Pamela Anderson Opens Eyes In ‘The Last Showgirl’ Role Of A Career

EXCLUSIVE: Pamela Anderson says she has “danced between shame and beating myself up” — and she’s still here.

She has opened so many eyes with her stunning breakthrough performance, at age 57, playing Shelly, a veteran hoofer forced to hang up her heels in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. I think it’s one of the best screen performances of the year.

The breakthrough has been a long time coming. Even though Anderson cares not to dwell too much on her past, she embraces it for her art and has poured it into the role of Shelly.

“I wouldn’t change one thing about my life or I wouldn’t be here,” she declares.

“I’ve danced between shame and beating myself up about so many things or wondering what life would’ve been if I didn’t experience the things I did, even as a child, there’s so much,” she says.

But she’s still here.

And after writing her memoirs and doing Broadway — she played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway in 2022 — she describes that experience as “the warm-up for this film.”

So it’s been such an experience, she tells me as she’s preparing to travel to London, where she arrives today to promote The Last Showgirl.

Anderson breathes real grounded life into her portrait of Shelly, who struts and does her stuff at the fictional Le Razzle Dazzle revue in Las Vegas. It’s a dinosaur of a gig that’s been running for 38 years and Shelly was there at the beginning. There she is in the poster that hasn’t been changed for over three decades. 

In her hands she elevates the character to such heights that it made one think of Gena Rowlands in a John Cassavetes movie, or Isabelle Huppert in almost anything.

I also know chorines like Shelly who just can’t summon the stamina to sashay onto a stage anymore. Or rather producers only want girls as young as their daughters to be in their shows. They’ve had it. They’re working in the perfume hall at Harrods department store in Knightsbridge now; a couple of ex-dancers I once knew are delivering FedEx packages. Not so nice work if you can get it.

There’s a moment in The Last Showgirl when Jodie, played by Kiernan Shipka, one of Shelly’s younger colleagues, performs the risqué dance routine she just did at an audition and Shelly, who considers herself an artist, is appalled.

“All that kicking is redundant,” Shelly tells Jodie dismissively.

“It’s a job and it pays American dollars,” is Jodie’s retort.

Anderson wasn’t surprised by her character’s reaction to the almost pornographic demonstration.

“Well, I feel that way even about culture now, how it’s in this kind of political climate, how women are,” she says. “It’s so wonderful that this film is not exploitive. It’s not about violence or overt sexuality. It’s such a touching story and on so many different generations.

“And I find that because again, I’ve been sexualized and objectified in my life and career, but I don’t want to be defined by what has been done to me. I want to be defined by what I do. And I feel like I do mentor a lot of women in this industry who have gone down a path that is a scary kind of path. And I’ve helped a lot of women, and I have nieces and my sons have girlfriends, and I wonder in this culture, what’s enough? What does it take to entertain somebody? And I’ve always felt like I’ve had this veil or wall, and I feel like to protect me.”

Laughing, she says, “I feel like Ms. Magoo. Actually, I’ve been really lucky in my Playboy experience, also in being a lifeguard on the beach, whatever people thought of that, even it was very innocent. Baywatch was wholesome, I think. 

“And then the things that happened to me were really hard on me when my personal life was exploited,” she continues. “And it really was hard on me for a couple of decades. It took me a long time to, or I don’t think you ever really get over it. And then to see people, even my feelings for Kiernan in that scene, her being a showgirl, you’re on stage and you have the stage between you and the audience as that protection. There are rules that you don’t interact with people in the casino afterwards. This is your job. And that was protection. 

“And I feel also that it was so interesting to hear the stories because this came from a play. It came from [screenwriter] Kate Gersten, she studied the last years of the Jubilee! spectacular in Las Vegas where there’s 85 women on stage, 45 people working on the crew, and 15 people in the audience.

“It’s just such an art form and it’s the icon of Vegas, but it’s no longer there,” she sighs.

In a glancing sense, for me, there are whispers of the Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman musical Follies in The Last Showgirl. In that show, the stars and chorus girls of past extravaganzas gather one last time to gaze back before a wrecking ball demolishes the old theater that is being turned into a parking lot. Le Razzle Dazzle’s time is up, and so is Shelly’s. Although Anderson’s hopeful about Shelly’s future.

She gets the connection regarding Follies. “I’m so drawn to musical theater and music and all my favorite movies from Flashdance, Dirty Dancing, like A Chorus Line, all the Bob Fosse stuff, anything involving Gwen Verdon and Fosse. When there’s a musical element or performance element to it, it’s something I am really, really drawn to. And I feel like I know how to pretend in my own personal life how to be the best. If it was a Playmate or a rockstar wife or lifeguard, these are all my fantasies of what those people are or what those people would be.”

She adds: ”And I think that what’s different about this time in my life where I’m actually wondering, what are my original thoughts? Who am I? I know how to be something else. And then to be the woman holding up the rhinestones in Shelly’s character, I felt like I really loved that we got to see her going to the grocery store and talking about what she’s going to make for dinner. Because that’s that true backstage banter. I mean, on Broadway, people were wondering, what am I going to eat? I’m like, where’s my cue? I was new at this, but they’d been doing it for 18 years. That’s the backstage banter and the realness of a woman playing a character, being in a performance. It’s all the stuff that it takes. So it was fun to be able to show that and experience that and play with that.”

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I knew Anderson could dance, but I wondered whether she studied ballet because there’s a poignant moment in The Last Showgirl where her Shelly is dancing en pointe and shadowing ballet steps as a classical performance plays on a video. Again, it reminded me of the “At the Ballet” sequence in A Chorus Line 

“I never took dance lessons when I was little,” Anderson replies. 

“We couldn’t afford to give me dance lessons, so I would wait on the porch of my girlfriend’s house. She would come home from ballet tap and she would teach me a few things. Her and her tutu and me and my cutoff jeans and dirty T-shirt. That’s how I learned how to dance,” she reveals. 

“But I always, always was drawn to music. I played in a jazz band. When I was in high school, I played saxophone and my dad taught me a little accordion. My dad played piano,” she says, adding that a friend of the family taught her how to play by ear using the Suzuki method. “So there’s a musical element to me that’s just untapped,” she says, beaming brightly.

And when she was cast in Chicago “it was really important to me to understand that, okay, I do have a big range in my voice. I am able to remember choreography, even though I don’t know how to count. I’m just memorizing the steps. So I mean, I have so much to learn, and I’m just like a sponge right now. Even at my age I feel I’m just at the beginning because I am really wanting to learn more and more, and I found out so much about myself even doing this film and working with a great acting teacher, Ivana Chubbuck, who I’ve worked with in the past but never had the focus,” she admits.

“So now my kids are grown. I’m on my own. This is my baby, this is my lover, this is my everything. And now I see it takes that much. It takes that kind of focus.”

I suggest that she probably couldn’t have played Shelly had she not experienced the life that she’s had.

“Exactly, that is it! I couldn’t have played this character if I didn’t have the life I had. And I couldn’t even look back in hindsight and think these things I may have done differently if I didn’t have the life experience to get me to this place where I feel that way. People sometimes say, why did you make this choice? Why did you make that? So we’re all doing the best we can in the moment and with the tools that we have and the experience that we have, and we’re all fighting in this invisible bubble,” she explains.

“And even having children,” she says referring to her own two sons and the film’s mother-daughter strand.

“That really resonated with me because having children in this business and having children and working, a working mom and children, we all carry this guilt and we’re all going to beg for forgiveness to our adult children. And I’ve had that experience too. So that scene with Billie Lourd [who plays Shelly’s daughter] was cathartic in some ways, and she brought her own experience, her grandmother being Debbie Reynolds and her mother being Carrie Fisher. So when we met in that room, it was a face-off and it was real.”

The Last Showgirl has fired her up. I must quickly mention the beautiful performances her co-stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista give; they’re all fired up as well. 

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Anderson’s already shot The Naked Gun with Liam Neeson, and then spent several weeks this summer in Barcelona shooting Rosebush Pruning for director Karim Aïnouz (The Invisible Life, Firebrand), and she’s in marvelous company. That cast also includes Elle Fanning, Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Lukas Gage, Jamie Bell and Tracy Letts.

When I mention that I spent time on the Firebrand set in Derbyshire, England, she laughs and says: ”Then you know. He’s a wild man!”

She compares Aïnouz to conductor. “He’s so passionate and he’s tapping his feet and dancing behind those screens. Oh no, he’s wonderful. It was a great experience. I’m lucky because it couldn’t be any more different, you know, making The Last Showgirl and then doing The Naked Gun and then doing this film in Barcelona, the Rosebush Pruning. We shot The Last Showgirl in January; this is less than a year from shooting it. We shot The Last Showgirl in 18 days, which is like making a play every day.”

I’m emboldened to ask when she decided to rid her face of make-up in her everyday life. 

“Of all places? Paris Fashion Week. I mean, if you’re not going to wear make-up,” she chuckles.

“But I just felt these last few years have been a process for me of just peeling it all back and remembering who I am. I feel like I just went home to my garden and I just thought, I guess that’s all there is. I guess people are just going to think of me as this cartoon character, and even though I know I’m capable of so much more, I’m just going to make pickles and jam and I’ll make something, and my life is going to be beautiful no matter what. I’m going to make it exciting and fun.

“But I really craved expressing myself, and so I write a lot,” she says.

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The Last Showgirl was a surprise. “It was a surprise to get this film. And it makes you realize you just have to prepare yourself because when opportunity comes, you need to grab it by the throat and do it,” she says, acting out that exact scenario. 

“So you always got to keep that little fire burning; however small, however hidden,” says Anderson, referring to her favorite Cormac McCarthy quote.

“That’s really what I did. I just kept thinking: I’ve just got this secret, one day I’ll be able to share it with people that I can do this or that. It’s not like I was ambitious in my life. I really wanted to create memorable characters, and I was doing that but no one was giving me a film, so I was becoming different characters and being a Halloween costume is all that it got me. I was creating memorable characters that hurt. And even though they were maybe even funny looking at times, the vulnerability in the heart is always there. And you can’t go wrong when you live like that, I think.”

Anderson, as per the McCarthy quotation, was ready when Coppola approached her.

“Well, I think when Gia finally found me and finally got the script to me, she had already seen the documentary [2023’s Pamela: A Love Story] and that’s how she thought, oh, this is my Shelly. So she knew that I am a big already cinephile. I am a big reader and poet, and she could tell that I was just really hungry to express myself creatively. So we were sharing references. I’ve overloaded her with references, and I’ve always loved Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.”

And she cited  the work of actor-turned-director Barbara Loden, who appeared in Elia Kazan’s Wild River and Splendor in the Grass — after which she married him — and went on to write, direct and star in the 1970 independent classic movie Wanda. She died in 1980. 

“I’m a big fan of Godard and Fellini, and so these are all already poured into me. And so I don’t know where it all came from. People probably don’t think of me this way, that back in the day when I first came to Los Angeles, I was sitting in the Bodhi Tree or Samuel French bookstores, sitting on the floor reading Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill plays, Sam Shepherd, and just wondering, how do I get from here to there? And this has been a long unorthodox road, but now I feel like, oh, I finally got to do something that I’m proud of and excited about and feel so grateful that I was able to do this. When I read the script, I thought, oh, this is that thing. This is that thing when an actress reads the script and they have to do it, it’s life or death, and that’s how I felt.”

The photographer Marilyn Minter, who has worked with Anderson, observed that “it’s really stunning how people underestimate her.”

Why has that been able to happen, I ask?

“I don’t know. I just feel like sometimes I think to myself, I haven’t shown anybody what I’m capable of doing. I think that I have always had to prove people wrong. And that’s part of my journey. It’s also what fuels me because right now I feel like even when I do film the way I work and I work, I work really hard and I’m very focused. And I know people would say, who do you think you are? Ralph Fiennes? I’m like, maybe. No, I’m kidding.” 

I somehow feel that Pamela Anderson doesn’t have to kid anymore.

She’s still here for a reason.