Pamela Anderson: “I Don’t Have to Please Anybody Else. That’s Real Freedom”

This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 situation of AnOther Magazine: 

When Pamela Anderson appears out her home windows in Ladysmith, a tiny city on the east coast of Vancouver Island, she sees ocean and orcas and snowcapped mountains. For a number of years now, she’s been dwelling in the home the place she grew up. She initially pictured going dwelling as a chance to strip her life again to necessities after the very public tumult of her movie star. She imagined gardening, making pickles, “getting back to the trees that have known me since birth”. But that plan hasn’t labored out in any respect. 

First, Broadway referred to as with a suggestion to visitor as Roxie Hart in Chicago. Then got here an Emmy-nominated documentary about her life and profession on Netflix, a bestselling memoir, the starring function in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl and extra nominations for Anderson. “And I thought, OK, I guess I’m not done. And now it’s kind of hard to get to the island. It’s a little isolated. I feel like I’m a little bit of a gypsy, travelling from one job to another these days.” 

Following her look in final yr’s massive studio reboot of The Naked Gun, she goes to be inescapable onscreen over the subsequent few years, with a slate of soon-to-be-cult movies lined up whose credit learn like purest film-festival bait. The newest, which she wrapped simply earlier than Christmas, is Love Is Not the Answer, Michael Cera’s directorial debut. Her character is Jean, stalked by a limo driver performed by Steve Coogan. Her son is Joseph Longo, the real-life offspring of the Fassbinder favorite Barbara Sukowa. Jamie Dornan performs a TV star, and Shirley Henderson and Lucas Hedges are in there too. It has been billed as “an absurdist comedy” that explores “modern loneliness and the search for connection”. Cera has Cannes in his sights, if he can end the edit in time. 

Anderson is a redhead within the movie. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says of her function. “It was three months of real immersion in this person, and it took me a while to shake off.” She wasted no time in going again to her signature blonde. “Until I got rid of the red hair, I was like, ‘She’s got to go. Goodbye, Jean!’ You have to find ways to let go of a character, and hair is a big deal.” A cutaway within the Netflix doc reveals a field of Garnier Nutrisse hair color in a shade referred to as Lightest Platinum. It’s a refined reminder that Anderson was launched into the showbiz stratosphere because the Playboy Playmate gone ballistic in Baywatch, the most recent replace of the pneumatic blonde-bombshell archetype whose lineage embraces Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, Lana Turner, Anita Ekberg and Marilyn Monroe, sad intercourse symbols all. A poignant clip from that doc captures Anderson in 1991 as a bright-eyed naif: “This is my time to shine not as a sex symbol, but as an actress. I think I stood back too long.” Faint hope. Years cross and we see her, naive now not, wearily declaring, “My boobs had a career and I was just tagging along.”

Everyone loves a comeback, however the dialog about Anderson’s current profession has appeared fixated on a redemption arc. That notion is just too biblical for my tastes, like she did one thing unsuitable and now she’s atoning. I desire to consider her success as hard-earned compensation for all the things she has been put by means of. Anderson herself is doubtful. “I’m not innocent here,” she tells me. “I used to be complicit, as a result of in some unspecified time in the future, particularly on the very starting of my profession and my relationships and the issues that occurred in my private life, it was simply exploitation and I type of gave up. I believed, ‘Well, this is who I am.’ Just being in Playboy and Baywatch and even the individuals round me at the moment, I used to be being minimised. ‘Yeah, you little girl, this is how you do it.’ I felt nearly like, OK, I deserve this. Which I do know I didn’t, trying again, however in that second I used to be like, oh yeah, I get why they’re saying that.

“I live cheque to cheque, I’ll never shake that. I’m just very old school and simple” – Pamela Anderson

“It took me years to shake that off because I was just going with the flow, thinking, ‘OK, I’m doing reality shows and I’m just trying to keep the lights on.’ I had a divorce. I didn’t get any compensation from men, I wasn’t depending on anybody. I was on my own and I wanted to supply a life for my boys, Brandon and Dylan, that didn’t seem different, even though the best part of their existence was living in the trailer park in Malibu, Paradise Cove. That was like Stand by Me on the beach. They say that’s their best memory. All the fancy houses and places they’ve seen around the world, that was their favourite time in our life. So that was important. Even though it was Malibu, so these were very expensive trailers.” 

Anderson chuckles on the incongruity. She’s at all times identified the worth of a greenback. “I like being in the fight. I live cheque to cheque, I’ll never shake that. I’m just very old school and simple. I don’t like debt. And second chances too, I don’t take for granted. I feel like I’m getting a second chance at all of it. And all that was lessons learnt, and I have a lot to draw on, from my childhood to my last couple of decades of relationships, so I want to explore that. I don’t want to have to worry about what I look like. I want to be able to not have someone in my life where I’m wondering, ‘Are they going to like it?’ I don’t have to please anybody else. That’s a real freedom. No one expects perfection from me. If I walk on a red carpet, it’s always going to be a little bit of a mess. And that’s part of my charm.”

In 2023 she was photographed at Paris Fashion Week sporting no make-up. Not a “no-make-up look”, which nonetheless includes some extent of slap, however an precise bare face. Anderson determined she would reasonably spend her time having fun with Paris than sitting in a make-up chair, however to her shock her resolution created a viral sensation. You can decide its lingering impression by the truth that, the evening earlier than we talked, she was the Beauty Icon honouree at this yr’s WWD Style Awards in LA. “You wouldn’t put the words ‘natural beauty’ in front of my name normally, but what I’m good at is making brave choices, because there’s no other way to do this. I always feel like a little kid on the outside of things and I have nothing to lose. Even the ‘no make-up’ thing, I just thought no one’s going to notice. I mean, I’m wearing Vivienne Westwood head to toe.” 

The bare face was most likely inevitable. Anderson calls herself a tomboy at coronary heart. “My kids used to joke that I spent half my life in a make-up chair. They would be scrambling around my feet. I was doing TV series and photoshoots. And I just thought one day, ‘Am I going to do this for the rest of my life? No, I have too much else to do. I’d rather go for a walk.’” She agrees it’s been like shedding a pores and skin. “And I had a lot of it to shed. I was just peeling it back. I feel like a lot of people chimed in. Everyone was against me, even my kids and the very small team that I have were like, ‘You have to have a glam team, you have to have a stylist, you have to have this and that.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t … I really don’t.’ Sometimes I’ll have a hairdresser. Sometimes I’ll have a stylist. Like that Naked Gun tour, it’s ten interviews a day in different outfits, so it was great to have help with that. But I can dress myself. Last night I chose my outfit.” 

For the WWD awards, Anderson visualised herself as a Jim Jarmusch model of Jeanne Moreau in Jacques Demy’s 1963 La Baie des Anges, a graphic combo of movie noir femme fatale and No New York heroine in black shades, black trench and platinum movie-star do. The originality of the reference, the sheer glamour of the look convincingly embodied her barefaced contrariness. And now she has Sonsie, a small however very private skincare line to specific it additional. She calls it her ardour mission. Brandon and Dylan work together with her on it. The merchandise are vegan, cruelty-free and sustainably produced. You might see them as a mild consummation of her years of social and environmental activism. 

Even as a young person in Ladysmith, Anderson had an activist gene. It advanced till, by the flip of the century, heartily sick of speaking about “boyfriends and boobs” on a regular basis, she determined to make use of her personal profile to lift the profile of NGOs whose causes she supported. She began with Peta and went on from there till she ultimately related with Vivienne Westwood in a flamable assembly of artist and muse. 

PAMELA ANDERSON: We met signing petitions for [the Native American activist] Leonard Peltier’s launch. She invited me to her present, after which we have been simply inseparable. She informed me, “I don’t have to draw you a map.” She and Andreas would come and keep in Paradise Cove on a blow-up mattress. They have been very unpretentious and enjoyable. And we might shoot with Juergen Teller within the trailer park and within the laundry room, and Queens of the Stone Age would come by. One day, she goes, “Give me Brandon for a summer.” I mentioned, “Sure.” Brandon interned together with her for a full summer time when he was 16 years outdated. He labored in each side of her enterprise. She would make him write e-book reviews on Anatole France’s The Gods Will Have Blood, or she’d ship him to a museum and ask him when he got here dwelling, “What painting would you save in a fire?” He saved saying, “Who is this crazy woman bringing me to Antarctica on a Greenpeace mission? Who is this wild woman that you’ve set me up with?” I imply, you assume Mom is wild? And now he clearly appears again and actually understands how that colored lots of the way in which he’s. It gave him a lot.

TIM BLANKS: Did Vivienne unleash something in you?

PA: I believe it was simply good to be reassured by her that I used to be on the proper path. I had a lot empathy for the world. I really feel, proper now, like I’m extra of a mild activist, the place I’m not essentially the poster little one. In the Nineties, it was completely different. It was more practical then for me to be Peta’s poster lady or to be visiting Julian Assange in jail, all kinds of stuff that was way back. But now it’s a really sensitive factor. Even Julian mentioned to me, “Pamela, I love your support but as much as you’re concerned about me, I’m concerned about you. I want you to never take your freedom for granted and to be cautious and find ways to be supportive without hurting yourself or your children.” 

TB: Do you assume that is a part of your factor about being by yourself now? After the life you’ve had, that is about defending your self?

PA: No, I simply wish to unleash the dragon. I don’t want anyone in my method. I wish to get it out. It occurs at completely different occasions in everyone’s life, and that is my time. There’s that nice Osho quote – “The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love.” That’s the place I’m at proper now. Every now and again I’ll have a flirtation or any individual will wish to have dinner or speak concerning the future and it’s titillating. It’s like, “OK, I’m good now for a whole year, thank you.”

The grand theme of Anderson’s life is heart-wrenchingly vivid. Her autobiography was referred to as Love, Pamela, her Netflix doc was Pamela, a Love Story. “I love being in love,” she as soon as mentioned. She at all times made the classical distinction between eros (attractive, passionate, loopy) and agape (dedication, help), but it surely was clear from a string of impulsive, failed unions which type of love she was most keen on. And then there was Tommy Lee, the closely inked heavy steel icon. Eros incarnate. They married on a seaside in Cancun after understanding one another for barely six weeks. When you realize, you realize. I noticed them collectively as soon as at a celebration for Dolce & Gabbana in LA, at a giant outdated citadel within the Hollywood Hills. Domenico Dolce was holding court docket in an odd little VIP room with a motley crew of celebrities when Anderson and Lee got here in, clearly on edge and seeking to escape all the eye they have been getting. The solely method out was the window, so we have been handled to the spectacle of the couple clambering over the sill and decreasing themselves into the backyard past. But earlier than that occurred, Lee took the time to thank his host for having them, strikingly gracious in that tiny little hothouse of fame. 

“My kids used to joke that I spent half my life in a make-up chair” – Pamela Anderson

Lee displayed an identical successful high quality within the Netflix doc. The couple have been clearly made for one another, till they weren’t. You’re praying for all of it to work out, even because the world conspires in opposition to their happiness, at the same time as you’re absolutely conscious of the darkness that’s coming: the gruelling 1997 court docket case round their stolen intercourse tape, Lee’s six-month jail sentence for home abuse in 1998. And then the toll taken by that type of life lived in that type of public was cruelly amplified within the 2022 miniseries Pam & Tommy. Anderson’s mom, Carol, at all times mentioned, “Love is the great healer.” It actually labored in her personal tumultuous relationship with Anderson’s father, Barry. Oh, how I wished to consider one thing related would possibly exist for Pam. I don’t assume I’m alone both, so charmed did the world appear by the prospect of a romance between her and her Naked Gun co-star Liam Neeson. 

PA: He actually began it. 

TB: But individuals wished you to be pleased with him. I believed it was candy.

PA: I do know, it was so candy. I’m like, “Maybe you need to do a romantic comedy about it.” It feels good to be rooted for, as a result of there have been occasions the place you are feeling like individuals weren’t rooting for you. But issues change on a regular basis. You’ve actually bought to depend upon your self. And that needs to be sufficient. I believe romantic love just isn’t sustainable, proper? We all agree on that. I’ve had such unbelievable experiences and horrible experiences, however that’s what it’s. I haven’t had something apart from that, and I haven’t seen something apart from that. I’ve had nice amorous affairs and if I’ve yet another in my lifetime that shall be a blessing, however I’m not relying on it. I’m not bitter, I’m a romantic, but it surely’s only a completely different time. I really feel I stay romantically. I’m the bubble-bath-and-candle type of lady who makes stunning dinners, even for myself. I’m studying how to try this.

TB: Learning? It sounds such as you’ve at all times been actually good at that.

PA: For different individuals, sure. I’m a grasp at doing that for different individuals.

TB: You inform your boys that Tommy is the nice love of your life however you may’t be with him. And I suppose that’s one thing else that I’d hope for, that point would ultimately take away regardless of the obstacles are to that.

PA: Even for a friendship, yeah, that might be good, to be in one another’s lives. And I believe that may occur over time. He remains to be going by means of what he’s going by means of, and there’s a time and a spot and I don’t wish to intervene.

TB: Can you see him in your boys?

PA: Yes, after all, all the great elements. Tommy is an actual softie. He’s a really delicate individual. And I really feel that in Dylan, particularly … I believe the toughest factor on the earth is leaving somebody you actually love. I bear in mind, after I was youthful, considering that’s the hardest resolution since you’re actually torn in half. You wish to do something you may to make it work however when you realize it’s not going to and you’ve got kids, then it’s exhausting. But you may’t change individuals, you may solely love them. I at all times inform my youngsters, “You were really born of true love.” Dylan is getting married in June in St Tropez, which could be very thrilling. Brandon has a ravishing girlfriend. And I at all times used to inform them each, “You have to be brave to be in love because heartbreak is the first step of awakening.” 

TB: But it sounds such as you’re in a a lot better place now. 

PA: Yeah, however I’m nonetheless rattled to the core. I’m grounded, however I’ve been doing these motion pictures which are actually stirring me up loads. And I’ve been doing so many in a row, which usually I don’t assume you need to do. But it’s not that I’m making an attempt to refill my time – I’m actually loving the issues I’m doing. I’m solely taking over initiatives that I really feel very challenged by, the place I like the director, I like the story, and I’ve to be completely scared to loss of life. I’ve at all times been in love with characters. I’d go into individuals’s lives and ask myself, how can I gown for them? What does a rock star’s spouse seem like? What does a Playboy Playmate seem like? What a couple of lady working on the seaside? But these have been simply visible creatures. Now my characters are extra inner. And I’m fortunate that every of them has been so completely different.

Even so, it’s putting what number of of Anderson’s upcoming movies characteristic a dysfunctional household dynamic, and the way typically she performs a mom. In Rosebush Pruning her character is definitely listed as The Mother. She has Tracy Letts as her husband, Riley Keough, Callum Turner and Jamie Bell as her kids and Elle Fanning as a potential in-law. It’s an interpretation of Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 pitch-black basic Fists within the Pocket, directed by Karim Aïnouz (whose final movie was the twisted delight Motel Destino) and scripted by Efthimis Filippou, a longtime collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos. In the unique, Mother was pushed off a cliff by considered one of her sons. The rewrite apparently has a gender change. “People get pruned.” Anderson will say not more than that. 

“I think the hardest thing in the world is leaving someone you really love” – Pamela Anderson

In Place to Be she performs Ellen Burstyn’s daughter and Murray Bartlett’s sister. Taika Waititi is the outsider, serving to Burstyn to move a misplaced racing pigeon from New York to Chicago (!) and the director is Kornél Mundruczó, who carried Vanessa Kirby to award-winning heights in Pieces of a Woman. We’ve already touched on Love Is Not the Answer, one other maternal state of affairs, and a very difficult function for her. “Steve Coogan was so good. When we were doing some scenes and he was talking to me and looking into my eyes, he was reminding me of feelings that I didn’t even know I had. I thought, ‘God, this is why people act.’ It was so touching. I had to run to my dressing room and write it all down.”

You know the outdated line about conserving a diary as a result of in the future it can hold you? Anderson has journalled her complete life. That must be a film, however her outdated diaries have been already the inspiration of Pamela, a Love Story, and her new ones are the idea of her Substack account. (Dylan is her “Mom, you can’t say that” editor.) When she was younger she referred to as her journals “evidence”, like she was anticipating one thing unhealthy to occur. And it did: a foul babysitter, a foul buddy of a buddy. Anderson by no means informed anybody concerning the abuse. Her circle of relatives dynamic was complicated: dad, the unhealthy boy on the bike, mum the bouncy, bouffant blonde waitress barely conserving issues collectively. “Mothers and daughters,” Anderson says with a heavy sigh. “I do know my mother liked me. I don’t know if she favored me. She was so younger and so fixated on my dad. Where is he? What’s happening? Is he coming dwelling? Is the vacuum cleaner going to be thrown over my head? All kinds of loopy issues. I must take my little brother exterior. We lived in a one-room cabin so we have been at all times exterior. I don’t know if I ever felt I had a mom. I’ve my mother now, we get alongside advantageous within the backyard. That’s our protected zone. 

“But the good thing is, my parents have never interfered in my life,” Anderson provides. “They’ve never been enablers. They didn’t have the resources to do that. When I would call them from LA and go, ‘Oh my God, this happened,’ they’d be like, ‘Well, I wish we could help you but we have no idea even where you are.’ They’ve never been in the way. They were just like, ‘Darling, go out into the world and have a different life. Get off the island.’ Not that the island is anything bad. It’s just because we have generations and generations of people who were not educated … waitresses, chimney sweeps … my family was very young and vibrant but just getting by. I feel like my mother just wanted me to try something else.” 

All of that was in her head as she bought to discover a mother-daughter reference to Burstyn. Anderson is 58, Burstyn simply turned 93. She was initially afraid of Burstyn and her Actors Studio credentials. “But halfway through our first scene together she winked at me and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m in.’ And you know who I had lunch with the other day? Shirley MacLaine. We like each other so we thought we should meet up. She’s in her nineties too. I was reading her book Out on a Limb the first time I ever flew in a plane, and I would always go to the Bodhi Tree bookstore in LA because that’s where she would go, so this just felt like another way to bookend things.” The ladies had a lot in frequent – the animal rights activism, the curiosity in metaphysics, the expertise of singing and dancing in a Bob Fosse manufacturing (Sweet Charity for MacLaine, Chicago for Anderson) – that the lunch lasted three hours. It was a pinch-me second for Anderson.

But her life appears filled with them. “Ellen said, ‘You’re like this little kid that just started this.’ And I told her, I am a little kid who just started this.” It’s nonetheless a shock – and a thrill for her – when Adam Sandler high-fives her at an awards present or Tilda Swinton runs over to provide her a congratulatory hug. “People are so kind to you, but you just don’t believe you fit into those rooms, because I still feel like the girl on Baywatch running in slow motion, and I’m walking in, meeting Kate Winslet … ” Her voice trails off as she contemplates that intimidating prospect. “But part of the journey is being able to hold your own in those rooms and feel like you belong next to those people. And I think, right now, for me that’s the hardest part because I’m just starting to meet them. Directors are one thing, but actors, my peers, I feel are not going to accept me for some reason. That’s the new thing I’m trying to get through.” The insecurity runs bone deep. In The Last Showgirl it clearly powered Anderson’s stunningly uncooked efficiency.

She nearly missed her breakthrough when her agent turned the script down, however Gia Coppola discovered Brandon, who handed it on to his mom. Once she’d learn it, Anderson knew she was the one one who might play Shelly Gardner, a light magnificence whose time within the Vegas highlight is working out. She nonetheless needed to endure the desk learn, the place the intimidating prospect this time was her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis. “And I was so insecure, but I thought, if this is the only movie I ever do I’m leaving it all on the floor, and if I don’t do anything else at least I’ll have this and maybe people will think I’m capable of more. I was very focused. And I would write every day. I filled so many diaries. I felt like the vulnerability was really important. It would have been very easy to play sassy, bitter, jaded. But I love that the baseline was this imperfect, vulnerable character.” Anderson noticed the finished movie for the primary time on the Toronto International Film Festival. “Gia wanted us to see it all together in a theatre with people, which could have been a disaster. But I was like, who is that person? I hadn’t had the experience before, when you see yourself onscreen but you don’t see you, you see a completely different person. I get chills thinking about it because that’s the goal. But this is just the beginning for me. I feel like I’ve just started with doing what I want to do.” 

“I still feel like the girl on Baywatch running in slow motion” – Pamela Anderson

And it’s absolutely that ingénue vitality that’s fuelling Anderson. She compares her schedule to bootcamp. “I don’t know what’s next, so that’s why I can’t take my foot off the gas. But I’m not doing things just to take up my time,” she insists. Next up she’s taking pictures Somedays, with Billy Bob Thornton, who can be using a wave with the success of Landman on TV. Then it’s straight into Sally Potter’s newest, Alma, by which Anderson is a part of yet another dysfunctional household, with Dakota Fanning and Lindsay Duncan. Then there’s a break for Dylan’s marriage ceremony in St Tropez, earlier than she shoots Queen of the Falls with Guy Pearce, one other manufacturing with a peerless indie pedigree: directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, scored by Marius de Vries and choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall, recent from The Testament of Ann Lee. Yes, there may be some singing and dancing, although it’s within the service of a darkish story concerning the relationship between a girl and her pen pal who’s on loss of life row. Anderson additionally loves the danger and freedom of stay efficiency – in between all of the promo for The Naked Gun, she spent her weekends starring in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real on the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts. On paper it regarded not possible, so after all she mentioned sure.

In a perfect world, she’d be working with Ingmar Bergman, if he have been nonetheless round, or Werner Herzog. That practically occurred as soon as, some time in the past. Jim Jarmusch is another person Anderson has admired for ever. “There are a lot of directors I want to work with. I don’t know about actors. Ethan Hawke? I love actors who are into the method. I just want to soak it up like a sponge. I feel like this is something that’s really driving me and saving my life. I think it’s been healing for me, better than therapy. My acting coach knows me better than any therapist ever did.” 

She’s not the primary individual to explain appearing as a cathartic course of, however in her case she possibly had extra to unleash than her friends. “Feeling those feelings you don’t necessarily want to feel because they get in the way,” is how Anderson describes these years when she’d be taking pictures for Playboy or lifeguarding in Baywatch however studying Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and the performs of Sam Shepard in her downtime. “I was doing things that I felt were more superficial but always knowing I had so much to give and I just needed to find a place to put it. The frustration of not being able to reach my potential was always like keeping a secret. And it got to the point where I had this little monster inside me that I had to get out,” – Anderson catches herself – “a cute little monster that’s been tickling me from the within. ‘Let me out! Let me do something!’ 

“Oh, I’m such a late bloomer,” she says, marvelling. We take a second to forged our minds again to the teenage lady in Ladysmith, whose puberty got here so late she thought her budding breasts have been most cancers. “I know, wasn’t that crazy? I was a late bloomer as a kid, as a teenager, as a woman. And I’m still blooming.” Two days after our dialog, Anderson arrives on the Golden Globes, the place, as a nominee for finest actress in a movement image (drama) final yr, she shall be presenting a finest actress award. Her blonde hair is in an informal updo, she’s in a plain white Ferragamo shirt and skirt and minimal make-up. Her magnificence is translucent. Bergman would forged her on the spot. 

For the precise ceremony, Anderson is seated with George Clooney. Of course she already is aware of that after we speak. “This is gonna be terrifying,” she says. I counsel she speak to him concerning the subsequent instalment of the Ocean’s franchise that he’s presently getting ready. “Come on, I’m not used to that,” she counters. “I’m not ready for the big leagues yet.” Oh, however you’re, Pamela. You are.

Casting: Greg Krelenstein. Hair: John Nollet at Forty-One Studio + Agency. Make-up: Yumi Lee at Streeters utilizing ARMANI BEAUTY. Set design: Kadu Lennox at Trouble Mngt. Styling assistants: Precious Greham and Karen Yabuta. Set-design assistants: Jeankarlos Cruz, John Carchietta and Izadora Fleetwood. Production: Hen’s Tooth Productions. Executive producer: Mary-Clancey Pace. On-set producer: Emily May. Production supervisor: Brenna Smit. Production assistant: Snake Garcia. Post-production: Two Three Two Studio. Special because of Brent Adams

This story options within the Spring/Summer 2026 situation, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 12 March 2026.