‘Awards Chatter’ Pod: Pamela Anderson on ‘The Last Showgirl,’ the Tarantino Film That Got Away and the Harm of the Stolen Sex Tape
“I’d like them to remember me [as I am] now instead of [as I was] then,” Pamela Anderson says upon being asked, during a recording of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast in Los Angeles, what she’d like her legacy to be.
The Playboy model and Baywatch alum — an icon of the 1990s — spent much of the past three decades feeling personally depressed and professionally derailed after the widespread dissemination of intimate home videos that were stolen in 1995 from the home she shared with her then-husband, Tommy Lee. But, as of Monday, she is a Golden Globe-nominated actress, thanks to her portrayal, in Gia Coppola’s new film The Last Showgirl, of a veteran Vegas dancer whose show is suddenly set to close after a 30-year-run. And she is thrilled to be entering a new chapter of her life. “I always knew I had more to give,” she quietly insists. “I always felt like I was keeping this secret, this little fire burning, just waiting for the opportunity.”
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Anderson, 57, was born in Canada. A stunning blonde, she was literally picked out of the crowd for stardom: indeed, her image appeared on the Jumbo-Tron at a football game, sparking immediate interest in her services as a model, which led to the offer of a Playboy cover, which, in turn, spawned an acting career. For the most part, she was asked only to be eye candy on TV shows — on Home Improvement she was “Lisa, the Tool Time girl,” whose only line was “Here you go, Tim”; and then on Baywatch she played a lifeguard who ran in slow-motion while donning a form-fitting red bathing suit, which helped to propel the show to the highest viewership of any TV program in the world. Though these parts didn’t demand great acting chops, Anderson was, even then, dreaming of bigger challenges: “I was reading Stanislavski, if you can believe it, for Baywatch.”
Then came the sex tape. “It just sidetracked everything,” Anderson laments. “And it also disrupted my family, my marriage — it was too hard on all of us to keep it together. I beat myself up about that for decades, really.” The mother of two continues, “My kids suffered, my family, my extended family, my parents. I just started doing things to kind of keep the lights on.” As far as most members of the public could discern, she largely disappeared, save for cameos in films like Borat. “These were all favors for friends, by the way, and hardly paid.”
In 2022, at almost the same time that Hulu released Pam & Tommy, an unathorized limited series about the sex tape episode, which Anderson says retraumatized her, she began to re-emerge in new and unexpected places. She made her debut on Broadway and received rave reviews. She wrote a memoir that became a New York Times bestseller. And she was featured in a documentary that received an Emmy nomination. Then she heard from Gia Coppola.
Coppola had seen the Anderson documentary and thought the actress would be perfect for the part of Shelley in The Last Showgirl. She sent the script to Anderson’s then-agent, who turned it down within an hour without even showing it to Anderson. “I don’t know why,” Anderson vents. “Maybe because of the money or because he thought that I wouldn’t do it or that I wouldn’t be able to do it?” But Coppola refused to take “no” for an answer, and tracked down one of Anderson’s sons, Brandon Lee, who, with the other, Dylan Lee, effectively manages her career. “Brandon had a meeting with Gia first before he would send me the script. Then he sent me the script. And when I read it, straight out of my garden, I could not believe it. I thought, ‘This is what people feel when they see a project and they have to do it and it’s life or death.'”
Anderson and Coppola connected via a Zoom. The actress recounts, “I was selling myself to her. I was saying, ‘I can do this! I can really do this!’ And she’s looking at me going, ‘No, I want you to. That’s why I’ve been looking for you and tried to get to you.’ So we were both really excited to work together.”
While Anderson threw herself into putting her own stamp on the character Shelley — changing her voice, posture and more — she understands that people will see that the actress and character share things in common: “There’s obvious parallels. I mean, our love of glamour and nostalgia and being a mother in an industry where I think it’s difficult for children to see their mother in a glamorous, even sexualized way, in other people’s eyes. I think that there was just a lot to draw from in my life. All my experiences from childhood ’til now are in this film. And anyone that knows me that sees it? They look at my eyes and they can tell everything is in there.”
The experience of making the film, the response to it and the opportunities that it has already created have made Anderson look differently at her rollercoaster past. “If I didn’t have the life I had, I wouldn’t have been able to play Shelley the same way,” she asserts. “So I keep on looking back and thinking, ‘Okay, everything was worth it now.”
* * *
Below are excerpts of Anderson’s thoughts on a few other interesting topics.
On the exploitation of women in showbiz…
“I wouldn’t say I’m a prude at all, but I do worry about women in film and exploitive roles, or being exploited at any time in their life. I’ve been around women who went a different direction and put themselves in dangerous situations. I know my image is one that maybe has that kind of connotation that goes with it, but like I said, I was a shy girl. I was somehow protected, and navigated this world the best I could. So for the tape to come out was extremely hard on me. I would go to depositions and they would say, ‘Oh, you’re in Playboy. What do you care?’ And they would have blown-up pictures of me naked behind them. And these men were saying, ‘This isn’t going to ruin your career. This is who you are. You’re a whore. You’re worth nothing.’ And that really hurt me a lot. I thought, ‘Well, I did this to myself somehow.'”
On people incorrectly assuming that she wanted the sex tape to be released and/or financially profited from it…
“After these home movies were stolen and spliced together and sold, they made hundreds of millions of dollars. We never got a dime. We never accepted anything. They offered to settle with us, and we just said, ‘We’re not taking any of your dirty money.’ We were just trying to stop it. … I remember a lot of women came up to me that were sex workers or dancers and said, ‘How do I be like you?’ They looked to me as someone they wanted to be like, not really understanding that that wasn’t me.”
On the Quentin Tarantino film that got away…
“It was Grindhouse. I remember him telling me that Baywatch was his favorite show, and he wanted me to come in and meet with him about this role. But I was a little concerned — my kids were small and I didn’t want to be slaughtered, ripped apart and killed if my kids saw it. He goes, ‘You’ll be the only person that I don’t kill.’ I said, ‘OK.’ And then I got too nervous to meet him, and I actually never had any contact with him after that. I just kind of ghosted him. I went to the front of the building and then I left. I had paparazzi following me, and I just thought, ‘I’m just too scared.’ It gave me an excuse to not go in.”
On her decision to no longer wear makeup…
“I just thought, ‘I am at Paris Fashion Week and these clothes are so great. No one’s going to notice if I’m not wearing makeup.’ But that resonated with people. And then I thought, ‘I’m saving all this time. I’m not sitting in a makeup chair for three hours. And who am I competing with, really? I am who I am.’ And when I went home to my garden, too, I thought, ‘I just need to be myself.’ And even in this world, it’s easier to maybe project onto somebody a role if you’re not playing a cartoon character. So it was nice to kind of put that aside and just be me. I wanted to find out who I was, remember who I was, and play characters in movies instead of playing characters in my personal life.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
