Pamela Anderson on her improbable journey from ‘Baywatch’ to ‘The Last Showgirl’: ‘I needed to do something for my soul’
This isn’t the way things were supposed to go for Pamela Anderson. As the 2020s dawned, she could reflect on a noteworthy career, from Playboy Playmate of the Month in February 1990 to playing Lisa the Tool Time Girl on Home Improvement to playing pin-up C.J. Parker on 110 episodes of Baywatch from 1992 to 1997 to starring in the Cannes-premiering feature Barb Wire (1996) to having another long series run as the head of an elite bodyguard agency on V.I.P. from 1998 to 2002. That’s all besides being a tabloid queen during her tumultuous 1990s marriage to Mötley Crüe cofounder Tommy Lee.
Anderson recognized she had done pretty well for someone who grew up in a small town on Vancouver Island. But at the same time, she felt unfulfilled.
“I came home a couple of years ago thinking, ‘Oh well, I guess I created this cartoon character, and there’s just no way out of it’,” she explains in an interview with Gold Derby. “I was peeling it all back and thinking, ‘I’ll make pickles and jam in my garden, and I’ll make my life beautiful no matter what.’ I’m always creative. I was always known for that. But I needed to do something for my soul.”
Improbably, in short order, things took a turn for Anderson as she entered her 50s. She earned rave notices for her eight-week turn as Roxie Hart in a Tony Award-winning revival of Chicago on Broadway in April 2022. She wrote the bestselling memoir Love, Pamela, released in January 2023, and the same month the Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story (produced by her son Brandon Thomas Lee) was released and subsequently nominated for a pair of Emmy Awards, including Best Documentary/Nonfiction Special.
Then came perhaps the most unlikely career breakout of all: starring as an aging Las Vegas performer in the low-budget indie drama The Last Showgirl. Anderson’s performance was met with near-universal acclaim upon the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Suddenly, at age 57, there were nominations for Anderson for a Gotham Award, a Golden Globe Award, and finally a SAG Award. The Roadside Attractions film catapulted her into a different stratosphere, to a place where she was being discussed as a legitimate Oscar contender for Best Actress. That didn’t pan out, but being a SAG nominee is already more than Anderson ever permitted herself to dream about.
(Photo courtesy of Pamela Anderson)
“I knew I had this performance inside me,” Anderson asserts. “I knew I had something to give, more to give than what I was giving, but I didn’t know if it would be award-worthy or anything like that. The win is doing it. The joy is doing it. And now it’s like, ‘From Baywatch to Broadway,’ that has a good ring to it. I can live with that.”
She had no idea, however, that Broadway was just the warm-up for the melancholic The Last Showgirl. It tells the story of Shelly (Anderson), the eldest showgirl in the fictitious Las Vegas show Le Razzle Dazzle, the last revue of its kind on the Vegas Strip. She’s a woman who has been part of the show for decades and takes great pride in the artfulness of her performance. But Shelly’s dedication has come at a cost. Her life choices have largely estranged her from her adult daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), and it becomes especially fraught when Shelly learns from stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista) that the fading show will be closing in just days.
“It eventually hits Shelly that she should have done things differently,” Anderson says. And now she’s forced to take a good hard look at herself and make peace with the end of the show’s, and her own, era.
Last Showgirl was written by Kate Gersten and based on an unproduced play inspired by the real Las Vegas show Jubilee! that ran from 1981 and closed in 2016. It caught the attention of director Gia Coppola, granddaughter of the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who told Gold Derby she’s “always been fascinated with Las Vegas. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to live in this unusual city. I’d never really found a story that I connected to emotionally to convey my version of Las Vegas. [But] when I came across Kate’s script, I was just really struck by it in so many ways. I love that it stemmed from her play, so it allowed us to make something in a very intimate, kind of [John] Cassavetes fashion. It’s a mother-daughter story, and I’ve always longed to tell that story.
“I didn’t know about the showgirl world and community, and it was really interesting to learn about and dive into.”
Once she signed on to direct, Coppola went about searching to cast the right actress to star. But fortunately, she knew what she was looking for after watching Anderson’s documentary.
“I felt like Pamela had to play this part,” she maintains. “I couldn’t see this movie any other way than it being with Pamela. … I could see a lot of parallels of Pamela and Shelly in just their sensitivity and gentleness and kindness, and always sort of finding the light no matter what life throws at them. I also saw [in Anderson] someone who was just craving to express herself as an artist. She such a cinephile and deep in philosophy. I knew she was going to bring so much to the table, to this character.”
Anderson, too, found plenty of similarities between herself and Shelly. “I empathized with what she was going through so much. … I felt like this was my opportunity to heal myself and some parts of me that there’s no other way to do other than through an art project. This was a real catharsis. I put a lot into it and got a lot out of it. … I just loved Shelly as an imperfect, wears-her-heart-on-her-sleeve, unpredictable character. My pockets were full of experiences that I could draw from and feel, in being a mother in this industry and being objectified and not realizing how much that affects your kids.”
The shoot for The Last Showgirl was completed in just 18 days on a reported budget of less than $2 million. Not that the film looks at all cheap. Many tears were shed on the set, which also featured a recent Oscar winner named Jamie Lee Curtis portraying Shelly’s best friend, Annette.
What was it like working with Curtis?
“Legend,” Anderson replies. “I learned so much from her. She’s just an incredible professional and such a wonderful champion for women. She’s authentic. She loves to support women in this industry and small indie films. And there was the time she took me by the shoulders and said, ‘I did this for you.’ I mean, I was blown away.”
Coppola admits that the presence of Curtis on the set was intimidating, adding, “But I was also so excited top be in the orbit of that level of talent and learn, and I’m so grateful [for it]. I really didn’t know that we’d have a chance of her doing this small independent movie, coming off the Oscar. But because she’s such a champion of small independent cinema and of Pamela, she was gung-ho. We just had to make her four days [on the set] work within her schedule, and so we bumped it right after the holidays [in 2023]. She did what was best for the movie, and it really set a great tone for our first few days of shooting.”
During that shoot, Anderson says she often found herself in disbelief when they would complete a take of a scene and her fellow cast and crew would begin applauding her. She credits director Coppola’s “singular focus” while being “so calm and decisive.”
She no longer questions why it took her so deep into her career for such a meaningful project as The Last Showgirl to come along.
“It all happened the way it was supposed to happen,” Anderson theorizes. “If I didn’t live [the life I lived], I couldn’t have played Shelly the way that I did. I really thought it was the end [of my career] and it truly was just the beginning, and that caught me off-guard in a really exciting way. That it almost slipped through my fingers makes it even sweeter that I got to do it. Those are the ones that make life interesting.”
The Last Showgirl is playing in theaters nationwide.
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