'The Last Showgirl' exclusive first look: How Pamela Anderson channeled her 'beautiful, messy life'

Gia Coppola had a problem. She couldn't figure out who should star in the new movie she was about to direct, about Shelly, a veteran Las Vegas showgirl whose world crumbles when her longtime revue shutters.

"It was all these actresses from the past I would dream about: Wouldn't this be an interesting role for Marilyn Monroe?," the director tells Entertainment Weekly, sitting backstage last weekend at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, before a post-screening Q&A of The Last Showgirl .

But then, it hit her, when she was watching Pamela Anderson 's 2023 Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story . "She is the Marilyn of our time,'" Coppola recalls. "I find her to be a very interesting human being. She's very intelligent and has an art background, and I could see she was a woman that was really craving to express herself as an actress creatively. I saw a lot of parallels with Shelly, but I also saw this was a person that was really hungry to show her talents."

As seen in EW's exclusive first-look photos, Shelly is the star performer in Las Vegas' fictional Le Razzle Dazzle (based on the real Jubilee!, which closed in 2016 and was the last of its kind), a dying show featuring lots of sequins, feathers, and, well, showgirls. When producers announce they're shutting down the production, Shelly is devastated, anxiously wondering what she'll do next. She devoted some three decades of her life to this, sacrificing her relationship with her daughter, Hannah ( Billie Lourd ), in the process.

Once Anderson got her hands on Kate Gersten's script (based on a play she wrote several years ago, inspired by her experience observing the closing of Jubilee!), she was instantly drawn to the character, who takes her art form very seriously...everyone reducing her to a sexual object be damned.

"I've never read a script that I responded to like that before — no one was sending me anything like this," Anderson says, seated across from Coppola. "I read it and I thought, I have to do this. It's life or death. It's really important."

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At the movie's Toronto International Film Festival premiere in September, the actress said she's "been getting ready my whole life for this role" — and she was ready for the biggest challenge of her career.

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

She was also able to have "a thousand percent focus" on the project, thanks to singledom and her kids being grown. She realized, "I have nothing to lose. And what if this is the last movie I ever do, or the only movie I ever do?"

Sure, she's appeared in some two dozen films, a handful of those as herself. But in The Last Showgirl, it's all about Shelly — and in turn, Anderson, who also took the role as a chance to "see what I'm made of."

"I knew I was capable of more than I'd done in the past, and I kind of had given up and went home and thought, oh 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 trappings," the Baywatch actress says. "I want to be defined by what I do and not what has been done to me."

In the movie (opening Dec. 13 in limited release and expanding nationwide on Jan. 10), Shelly isn't the only one facing an uncertain future. Also in Le Razzle Dazzle are two younger performers, 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-turned-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 were off to the races."

Curtis was in her red wig the first time Anderson met her. She had also just gotten a spray tan. "We were doing the table read, she was getting more and more orange, and with this frosty pink lipstick," Anderson recalls, laughing. "It was amazing."

The look, though, was very intentional.

"There is that term that is kind of a pejorative of, particularly, women that says they look like they were road hard and put away wet," Curtis explains. And that was her goal with Annette. "I wanted very much to show the damage the sun had done to her — she has that leathered look."

Beyond the exterior, Curtis says she knew who Annette was on the inside.

"I know hustlers. I love hustlers. I love people who have hustled their whole lives with very little support, very little education, very little family support, and have just grown [and] developed skills where there were none," she says. Annette, she presumes, started working as a dancer — "maybe she was a stripper, we don't know" — but aged out of that job, then became a stripper again, then was a showgirl with Shelly, "aged out of that, and then became maybe a sex worker."

Eventually, she became a cocktail waitress. Though at the Rio, where The Last Showgirl was filmed in January 2024, many servers are "bevertainers," beverage servers who entertain casino-goers a few times each shift with their chosen talent. During production, Curtis and Coppola met one of these women, who took the stage to dance for them.

"Jamie was there in awe watching one of them dance, just thinking they're so talented and amazing," Coppola recalls. "I was like, 'Well, will you do that?' And she's like, 'You're gonna get me on a podium to dance?'"

Curtis remembers it a little differently, less as a question and more matter-of-factly. "I thought she was joking. And then, honestly, as we walked into the rehearsal room, the song that was playing — music is playing 24/7 in a casino — was 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.' And I joked to Gia, 'Well, if Annette was a bevertainer, she would dance to that song.'"

Five minutes later, Curtis came up with a dance to that song and the camera was rolling.

"Everything I do is, 'F-k it, let's do it.' If The Bear hadn't coined the term, 'Let it rip,' I would've 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, but there's also something incredibly sad about it. And that was powerful to me. There's something so vulnerable about that idea that you're pouring yourself into something that nobody cares about. That's very sad and very much what Vegas, and mostly women in Vegas, have to deal with. Clearly, it was poignant for me."

Curtis wasn't even sure if Coppola would use the scene, or how, considering they only had enough time to film one take of it. But she found out at the Toronto premiere, where she saw the movie 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 about making them wait. "So to sit next to Pamela as she was watching it and be around all of them was really gratifying.... I could see how this movie plays so well with an audience; it's really reactionary and it has a communal kind of experience."

As excited as Anderson was to make the movie, she admits it was "so hard" to watch it. "It's the first time I had seen myself up on a big screen doing a movie," 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 kid. I was too shy to do a lot of that when I was younger, but as I got older it was something I was really curious about, so I started working on that. And then my life took a different turn."