How Pamela Anderson channeled her “beautiful, messy life.”

Gia Coppola had a problem. She didn’t know who would star in the new movie she wanted to make about Shelly, a veteran Las Vegas showgirl whose world falls apart when her long-running revue comes to an end.

“It was all these actresses from the past that I dreamed about: Wouldn’t that be an interesting role for Marilyn Monroe?“says the director Weekly entertainmentsat backstage at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival last weekend, before a question-and-answer session after the screening of The Last Showgirl.

But then it hit her when she watched Pamela Anderson’s 2023 Netflix documentary: Pamela, a love story. “She “is the Marilyn of our time,” remembers Coppola. “I think she’s a very interesting person.” She’s very intelligent and has an artistic background, and I could see that she was a woman who really longed to express herself creatively as an actress. I saw a lot of parallels with Shelly, but I also saw that she was a person who was really eager to showcase her talents.

As seen in EW’s exclusive first-look photos, Shelly is the leading lady in Las Vegas’ fictional Le Razzle Dazzle (based on the real-life Jubilee!, which ended in 2016 and was the last of its kind), a dying one Show with lots of sequins, feathers and, well, showgirls. When the producers announce that they are halting production, Shelly is devastated and anxiously wonders what she will do next. She dedicated around three decades of her life to this topic, sacrificing her relationship with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd).

When Anderson got her hands on Kate Gersten’s script (based on a play she wrote several years ago and inspired by her experience completing Jubilee!), she was immediately drawn to the character, who takes her art form very seriously takes…Anyone who reduces her to a sexual object is damned.

“I’ve never read a script that I responded to like that – no one has sent me anything like that,” says Anderson, sitting across from Coppola. “I read it and thought I have to do this. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s really important.”

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At the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the actress said she had “prepared for this role my whole life” – and she was ready for the biggest challenge of her career.

“Living a beautiful, messy life is something incredible to draw from and sometimes I look back on my life and think I could have done it differently, but you need the life experience to be able to look back and say these things “,” she now explains her statement at the premiere. “I love the craft of acting and have taken a lot of private lessons, and finally I felt like this was an opportunity for me to put that into practice.”

Thanks to her single life and the fact that her children were grown, she was also able to focus “a thousand percent” on the project. She realized: “I have nothing to lose. And what if this is the last movie I ever make, or the only movie I ever make?”

Sure, she’s appeared in about two dozen films, a handful of them as herself. But in there The Last ShowgirlIt’s all about Shelly – and in turn, Anderson, who also used the role as a chance to “see what I’m made of”.

“I knew I was capable of more than I had done in the past and I had kind of given up and went home and thought, well, it’s too bad. I screwed up. I didn’t work hard enough or people just see me a certain way because I fell into the trap,” he said Baywatch says the actress. “I want to be defined by what I do, not what was done to me.”

In the film (which opens in limited release on December 13th and opens nationwide on January 10th), Shelly isn’t the only one facing an uncertain future. Also in Le Razzle Dazzle are two younger cast members, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), as well as stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), with whom she has some complicated feelings.

But then there’s Annette, a former showgirl and cocktail waitress played by Jamie Lee Curtis. She “immediately had a lot of ideas about what she would look like and what her backstory was,” the Oscar and Emmy winner says, calling EW from Tennessee, where she’s filming the series Scarpetta. “I called my wig maker and we headed to the races.”

Curtis was wearing her red wig when Anderson first met her. She had also just gotten a spray tan. “We did the table reading, it got more and more orange and with this frosty pink lipstick,” Anderson remembers, laughing. “It was incredible.”

However, the look was very intentional.

“There’s this term that describes women in particular in a derogatory way, saying that they look like they’ve been ridden hard and put away wet,” Curtis explains. And that was her goal with Annette. “I really wanted to show the damage the sun has done to her – she looks so leathery.”

Curtis says she knew on the outside who Annette was on the inside.

“I know hustlers. I love hustlers. I love people who have lived their entire lives with very little support, very little education, very little family support and just grew up.” [and] “She developed skills where there were none,” she says. Annette, she suspects, started working as a dancer – “maybe she was a stripper, we don’t know” – but left that job as she got older and then became a stripper again Sex worker.”

Eventually she became a cocktail waitress. Although on the Rio, where The Last Showgirl was filmed in January 2024, many waiters are “bevertainers,” beverage servers who entertain casino visitors a few times per shift with their chosen talent. During the production, Curtis and Coppola met one of these women who came on stage to dance for them.

“Jamie watched one of them dance in awe and just thought they were so talented and amazing,” Coppola remembers. “I thought, ‘Well, are you going to do that?’ And she was like, ‘Will you take me to the podium to dance?'”

Curtis remembers it a little differently, less as a question and more matter-of-fact. “I thought she was joking. And then, to be honest, as we walked into the rehearsal room, the song came on – music plays 24 hours a day in a casino – ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. And I joked to Gia, “If Annette were a Bevertainer, she would dance to this song.”

Five minutes later, Curtis developed a dance to the song and the camera was rolling.

“All I do is, ‘F–k it, let’s do it.’ If The bear I didn’t coin the term ‘let it rip,’ I would have coined it,” she says, referring to the Hulu series for which she won her first Emmy this September. “Letting it rip is the whole point of the whole thing.” thing, but there’s also something incredibly sad about it. And that was powerful for me. There’s something so vulnerable about this idea that you get involved in something that no one cares about. This is very sad and exactly what Vegas and especially the women in Vegas are struggling with. It was definitely poignant for me.”

Curtis wasn’t even sure if Coppola would use the scene or how, considering they only had enough time to shoot one take of it. But she found out at the Toronto premiere, where she saw the film for the first time along with the rest of the cast.

“I really wanted them to experience it in the theater and not just watch it on a computer screen,” Coppola says of the wait. “So sitting next to Pamela as she watched the film and being with all of them was really gratifying… I could see how well this film resonated with audiences; it is truly reactionary and offers a communal experience.” ”

As excited as Anderson was to make the film, she admits it was “so hard” to watch. “It’s the first time I’ve seen myself doing a film on a big screen,” she says. But wasn’t that always her goal, growing up in Canada? “I don’t know what my dreams were. I was always a very imaginative child. When I was younger I was too shy to do much of it, but as I got older I was really curious about it, so I did. And then my life took a different turn.”

But that curiosity never faded. “I feel like it’s exactly what I’m meant to do, so I hope I can do more,” she continues. “I feel like this is just the beginning of my career.”