Pamela Anderson and I meet on a sweltering-hot July afternoon on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

As I walk into the sizable and fiercely air-conditioned suite at The Mark Hotel, the petite, world-famous blonde is somewhat preoccupied, intently arranging a tiny parsnip into a pin in the buttonhole of her shirt.

Anderson—in a white James Perse linen shirt and trousers and black Saint Laurent satin slippers, with that iconic platinum hair in a loose ponytail at her neck and, crucially, wearing no makeup—stands to greet me. “It’s cute, right?” she says, pointing at the parsnip that she’d plucked from a platter of room service crudités on the coffee table.

It’s a typical “kooky” gesture, in keeping with the playful, fun, and dare I say, “ditzy blonde bombshell” public persona that she has cultivated, and that has been cultivated for her, over the years. I say “cultivated” because, as I soon discover, it seems to be also a role of protection, born from abuse, misogyny, and objectification that for a long time left her not only utterly unsure of her own self but, as she confesses to me, actively disliking the publicly perceived “Halloween costume” that is Pamela Anderson.

Anderson apologises that she is tired. She does seem a little distracted, having flown in a couple of days earlier from Atlanta, where she just wrapped filming The Naked Gun, a reboot of the classic ’80s and ’90s spoof cop films, alongside Liam Neeson.

“I have such a mushy head! I’m still in the movie mode. I’m still in the come-down,” she confesses in that soft yet familiar singsongy lilt.

“We were shooting nights a lot too. So I still feel like I’m stumbling on my words and feel a little bit out of it!” she says.

For the first half hour, Anderson hurtles through our interview at breakneck speed, her speech hurried as she darts rapidly from one topic to the next. It’s quite the impenetrable monologue, punctuated only by the odd nervous giggle.

She is self-deprecating and funny. For example, when referring to a famous look she wore in the ’90s—a giant pink fluffy hat, sequined sheer trousers, and a white corset—she says, “Everyone was asking me, ‘Who was your stylist back then with the pink hat?’ And I say, ‘You think any stylist would have let me out the door [in that]?!’”

But the self-deprecating shtick, as funny as it is (crazy is a word she often uses to describe herself), at times makes me sad. It feels, perhaps, like her armor, a coping mechanism that is part of her protective, public-facing shield. And she shocks me more than once by revealing she has battled with deep insecurities surrounding her image.

The parsnip, as it turns out, is an apt icebreaker because we’re here to discuss, among many things, her first cookbook of vegetable recipes. I Love You: Recipes From the Heart, on sale later this month, is teeming with homespun recipes from her kitchen garden in the town of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

“It’s not a vegan cookbook. I’m not telling other people how to eat,” says Anderson (famously vegan) hastily, clearly worried about coming across preachy. “I just have so many vegetables in my garden! I’m always canning and pickling and making sauces and just trying to find cool ways to cook vegetables.”

We’re also here to talk about her vegan, cruelty-free skin care range, Sonsie, which she acquired earlier this year, plus her renaissance as a movie star with the aforementioned The Naked Gun, as well as The Last Showgirl costarring Jamie Lee Curtis, both out next year.

“This last couple of years…it was an effort to just stay alone and figure out what I love, what I like, what I want to do.”

And there is early industry buzz that The Last Showgirl could well [whisper it] put Anderson on track for awards-season recognition. Which—and Anderson herself is the first to admit this, self-deprecating again: “That’s hysterical,” she says, laughing—would certainly be a whole new era for the actor formerly known as Barb Wire.

But industry buzz aside, Anderson has most definitely entered a new era. And she is, perhaps for the first time in her five decades in the public eye, very much in the driver’s seat, determining how she is presented to the world. After a lifetime of being objectified, she is seizing back control.

Anderson has clearly thought a lot about being one of Glamour’s two Global Women of the Year.

“It’s really an honour to be chosen…but I want to be careful with all of it. I want to have integrity,” she tells me. “Why do you want me to be Woman of the Year? Because I’m living my authentic life, because I’m making these choices.”

As such, Anderson is keen to be involved in the creative process of our cover shoot. Most importantly (and unusually for a cover shoot), she is adamant that she will have barely any makeup or hair styling. This is a radical new look for Anderson, one that has caused an avalanche of headlines since she debuted her bare face at Paris Fashion Week in September of 2023. And it is something we will discuss in more detail later.

Before our interview, Anderson took the unusual step of emailing me an essay she has written, entitled “The Roles I’ve Played.” It’s kind of a meandering stream of consciousness, and it is beautifully written, poetic and poignant at times.

In addition to writing, Anderson has always been a vociferous reader, citing Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and E.E. Cummings at points during our chat. There’s a copy of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas poised on the coffee table in front of us next to her reading glasses.

Her essay is handy, I tell her, saying that I’ve never had a celebrity help out with the research and structure before!

“Sometimes I write things before I do interviews, because I like to write. And I feel like, Okay, then I can just get it out of my head. I just wanted to empty my brain,” she tells me, reminding me that she’s recently launched her own Substack, “The Open Journal,” with weekly journal-style essays, a combination of poetry and reflection. But this essay (Anderson narrated parts of it for a video created at the Glamour cover shoot) serves to dictate much of the direction of our interview. At times I get the impression she has memorised it, like a script.

Its opening paragraph is a roll call of the characters she’s played both on and off screen, from CJ in Baywatch to the wife of a rock star to her most current role in The Last Showgirl. She then writes, “But my bigger dilemma is…who am I in real life? This been my hardest work over the past few years, to really identify that.”

So I start by asking her, “Who is the Pamela Denise Anderson sitting here before me today?”

“Well, it’s shedding those layers, those protective layers,” she says thoughtfully. “I realised as a very young child, I was playing roles my whole life. I had such a strong imagination. And it’s just what I did. I didn’t realise that was a career.

“And then as I moved here [to the USA from her native Canada] and then Playboy…or being married to Tommy, or whatever it was…I just always wanted to be the best I could be at that. What is a Playmate? What is a rock star’s wife? What is a Baywatch [star]?

“This last couple of years…it was an effort to just stay alone and figure out what I love, what I like, what I want to do.”

As Anderson highlights, the past few years have been a process of reflection. And 2023 was a big one, with the publication of her New York Times best-selling memoir, Love, Pamela. Also the release of the Netflix documentary Pamela: A Love Story, which showed her enjoying a career renaissance on Broadway as Roxie in Chicago and moving back to Vancouver Island, along with her parents, to renovate her grandparents’ former home. It is there, in the picturesque surroundings by the water’s edge, that she now spends much of her time cooking, reading, journaling, and being amid nature.

“We have a big property, and it used to be nine cabins; now we have three,” she tells me. “So they [her parents] live in one cabin, and I have two houses that are mine. I always say I meet my mom in the vegetable garden and we get along just fine. If we’re in the garden, it’s all roses, really!”

Born in Ladysmith on July 1, 1967, to childhood sweethearts Barry, a furnace repairman, and Carol, a waitress, Anderson grew up with younger brother Gerry. After graduating from high school, she worked as a fitness instructor and in a tanning salon. But it was when she was spotted at a football game in Vancouver in 1989, aged 22—wearing a Labatt’s beer T-shirt and projected onto the big screen—that her life went stratospheric.

She was immediately signed to be the face of Labatt’s and quickly caught the attention of Hugh Heffner, who flew her to Los Angeles to the Playboy Mansion. Anderson would go on to appear on the most Playboy covers of all time. In 1992, after a stint on the sitcom Home Improvement, came her role in the juggernaut that was Baywatch—the most-watched TV show on the planet in the ’90s, which saw her play lifeguard CJ Parker and become the biggest sex symbol in the world.

Next came the real-life role of rock star’s wife, to Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe, complete with a stolen sex tape and a messy divorce. The pair had two sons: Brandon, 28, who coproduced Anderson’s Netflix documentary; and Dylan, 26, a model and musician. Three husbands followed, including musician Kid Rock, professional poker player Rick Salomon (twice), and most recently, her bodyguard, Dan Hayhurst, from whom she split in January 2022 after a year.

Other than Baywatch’s CJ, Anderson’s most famous movie role was the titular heroine in 1996’s critically panned Barb Wire. As a model she has fronted campaigns for Marc Jacobs, Vivienne Westwood, and lately, Pandora. Anderson has also used her platform to carve a well-respected career as an animal-rights activist and outspoken political advocate.

The year 2022 was also significant for Anderson, as it saw the release of the Hulu show Pam & Tommy on Disney+. Starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan, the Seth Rogen–produced series was a dramatised version of the events surrounding the theft and unauthorised release of a private sex tape that Anderson and Lee had made while on honeymoon in 1995. (The pair famously got married on the beach in Cancun just four days after getting together.) While the tape became an era-defining moment in celebrity culture, neither Anderson nor Lee reportedly received any financial recompense. They filed, lost, and settled several lawsuits in their attempts to get the distribution halted.

“I didn’t go after any bad boys. Bad boys came after me!”

“The tape that was stolen property and exploited—it was a complete crime,” she says today, still clearly incensed.

The tape, watched by millions, was arguably the first viral moment of the internet. And it was a period in Anderson’s life that not only came to define her reputation forever, making her the butt of endless sexist jokes in the media (while simultaneously glorifying her husband), but one that has also caused her deep, lasting trauma. And she says that trauma was exacerbated by Pam & Tommy.

“They [Hulu] never called me. I’ve never had any input. I didn’t know anything about it,” she tells me. (Both Lily James and the show’s creator, Robert Siegel, have claimed that they did reach out to Anderson to seek her involvement but say they did not receive a response.)

Coincidentally, Hulu is also on Pamela’s mind today, as it is being reported that they are planning to do a documentary on Baywatch, which she does not want to be part of.

“Even today, someone showed me something that Hulu’s doing, some kind of Baywatch [documentary] which I have nothing to do with,” she says. It’s being widely reported that the program will feature input from most former cast members and that the directors will use a never-before-seen interview with Anderson made while she was filming the show.

“And so they just dug up some interview,” she says. “But I had nothing to do with this documentary. They begged everybody around me. They tried to get my kids to talk me into it. They said they’d give them producer credits. I mean, they were trying everything. And I said, ‘No, I really don’t want to go backwards.’”

The sex tape scandal was clearly a turning point for Anderson, a seminal moment from which everything changed. And even though I was warned that she doesn’t like to discuss the tape, it is something she refers to numerous times as we chat.

“It hit me a lot harder than I even imagined,” she tells me. “Because it made me so nauseous to even think about it again when it came out, this Hulu thing. It really felt like another kick in the stomach that people might find that entertaining. And that was…I think I lost my husband, my sanity, my career.

“In the moment I didn’t realise it,” she says. “It’s like post-traumatic, and so then you just start acting out. And I knew that I had lots of things that happened [to me] that I could have handled differently…. In this world, it’s really important how you manage your career. And I was just Wild West-ing it.”

She says that in the years that followed, she took jobs, such as reality TV shows (Big Brother, Dancing on Ice), just to make money and support her young family, believing her reputation was in tatters.

Although she has said that she refuses to see herself as one, she was undoubtedly a victim of the rampant misogynistic attitude toward women in the public eye in the ’90s and early ’00s.

I ask her how she coped with it. “I just used to try and laugh it off, and I think that’s how we learned to deal with it,” she responds.

However, later she says something that startles me, revealing that she still struggles with her identity.

“Even when I hear my name, I don’t like it. I have a negative connotation with it,” she says. “I still have a stereotype of myself almost. And so it’s been hard work to try and get rid of that because I’m a woman.”

I find this really heartbreaking. But it is when she starts talking about now being the first time she’s felt confident in a bathing suit—yes, really—that I am shocked by how much her confidence seems to have been eroded over the years, despite her being a global sex symbol.

“I feel like [now] it’s the first time in my life where I feel like if I’m wearing a bathing suit…I feel fine about myself. It’s so freeing. It’s so crazy because sucking in…or trying to live up to this crazy expectation of what people want you to look like or be as you get older, things change.

“I’m lucky because I’ve never really had to worry about my weight or anything like that, but I just... [have] never been 100% confident.”

The whole sex tape scandal was, quite evidently, a form of abuse. And abuse is something that has sadly shaped Anderson’s life from an early age.

In her memoir, Pamela openly discusses her parents’ often-violent relationship. Barry and Carol split briefly but reconciled and are still together today. I ask her how she maintains a close relationship with her father, having witnessed what she did.

“Well, I know my parents, my dad was a terrible drinker, and my mom kind of figured out a way…. And I blamed her, too, because why was she staying in this kind of relationship? There were many times where I didn’t want her to stay in it. But they worked it out. They’re madly in love,” she says. “And I just accepted their relationship is theirs; it’s not my business. And I love my dad. My dad is such an interesting person. He’s in Mensa, the family’s Finnish. He’s very poetic… Growing up, playing poker and all the things that he did, I guess people would’ve considered him kind of like the wild man of the neighborhood, very like the bad boy.”

Is this what made her go after bad boys? I ask, and she quickly responds: “I didn’t go after any bad boys. Bad boys came after me!”

“You’re going to hit a crossroads in your 50s, and you go, Am I going to chase youth? Am I going to be miserable? Or am I going to be self-accepting?”

Anderson’s tempestuous romantic life has been well-documented. But it is perhaps her three-year marriage to the father of her children that has had the most profound and lasting effect on her—and Lee, who is now married to his fourth wife, Brittany Furlan, is someone she is constantly referencing throughout our chat. She even dedicates the final words of her memoir to him, when writing about their sons.

“It’s no secret,” she writes. “Both you boys are born from a rare kind of romantic love. Which leads me to Tommy. Thank you for just being you, and for being the catalyst for everything good in my life.”

Yet it was abuse that would ultimately end Anderson and Lee’s marriage. In February 1998, Anderson filed for divorce, just hours after Lee was arrested at their home and charged with spousal and child abuse after assaulting Anderson while she was holding seven-week-old Dylan. Lee was later sentenced to six months in jail on the spousal abuse charge. The pair then reconciled many times before eventually ending it for good in 2009.

It was in the aftermath of her marriage to Lee breaking down that Anderson says she felt she made many mistakes, which were widely reported as she became the tabloid media’s favourite party girl.

“I knew after my marriage and things that happened, it was just fodder,” she says. “And it was a very difficult time in my life, but just at some point, you just went, ‘Okay, I’ll just have another glass of Champagne and I’ll just feed into it. Pour a bottle all over my[self]… Ha ha, look at me.’ I was always invited out to be the life of the party.”

She tells me she felt that she became a caricature of herself. “I’m a Halloween costume, everywhere you turn,” she says wryly.

I’m keen to understand whether she thinks that this character, this Halloween Pammy, was in fact a reaction to abuse she’s suffered throughout her life. A coping mechanism to distract from her reality.

“It might’ve been some kind of protective shield,” she says, nodding. “But also, I realized at some point, This is how people see me…. It’s not like I just came to LA and decided to play a character. I was on these shows…everything was photographed. So I just kind of played along with it. And I think when my marriage [to Tommy] fell apart, and I blame that a lot on this tape being stolen and exploited, I really felt like, Oh, what am I going to do? What’s my career going to be? And then people just offered me stuff that fed that character, so that’s what it became. And I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad it’s put behind me.”

Which leads us to talk further about her decision to no longer wear the mask of makeup that had so become associated with the Halloween-costume Pamela Anderson.

“I’ve just done it and I’ve played with it,” she says of makeup. “I’ve nothing against makeup, but I felt like it just looked better on me in my 20s than it did now,” she says.

“You’re going to hit a crossroads in your 50s, and you go, Am I going to chase youth? Am I going to be miserable? Or am I going to be self-accepting? And it’s a practice. And it’s hard to say that you’re attempting all this if you’re still doing the red carpets and the covers of magazines plastered in makeup.”

“Instead of trying to be this polished person, I’d rather be raw.”

The next day, when we meet again at a studio in downtown Manhattan as she’s preparing for our cover shoot, we chat more about what it means to her to go au naturel.

“This process is really empowering. I know it seems a little bit crazy. I’m also trying to find myself and who I am, kind of, underneath it all and trying to peel back the layers,” she says. “And we’re women or whoever, anybody—what we look like underneath the mask is still good enough for a cover of a magazine.

“It’s important, no matter where you are in your beauty journey, to accept yourself as you are. And right now I’m having a big moment accepting scars I have or imperfections.”

In our earlier conversation, she also said, “I think, instead of trying to be this polished person, I’d rather be raw. One eye is smaller than the other, my nose is crooked, my lips are weird. Everyone is weird. Everyone has imperfections.

“I’m definitely much happier now. Ten years ago, I felt like a failure. I think it was probably the last 20 years, maybe.”

This revelation makes me wonder how she has coped with her mental health throughout her life. Was she ever depressed?

“I don’t know if [I’ve been] clinically depressed, but I don’t mind feeling poetic or having dark days,” she says. “Sometimes it’s not just a day—sometimes it’s a month, sometimes it’s a year, and sometimes it takes a little time. And you can also numb yourself out.”

Did you do that? I ask her.

“I hung around with a lot of fun artists,” she tells me. “But I always had my kids and I always had rootedness, so I never went too crazy, even though it may seem like I did. I was always having a really good time and having fun, but I didn’t go down any dark, dark paths.”

You’d never think of yourself as an addict in any way? I ask.

“No, no, no. Never went that way. I mean, I was around a lot of them—and married to them, too! But no…I have a glass of rosé every once in a while. I’m not sober, but I don’t drink, especially when I’m working.”

“What saved my life—and you never want to put this on your kids—were my boys.”

We discuss women in the public eye whose lives have gone down a tragic route, such as the late Amy Winehouse, with whom she was friends. “She came to my show in Las Vegas,” she tells me. “I still have her jacket with a ticket to the magic show in her pocket.”

I suggest that, given all that she has endured and survived, there was a very real chance that at times, her story could have gone another way, like Amy’s.

“Definitely,” she agrees. “There were many times where I could have just gone that way, but what saved my life—and you never want to put this on your kids—were my boys. Because without my boys, I wouldn’t have been able to be as strong as I was.”

And throughout our time together, it is her two sons that Anderson returns to, time and again, as her grounding force.

“I had to be strong for my boys. And I also had to leave Tommy for my boys,” she says. “And even though I married other people and I did other things, my intention was to create a family for them.”

Another means of grounding was using her public profile as an advocate and philanthropist, becoming, among other things, one of PETA’s earliest celebrity ambassadors, campaigning for animal welfare and launching her own eponymous charitable foundation.

“That made me feel better about it all, that I was helping animals or helping people,” she says.

“And that made me feel a little bit better about all the crap that was out there about me. I might as well put it to use. If it’s going to get me in the door with a prime minister or the president, then that’s okay. And they usually just want, in some countries, a kiss on the cheek or a signed autograph—and I wanted laws to be changed for animals, and we’d all get what we wanted.”

We discuss her good friend the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has recently been released from prison in the UK after reaching a plea deal with US authorities, pleading guilty to “unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents relating to national defense,” a violation of the Espionage Act.

“He’s free!” she exclaims. “I’m sorry to say that I didn’t know if that was going to happen. I didn’t know if we were going to lose him in prison.”

I ask her if they’ve spoken since he was released. “I haven’t, but I’m going to soon. And I have talked to some people that are with him right now, so I’m just close enough. It’s a little bit overwhelming for him and there’s a lot going on. I visited him in Belmarsh Prison [in 2019] and I haven’t seen him since,” she tells me.

Anderson also visited Assange regularly when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking asylum from 2012 to 2019. On one of those visits in 2018, she was pictured by paparazzi leaving at 4 a.m. after, as she writes in her memoir, falling asleep having enjoyed a bottle of mezcal and “a slightly frisky, fun, alcohol-induced night together.”

I ask her if things became romantic on this frisky, fun, alcohol-induced night.

“No, no! I don’t know what you call romantic, but no!” she responds adamantly. “His sleep cycles were really strange, too, because of not knowing when the sun is,” she explains. “So, he had these lamps that came on with the sunrise and dawn, so he had some of that stuff. Four o’clock in the morning could be 12 in the afternoon. But just leaving the embassy at that hour, I thought, What are people going to think? Oh, dear!”

Conversation turns to politics closer to home, and we discuss the forthcoming US election and the rolling back of women’s bodily autonomy following 2022’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“It’s scary. No, it’s very scary,” she says. “I wouldn’t say I’m a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t know what I am. Obviously more Democrat than Republican. But I think there’s so much out of our hands, unfortunately…the one thing you have to do is vote.”

Of Donald Trump’s potential second term, she is, however, very clear. “You definitely don’t want a sexual predator in the White House. I feel very strongly about that. And that should just be it...that’s my red line.”

As our time together comes to an end and Anderson tells me of her plans to head to Saint-Tropez for a holiday, I can’t help but feel that, despite all that’s great and impressive in her life right now, there’s a pathos to Anderson that seems to surround her. And it’s something she herself acknowledges.

“I feel better now, even though I always kind of walk around with this little aching feeling in my chest. I don’t know what it is. My soul, I always feel a little bit achy.”

She’s done the work, and is still doing the work, to kill off the Halloween-costume Anderson, but this cartoon character seems to haunt her. As do her past choices, be they romantic, professional, or personal; she refers constantly to “mistakes” she’s made in the past. She’s hard on herself—unfairly so at times, I feel. But despite all this, I leave our meeting with one very clear takeaway about Pamela Anderson. And this is that the woman whose existence has been defined by how she appears to the male gaze, who has been heralded as the universal ideal of a sex symbol, has finally, at the age of 57, found a way to feel confident in how she looks.

“I’m finding I feel more comfortable in my skin now than I probably have in the last 30 years. But I didn’t realise it until now,” she says. And I really do believe her.