Pamela Anderson Is the Indie Film Goddess We’ve All Been Waiting for

On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.

Ever since “The Last Showgirl” premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, Pamela Anderson has said it over and over: This is the screenplay, the project, that she’s been waiting to make her whole life. However, what often goes unsaid it is it’s the movie we’ve hoped she’d make, too.

Everyone knows Pamela Anderson, pop icon: Playboy! Blonde! Red swimsuit! Sex tape! Marriages! Maybe you thought of her more deeply, maybe you didn’t, but what was clear to everyone is the image only represented the facsimile of a person. And then, four things happened.

The first was her Spring 2022 Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in “Chicago” in a bravura performance that received rave reviews. Later that year, while Anderson herself wanted nothing to do with it, Hulu’s limited series “Pam & Tommy” succeeded in presenting the shameful perspective that public response to the sex tape scandal had completely denied the actress her humanity. Then there was “Pamela: A Love Story,” a revealing documentary produced by her son Brandon Thomas Lee.

And finally there was her decision to shun the lip liner, false eyelashes, and hairspray in fall 2023 — a no-makeup look she debuted at Paris’ Fashion Week and has maintained ever since. After more than 30 years in Hollywood, she stripped away everything to reveal the person inside, and we realized for all the times she’s been on screen, we’d never seen her at all.

Pamela Anderson in ‘Chicago’ on Broadway, Ambassador Theatre, April 12, 2022

Now, Anderson says she is done creating characters. She calls them “masquerades,” the times she spent playing the Playboy Bunny, the rock star’s wife, the “Baywatch” actress. After portraying Shelly in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” she knows that everything has changed for good. Behind Anderson’s teased hair and platform heels, there was an indie film goddess who was dying to get out.

The real Pamela Anderson has nothing to do with “Barb Wire”; she’s a film nerd who lives on the Criterion Channel and loves Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog, John Cassavetes, and Ingmar Bergman. (On her recent visit to the Criterion closet, her selections included Abbas Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy and Barbara Loden’s “Wanda.”)

And so, it makes a kind of sense that while she became a global superstar who became shorthand for pouty-lipped sexy glamour, the first project that took the full measure of Pamela Anderson, the actress, was a little indie that had just 18 days to shoot.

“I took a quite the unorthodox route to get here,” Anderson said over a Zoom call from London. “I know I kind of did it backwards. This is just the beginning of my career, instead of the end.”

She’s been promoting “The Last Showgirl” since its Toronto premiere. Between that and shooting the Karim Aïnouz drama “Rosebush Pruning” (opposite Elle Fanning, Riley Keough, and Callum Turner), she hasn’t been home in four months.

Not that she’s complaining. She knows that the character of Shelly — a 57-year-old chorine who has spent her entire adult life in the rhinestone embrace of old-school Vegas revue Le Razzle Dazzle — is the role of a lifetime. Written by Kate Gersten, “The Last Showgirl” is the portrait of a woman who takes fierce pride in her work but, now that the show is about to close, threatens to see it take her identity with it.

Udo Kier and Pamela Anderson in 1996 film ‘Barb Wire’©GramercyPictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Shelly is unabashedly romantic (“We were ambassadors!,” she declares, remembering how the show’s chorus girls once participated in ad campaigns), but Anderson’s sensitive performance also recognizes a measure of the heroine’s narcissism and self-deception. No matter the dwindling crowds, Shelly loves her work because it’s the only thing that makes her feel seen. That single-minded devotion also risks blinding her to the needs of her estranged daughter (Billie Lourd) or those of a struggling castmate (Kiernan Shipka).

“When I read [the script], it felt like life or death,” Anderson said. “It really felt like this was my opportunity to put my entire life in personal experience. It just came at the right time; everything else is boot camp.”

In another light, Anderson’s boot camp could resemble hazing. “Home Improvement” and “Baywatch” made her world famous, but also convinced the world that she was a sexpot unworthy of further regard. That perception trebled with roles that exploited Pamela Anderson the persona and did little to indicate the presence of an actress.

“I did a lot of favors for friends,” she said of her filmography. “It’s so funny when you look at Wikipedia on me, because all those were favors for friends, I mean, none of them were like, you know … they’re mostly cameos as myself. No one ever sent me a script like this. And now I’m starting to read really nice scripts.”

Her career break didn’t come from the movies. After virtually disappearing for four years and relocating to a 100-year-old farm in her hometown of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, she upended expectations with a killer Broadway performance in “Chicago.” Producer Barry Weissler first offered her the role a decade prior, but she turned it down to care for her young sons. “That was my warm-up for this character,” she said.

The other breakthrough was self-invented: She starred in Ryan White’s critically acclaimed 2023 Netflix documentary “Pamela: A Love Story.” It served as tonic to  “Pam & Tommy” released four months’ prior, but it also forced viewers to look beyond Anderson’s exploitation and take account of her as an individual.

“I feel like I’m always fighting this invisible monster,” Anderson said. “I mean, I feel like being a part of pop culture is a blessing, but it’s also a little bit of a curse if you’re always just trying to convince people of your humanity, and then being an actress on top of it.”

‘The Last Showgirl’Utopia

Coppola, who was struggling to find her last showgirl, found the documentary revelatory. “I just could see so many parallels of Shelly, but also I could see this artist that was so creative and so knowledgeable of art and philosophy and just the way she approached life,” the director said during a post-screening Q&A in New York. “And how vulnerable she was, not really wearing makeup in the documentary, so I could see that this was a person who was fearless. I just really wanted to collaborate with her. I could see her hunger to kind of express her talents in a dramatic way.”

And then, in a casting story that’s already taking its place among Hollywood legends, Coppola sent the screenplay to Anderson’s agent and he rejected it within the hour. Figuring that quick turnaround meant Anderson never saw it, Coppola reached out to Lee and he went to the agent’s office, nabbed the script, and brought it to his mom. Lee became an executive producer on “The Last Showgirl,” Anderson fired her agent, and the rest is history.

“You know, I can’t blame [the agent] for everything,” Anderson said. “I went [to Canada] and he probably thought I wouldn’t want to do it, but he should have at least sent it to me and I would have made that decision.”

“The Last Showgirl” was Anderson’s first film with an auteur (“This is a Gia Coppola film through and through,” she said. “She had her little monitor in front of her, and it kept the noise away. It was her singular vision”), but certainly not the last. Next year, maybe we’ll see Anderson in Cannes with “Rosebush Pruning”; five of Anouz’s prior films premiered at the festival.

Next summer she’ll star opposite Liam Neeson in Paramount Pictures’ reboot of “The Naked Gun,” written and directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer. (Schaffer may also be the last director to require that Anderson audition; she happily did so, twice, before getting the role.)

“I want to be who I am, and I want to play characters in film instead of my personal life,” Anderson said. “So I kind of switched places now, which is nice.”

Roadside Attractions release “The Last Showgirl” opens in Los Angeles on Friday, December 13, with a wider release on Friday, January 10.