This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine:
When Pamela Anderson looks out her windows in Ladysmith, a tiny town on the east coast of Vancouver Island, she sees ocean and orcas and snowcapped mountains. For several years now, she’s been living in the house where she grew up. She originally pictured going home as an opportunity to strip her life back to essentials after the very public tumult of her celebrity. She imagined gardening, making pickles, “getting back to the trees that have known me since birth”. But that plan hasn’t worked out at all.
First, Broadway called with an offer to guest as Roxie Hart in Chicago. Then came an Emmy-nominated documentary about her life and career on Netflix, a bestselling memoir, the starring role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl and more 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 appearance in last year’s big studio reboot of The Naked Gun, she is going to be inescapable onscreen over the next few years, with a slate of soon-to-be-cult films lined up whose credits read like purest film-festival bait. The latest, which she wrapped just before Christmas, is Love Is Not the Answer, Michael Cera’s directorial debut. Her character is Jean, stalked by a limo driver played by Steve Coogan. Her son is Joseph Longo, the real-life offspring of the Fassbinder favourite Barbara Sukowa. Jamie Dornan plays 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 finish the edit in time.
Anderson is a redhead in the film. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says of her role. “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 back 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 in the Netflix doc shows a box of Garnier Nutrisse hair colour in a shade called Lightest Platinum. It’s a subtle reminder that Anderson was launched into the showbiz stratosphere as the Playboy Playmate gone ballistic in Baywatch, the latest update of the pneumatic blonde-bombshell archetype whose lineage embraces Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, Lana Turner, Anita Ekberg and Marilyn Monroe, unhappy sex 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 pass and we see her, naive no longer, wearily declaring, “My boobs had a career and I was just tagging along.”
 by Collier Schorr, 2022–2026)
Everyone loves a comeback, but the conversation about Anderson’s recent career has seemed fixated on a redemption arc. That notion is too biblical for my tastes, like she did something wrong and now she’s atoning. I prefer to think of her success as hard-earned compensation for everything she has been put through. Anderson herself is dubious. “I’m not innocent here,” she tells me. “I was complicit, because at some point, especially at the very beginning of my career and my relationships and the things that happened in my personal life, it was just exploitation and I kind of gave up. I thought, ‘Well, this is who I am.’ Just being in Playboy and Baywatch and even the people around me at that time, I was being minimised. ‘Yeah, you little girl, this is how you do it.’ I felt almost like, OK, I deserve this. Which I know I didn’t, looking back, but in that moment I was 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 at the incongruity. She’s always known the value of a dollar. “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 wearing no make-up. Not a “no-make-up look”, which still involves some degree of slap, but an actual naked face. Anderson decided she would rather spend her time enjoying Paris than sitting in a make-up chair, but to her surprise her decision created a viral sensation. You can judge its lingering impact by the fact that, the night before we talked, she was the Beauty Icon honouree at this year’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 naked face was probably inevitable. Anderson calls herself a tomboy at 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 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 version of Jeanne Moreau in Jacques Demy’s 1963 La Baie des Anges, a graphic combo of film 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 but very personal skincare line to express it further. She calls it her passion project. Brandon and Dylan work with her on it. The products are vegan, cruelty-free and sustainably produced. You could see them as a gentle consummation of her years of social and environmental activism.
Even as a teenager in Ladysmith, Anderson had an activist gene. It evolved until, by the turn of the century, heartily sick of talking about “boyfriends and boobs” all the time, she decided to use her own profile to raise the profile of NGOs whose causes she supported. She started with Peta and went on from there until she eventually connected with Vivienne Westwood in a combustible meeting of artist and muse.
PAMELA ANDERSON: We met signing petitions for [the Native American activist] Leonard Peltier’s release. She invited me to her show, and then we were just inseparable. She told me, “I don’t have to draw you a map.” She and Andreas would come and stay in Paradise Cove on a blow-up mattress. They were very unpretentious and fun. And we would shoot with Juergen Teller in the trailer park and in the laundry room, and Queens of the Stone Age would come by. One day, she goes, “Give me Brandon for a summer.” I said, “Sure.” Brandon interned with her for a full summer when he was 16 years old. He worked in every aspect of her business. She would make him write book reports on Anatole France’s The Gods Will Have Blood, or she’d send him to a museum and ask him when he came home, “What painting would you save in a fire?” He kept 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 mean, you think Mom is wild? And now he obviously looks back and really understands how that coloured a lot of the way he is. It gave him so much.
TIM BLANKS: Did Vivienne unleash anything in you?
PA: I think it was just nice to be reassured by her that I was on the right path. I had so much empathy for the world. I feel, right now, like I’m more of a gentle activist, where I’m not necessarily the poster child. In the Nineties, it was different. It was more effective then for me to be Peta’s poster girl or to be visiting Julian Assange in prison, all sorts of stuff that was long ago. But now it’s a very touchy thing. Even Julian said 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 think this is part of your thing about being on your own now? After the life you’ve had, this is about protecting yourself?
PA: No, I just want to unleash the dragon. I don’t need anybody in my way. I want to get it out. It happens at different times in everybody’s life, and this is my time. There’s that great Osho quote – “The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love.” That’s where I’m at right now. Every once in a while I’ll have a flirtation or somebody will want to have dinner or talk about 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 called Love, Pamela, her Netflix doc was Pamela, a Love Story. “I love being in love,” she once said. She always made the classical distinction between eros (sexy, passionate, crazy) and agape (commitment, support), but it was clear from a string of impulsive, failed unions which kind of love she was most partial to. And then there was Tommy Lee, the heavily inked heavy metal icon. Eros incarnate. They married on a beach in Cancun after knowing each other for barely six weeks. When you know, you know. I saw them together once at a party for Dolce & Gabbana in LA, at a big old castle in the Hollywood Hills. Domenico Dolce was holding court in an odd little VIP room with a motley crew of celebrities when Anderson and Lee came in, clearly on edge and looking to escape all the attention they were getting. The only way out was the window, so we were treated to the spectacle of the couple clambering over the sill and lowering themselves into the garden beyond. But before that happened, 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 a similar winning quality in the Netflix doc. The couple were obviously made for each other, until they weren’t. You’re praying for it all to work out, even as the world conspires against their happiness, even as you’re fully aware of the darkness that is coming: the gruelling 1997 court case around their stolen sex tape, Lee’s six-month jail sentence for domestic abuse in 1998. And then the toll taken by that kind of life lived in that kind of public was cruelly amplified in the 2022 miniseries Pam & Tommy. Anderson’s mother, Carol, always said, “Love is the great healer.” It certainly worked in her own tumultuous relationship with Anderson’s father, Barry. Oh, how I wanted to believe something similar might exist for Pam. I don’t think I’m alone either, so charmed did the world seem by the prospect of a romance between her and her Naked Gun co-star Liam Neeson.
PA: He really started it.
TB: But people wanted you to be happy with him. I thought it was sweet.
PA: I know, it was so sweet. I’m like, “Maybe you need to do a romantic comedy about it.” It feels nice to be rooted for, because there have been times where you feel like people weren’t rooting for you. But things change all the time. You’ve really got to depend on yourself. And that has to be enough. I think romantic love is not sustainable, right? We all agree on that. I’ve had such incredible experiences and terrible experiences, but that’s what it is. I haven’t had anything other than that, and I haven’t seen anything other than that. I’ve had great love affairs and if I have one more in my lifetime that will be a blessing, but I’m not counting on it. I’m not bitter, I am a romantic, but it’s just a different time. I feel I live romantically. I’m the bubble-bath-and-candle kind of girl who makes beautiful dinners, even for myself. I am learning how to do that.
TB: Learning? It sounds like you’ve always been really good at that.
PA: For other people, yes. I am a master at doing that for other people.
TB: You tell your boys that Tommy is the great love of your life but you can’t be with him. And I guess that’s something else that I would hope for, that time would eventually remove whatever the obstacles are to that.
PA: Even for a friendship, yeah, that would be nice, to be in each other’s lives. And I think that will happen over time. He is still going through what he’s going through, and there’s a time and a place and I don’t want to interfere.
TB: Can you see him in your boys?
PA: Yes, of course, all the good parts. Tommy is a real softie. He’s a very sensitive person. And I feel that in Dylan, especially … I think the hardest thing in the world is leaving someone you really love. I remember, when I was younger, thinking that is the hardest decision because you’re really torn in half. You want to do anything you can to make it work but when you know it’s not going to and you have children, then it’s hard. But you can’t change people, you can only love them. I always tell my kids, “You were really born of true love.” Dylan is getting married in June in St Tropez, which is very exciting. Brandon has a beautiful girlfriend. And I always used to tell them both, “You have to be brave to be in love because heartbreak is the first step of awakening.”
TB: But it sounds like you’re in a much better place now.
PA: Yeah, but I’m still rattled to the core. I’m grounded, but I’ve been doing these movies that are really stirring me up a lot. And I’ve been doing so many in a row, which normally I don’t think you should do. But it’s not that I’m trying to fill up my time – I’m really loving the things I’m doing. I’m only taking on projects that I feel very challenged by, where I love the director, I love the story, and I have to be absolutely scared to death. I’ve always been in love with characters. I would go into people’s lives and ask myself, how can I dress for them? What does a rock star’s wife look like? What does a Playboy Playmate look like? What about a girl running on the beach? But these were just visual creatures. Now my characters are more internal. And I’m lucky that each of them has been so different.
Even so, it’s striking how many of Anderson’s upcoming films feature a dysfunctional family dynamic, and how often she plays a mother. In Rosebush Pruning her character is actually listed as The Mother. She has Tracy Letts as her husband, Riley Keough, Callum Turner and Jamie Bell as her children and Elle Fanning as a prospective in-law. It’s an interpretation of Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 pitch-black classic Fists in the Pocket, directed by Karim Aïnouz (whose last film was the twisted delight Motel Destino) and scripted by Efthimis Filippou, a longtime collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos. In the original, Mother was pushed off a cliff by one of her sons. The rewrite apparently has a gender switch. “People get pruned.” Anderson will say no more than that.
“I think the hardest thing in the world is leaving someone you really love” – Pamela Anderson
In Place to Be she plays Ellen Burstyn’s daughter and Murray Bartlett’s sister. Taika Waititi is the outsider, helping Burstyn to transport a lost 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, another maternal situation, and a particularly complicated role 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 old line about keeping a diary because one day it will keep you? Anderson has journalled her whole life. That should be a movie, but her old diaries were already the foundation of Pamela, a Love Story, and her new ones are the basis of her Substack account. (Dylan is her “Mom, you can’t say that” editor.) When she was young she called her journals “evidence”, like she was expecting something bad to happen. And it did: a bad babysitter, a bad friend of a friend. Anderson never told anyone about the abuse. Her own family dynamic was complex: dad, the bad boy on the motorbike, mum the bouncy, bouffant blonde waitress barely keeping things together. “Mothers and daughters,” Anderson says with a heavy sigh. “I know my mom loved me. I don’t know if she liked me. She was so young and so fixated on my dad. Where is he? What’s going on? Is he coming home? Is the vacuum cleaner going to be thrown over my head? All sorts of crazy things. I would have to take my little brother outside. We lived in a one-room cabin so we were always outside. I don’t know if I ever felt I had a mother. I have my mom now, we get along fine in the garden. That’s our safe zone.
“But the good thing is, my parents have never interfered in my life,” Anderson adds. “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 got to explore a mother-daughter connection with Burstyn. Anderson is 58, Burstyn just turned 93. She was initially terrified 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 women had so much in common – the animal rights activism, the interest in metaphysics, the experience of singing and dancing in a Bob Fosse production (Sweet Charity for MacLaine, Chicago for Anderson) – that the lunch lasted three hours. It was a pinch-me moment for Anderson.
But her life seems full of 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 still a surprise – and a thrill for her – when Adam Sandler high-fives her at an awards show or Tilda Swinton runs over to give 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 raw performance.
She almost missed her breakthrough when her agent turned the script down, but Gia Coppola found Brandon, who passed it on to his mother. Once she’d read it, Anderson knew she was the only person who could play Shelly Gardner, a faded beauty whose time in the Vegas spotlight is running out. She still had to endure the table read, where 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 saw the completed film for the first time at 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 surely that ingénue energy that is 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 shooting Somedays, with Billy Bob Thornton, who is also riding a wave with the success of Landman on TV. Then it’s straight into Sally Potter’s latest, Alma, in which Anderson is part of one more dysfunctional family, with Dakota Fanning and Lindsay Duncan. Then there’s a break for Dylan’s wedding in St Tropez, before she shoots Queen of the Falls with Guy Pearce, another production with a peerless indie pedigree: directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, scored by Marius de Vries and choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall, fresh from The Testament of Ann Lee. Yes, there is some singing and dancing, though it’s in the service of a dark tale about the relationship between a woman and her pen pal who is on death row. Anderson also loves the risk and freedom of live performance – in between all the promo for The Naked Gun, she spent her weekends starring in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts. On paper it looked impossible, so of course she said yes.
In an ideal world, she’d be working with Ingmar Bergman, if he were still around, or Werner Herzog. That nearly happened once, a while ago. Jim Jarmusch is someone else 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 first person to describe acting as a cathartic process, but in her case she maybe had more to unleash than her peers. “Feeling those feelings you don’t necessarily want to feel because they get in the way,” is how Anderson describes those years when she’d be shooting for Playboy or lifeguarding in Baywatch but reading Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and the plays 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 inside. ‘Let me out! Let me do something!’
“Oh, I’m such a late bloomer,” she says, marvelling. We take a moment to cast our minds back to the teenage girl in Ladysmith, whose puberty came so late she thought her budding breasts were cancer. “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 conversation, Anderson arrives at the Golden Globes, where, as a nominee for best actress in a motion picture (drama) last year, she will be presenting a best actress award. Her blonde hair is in a casual updo, she’s in a plain white Ferragamo shirt and skirt and minimal make-up. Her beauty is translucent. Bergman would cast her on the spot.
For the actual ceremony, Anderson is seated with George Clooney. Of course she already knows that when we talk. “This is gonna be terrifying,” she says. I suggest she talk to him about the next instalment of the Ocean’s franchise that he is currently preparing. “Come on, I’m not used to that,” she counters. “I’m not ready for the big leagues yet.” Oh, but you are, Pamela. You are.
Casting: Greg Krelenstein. Hair: John Nollet at Forty-One Studio + Agency. Make-up: Yumi Lee at Streeters using 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 manager: Brenna Smit. Production assistant: Snake Garcia. Post-production: Two Three Two Studio. Special thanks to Brent Adams
This story features in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 12 March 2026.
