Pamela Anderson’s ‘Naked Gun’ Role Is ‘Healing,’ She Says

Pamela Anderson is reflecting on how acting is a form of healing. 

Her latest movie The Naked Gun (in theaters Aug. 1), in which Anderson, 57, stars with Liam Neeson, is “going to show a different side of me,” she said in a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar.

“I feel every film I do lately is healing various parts of me,” added the Baywatch star. “And you need a big, messy life to draw from if you want to make these kinds of things interesting.”

As she explained in her interview, that big, messy life began in 1989 when a cameraman picked Anderson out of a crowd at a football game in Vancouver, near her Canadian hometown. “I went straight to the Playboy Mansion, I met all these people, and then, you know, life just kept going,” she said. “I call them the blurry years. I just went on this crazy, wild ride that I had no control over.”

Those years included a whirlwind marriage with Tommy Lee and the 1995 theft and sale of the couple’s home videos as sex tapes, which Anderson called “the worst time of my life.” But focusing on raising her two sons, Brandon Thomas and Dylan Jagger, who she shares with her first ex-husband, has enabled the actress to regain control, she added.

“Sometimes when you think it’s the end, it’s really the beginning,” said Anderson. She experienced a career renaissance following a 2022 Broadway debut leading Chicago. Next came the release of her memoir Love, Pamela and documentary Pamela, a Love Story; then her Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated performance in last year’s The Last Showgirl.

“I feel I’ve got a lot to learn and do yet,” she said. “I love being in a creative space. That’s my happy place… I love poetry, film and music, and I feel like I’m just trying to live this part of my life as authentically as possible.”

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In The Naked Gun, a sequel-reboot to the crime spoofs of the 1980s and ’90s starring Leslie Nielsen, Anderson plays femme fatale Beth. The Akiva Schaffer-directed comedy from Paramount Pictures is in theaters Aug. 1.

Among her other upcoming projects are returning to the stage in Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Camino Real, Kornél Mundruczó’s film Place to Be and Sally Potter’s film Alma.