IN THE LAST SHOWGIRL, PAMELA ANDERSON GETS THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME AS A VEGAS DANCER TRYING TO SURVIVE THE END OF AN ERA. WE SPEAK TO HER AND DIRECTOR GIA COPPOLA ABOUT SECOND CHANCES… AND THE REALITY OF THE RAZZLE-DAZZLE

WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL

Clockwise from main: A star performer: Shelly (Pamela Anderson) takes the stage;

PAMELA ANDERSON IS EXCITED. She has never been this excited about a role in her life. An hour ago she was stuck in traffic, and to avoid being late for her interview with Empire she leapt out of the cab and marched across London to make it in time. This new film is different from anything she has done before and she’s desperate to talk about it — though she does pause briefly to make the hotel waiter giggle (he was carrying an impressive amount on one arm). “I feel like I’ve been keeping this secret that I was capable of more,” she says, beaming. She’s even dressed in a cream jumper woven through with glittering silver thread in homage to her character.

In The Last Showgirl, Anderson plays Shelly, a 57-year-old Las Vegas dancer whose once celebrated show is closing due to dwindling ticket sales. She is a woman hailed as beautiful and worshipped like a movie star, back when this kind of spectacle was what the city was built on. It’s a show that Shelly devoted her whole life to — it is the root of her grown daughter’s (Billie Lourd) bitterness, feeling she always came second — and now it’s ending. The film is an existential reckoning in 85 minutes, set in the everyday reality that holds up a world of rhinestones and feathers.

We’re far from the Las Vegas strip now, sitting in the library of the Covent Garden Hotel, and Anderson is bare-faced and luminous in the winter sunlight. She seems kind of stunned that her new stripped-back, make-up-free look gets so much press — but in the kind of resigned way of a woman whose entire life gets so much press. “It’s so funny, because I didn’t do it for any other reason than just that I’m in the process of remembering who I am, and wanting to be as me as possible — instead of a caricature of myself, which I felt like I’ve done in the past.” But it is quietly revolutionary for someone as famous as Pamela Anderson to finally show us who she really is: a woman who, when TheLastShowgirl landed in her life, was living on the plot of land in Canada where she grew up, making pickles in her garden, thinking her career was over, having never had a chance to show us what she could really do.