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Pamela Anderson’s new comedy, The Naked Gun, releases in theaters across the world today.
She has another gig that’s much more intimate: Since July 19, the Golden Globe nominee, 58, has been performing in a production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real at the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Anderson’s three-show-per-weekend schedule (two on Saturdays, one on Sundays), means the actress has had to jet from all over the globe — where she’s been promoting The Naked Gun in London, New York and Berlin — back to the small town in the Bay State’s Berkshires area.
Marcia Johnston
“I saw that the premiere dates and press tour for The Naked Gun would have to happen between performances of Camino Real, but I said, ‘there’s no other choice.’ I absolutely had to do this play,” Anderson recently told Town & Country.
The projects couldn’t be more different in tone. In The Naked Gun — an update of the 1988 slapstick comedy starring Leslie Nielsen as L.A. Police Squat lieutenant Frank Drebin — she plays Beth Davenport, a femme fatale who gets involved with Drebin’s son Frank Jr. (Liam Neeson, with whom Anderson has struck up a romance, a source confirmed to PEOPLE on Tuesday, July 29.)
According to a description of the surreal play Camino Real on the festival’s website, “The Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in an imagined Latin-Mediterranean-American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature such as Don Quixote, Casanova, and Camille inhabit this phantasmagoric plaza where corruption and alienation have nearly destroyed the human spirit. Enter Kilroy, a prize-winning boxer and all-American fella with ‘a heart as big as the head of a baby.'”
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Nicholas Alexander Chavez, from the Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story, stars as Kilroy, while Anderson plays Marguerite Gaultier (a courtesan and character originally from Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Lady of the Camellias).
The star of The Last Showgirl told Town & Country her 2022 stint as murderous housewife Roxie Hart on the Great White Way inspired her to continue stage work. “I loved being on Broadway playing Roxie in Chicago, and I didn’t know if I’d get another chance,” she said.
Her role in Camino Real wraps up with a final performance on Sunday, Aug. 3, but Anderson seems interested in performing live in the future.
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“There are so many characters I want to play that I would never have thought about back in my twenties, but I feel like in this part of my life, I can play them with hindsight, wisdom, and knowledge,” she told Town & Country. “I’d love to play Amanda in The Glass Menagerie — I have the energy and the inspiration, and I feel like I’m really just starting out.”
The Naked Gun is now playing in theaters nationwide; performances of Camino Real run through Sunday. Aug. 3.
