Despite working in Hollywood for decades, Pamela Anderson never was offered a meaty role like “The Last Showgirl” protagonist Shelley, a struggling dancer about to lose the only job she’s ever known due to age and shifting tastes among the Las Vegas tourist set.
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“I underestimated myself too,” Anderson said during an interview at the Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio. “And it just came at the right time. Everything just came at the right time.”
The right time for Anderson was a career-changing 2023 that saw her sex symbol public persona morph into something more multidimensional thanks to Ryan White’s 2023 Emmy-nominated documentary “Pamela, A Love Story” and her best-selling memoir “Love Pamela.”
“The stars have really aligned,” Anderson added. “And now it just it also feels very surreal, like I’m going to wake up and this isn’t really happening, and then I’ll be really pissed because I just I feel so blessed and fortunate that I get this opportunity and chance to kind of have this life that I’ve thought I could have a long time ago, and things get interrupted, life interrupted.”
The film, which made its world premiere at TIFF on Sept. 6 to rapturous applause, features the “Baywatch” icon in a way that audiences have never seen before, sans glamor, unappreciated and showcasing a full range of emotions. For director Gia Coppola, the choice wasn’t obvious.
“I kind of came across a picture of her. I guess you were promoting your documentary and, there was this sort of gut feeling of, ‘Well, what about her?’” Coppola recalled. “But I didn’t know too much about you at that time. And then my other cousin, Matt Shire, was like, ‘I know who your Shelly is. It’s Pamela. Watch her documentary. And I did, and I was like, you’re absolutely right. Like no one else can be her. I have to go find her.”
Still, Anderson’s agent at the time nixed the idea.
“It got turned down within an hour, and then, I was able to find a way through Brandon [Lee], your son, to get her the script,” Coppola added. (Anderson subsequently signed with CAA.)
For the film’s writer, Kate Gersten, the long-gestating script came to life in Anderson’s hands.
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“I wrote it 11 years ago. I didn’t have Pamela in mind,” Gersten noted. “And then the first time I heard her read at our first read-through, she just said every single line the way I’ve always imagined it in my head. I mean, every single line was exactly the way I’d always heard them.”
While “Last Showgirl” delves into the world where women of a certain age are discarded in Vegas, it also shows how young women — like the dancers played by Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song — also are treated as disposable. That’s a paradigm will parallels to Hollywood. Song spoke of her experience as a child actor and how it differed from that of her partner, Macaulay Culkin.
“We have vastly different experiences as child actors, and that’s an interesting conversation that we’ve had because I’ve been doing it since I was 3 and I still love it. Something must be wrong with me,” Song said with a laugh. “At the end of the day, this is just a job. As with anyone at any job, everyone feels disposable. I think it’s just harder to take on because sometimes it’s like, ‘No, you just don’t look right. You’re not tall enough.’ … It never really hit me until I actually became an adult, how disposable and difficult this actually really is. Because my parents sheltered me from it because it wasn’t a business to them. And so I think as an adult, it’s harder for me to handle my emotions and keep myself in check when it comes to rejection.”
Shipka, who grew up on a set (in her case the critically acclaimed series “Mad Men”), concurred that it’s harder to process rejection now than then.
“It is more of a mental trip as an adult than it was as a kid,” Shipka said. “I mean, surely there’s things that you internalize and have to work out later. But not on skates, but still, it’s nice if you can find your way in through just a childlike joy and love of something.”
Ultimately, Anderson sees the upside of being underestimated.
“Having nothing to live up to is a good position to be in,” she said. “You can surprise everybody even with a full sentence. You’re a genius.”
The Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio is sponsored by J Crew and SharkNinja.
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