Pam & Tommy, which depicted that era of her life, starring Lily James as Anderson. I ask about that show’s impact on her and she says simply, “I can’t be my past. I am so much more. You can’t have regrets, or you wouldn’t be the person you are.”
In the days following our interview, right before the election, an empowered vision of Anderson’s past work would appear. In a video titled Beywatch, set to the music of “Bodyguard”, a track from her Cowboy Carter album, Beyoncé cosplayed as Anderson’s characters from Baywatch and her 1996 film Barb Wire, in a bid to encourage Americans to vote. In response,Anderson joked on her Instagram: “Don’t call me Bey,” followed by a kiss emoji.
When she looks back, Anderson sees herself as a woman who has performed her entire life. “I had never been on a plane before I came to LA,” she says. “All this time I’ve been acting. I was playing, what is a model? What is a wife? I was acting the whole time.”
She is grateful she made the choice to turn away from the narrow space the industry had allowed for her back then. “I took a lot of time off to be with my family. It was better to be with my kids as much as possible than go down the path of this career that I didn’t want.” And the timing of this new career era feels right, in so many ways. “It’s even sweeter that I’m able to do this film after my kids are grown and I don’t have a destructive relationship that’s taking up all my energy. I was a 1000% focused on the film. It just really excited me and energized me that I’m inspired to work, and that people are looking at me in a different way.”
As we speak, she is fresh from the Academy Museum Gala — a star-studded evening in LA. “It’s always scary to walk into a room like that with so many of your peers and people you admire,” she says, “but so many people came up to me and were excited for me in the film, and it just feels like it’s a different time and I just really am embracing it.”
At that gala, once again, she eschewed makeup — a habit that first began almost unconsciously. “I went to Paris fashion week, and I was wearing these Vivienne Westwood clothes and it was just my head [left unadorned]. I thought, I don’t want to sit in the makeup chair for three and a half hours. I thought no one would notice. It’s just this little head, it doesn’t matter. And that way I could go to the Louvre and see all these things I wanted to see. Then I went to the show, and I never expected that reaction. It became this whole thing. But I was doing it for me. I wanted to be myself, for me. I’ve had people come up to me with their daughters to say thank you, but I just wanted to be myself for myself.”
At the TIFF premiere of The Last Showgirl, Francis Ford Coppola was in the audience. He congratulated Anderson. “To have Francis Ford Coppola give you a compliment,” she marvels. “And he’s an honest man.”
That was the first time any of the cast had seen the film and during the standing ovation that followed, director and actors gathered on stage. “I’ve been getting ready my whole life for this film,” Anderson told the audience. Beside her, Curtis said through tears, “The dreams become a really harsh f*cking reality, especially for women… I’m a product of that same reality.” Lourd cried too, as she explained how the film had given her a new perspective on both her late mother Carrie Fisher and grandmother Debbie Reynolds’ experience. “I got to understand my mom on a deeper level than I ever had, and it was a beautiful experience. And to do that with Pamela was an absolute gift. She is a wonderful mother and was also a beautiful mother to me on this film.”
Now, as we wrap up this interview, Anderson is off to the airport, heading for Spain where she will shoot Karim Aïnouz’s film, Rosebush Pruning, alongside Riley Keough, Elle Fanning and Callum Turner. “He’s a wonderful artist and storyteller,” she says of Aïnouz. “It’s a beautiful film. I play the mother. I’m really excited.” She has already shot The Naked Gun reboot starring Liam Neeson, an experience that she calls “hysterical fun”.
This unexpected turn of things is still hard to take in. “I just can’t believe it,” she says. “I’m just starting my career at 57. It’s taken me all this time to just be myself.”
