Pamela Anderson Reveals Why She Gave Up Wearing Makeup, Why She Started a Garden, and How Her Children Survived the Leaked Sex Tape Scandal
Actress Pamela Anderson has opened up about why she started gardening, what prompted her to give up makeup, and how her sons reacted to leaked sex videos of her. She told Better Home & Garden about this in an interview.
During the pandemic in 2020, Pamela Anderson moved from France, sold her Malibu home, and headed north to the small town on Vancouver Island, Canada, where she was born and raised. She settled there with her two grown sons, Brandon and Dylan. Now 57, Pamela is filming the remake of The Naked Gun with Liam Neeson and bakes bread for the crew every morning: "It's what keeps me going and makes me feel at home while I'm here. I always bring banana bread and muffins to set for the crew. I've also started a new sourdough starter here - her name is Vixen and she's doing really well. I have another one at home called Astrid and it's sitting in the fridge waiting for me to get back. Bread is such a meditation for me. Baking teaches you patience. I've found that cooking is really rewarding. If you love cooking, you'll be good at a lot of things."
Pamela Anderson said she moved back to Canada because she felt like she had "messed up" because she was so far from the person she had become: "I was so sad and lonely. Not only was I misunderstood, I felt like I had really messed up, like my whole life was just mistakes. I was hard on myself, and I felt like I had put my family through a lot, I had put my kids through a lot. I came to the point where I decided to move home, disappear, and garden." Now, Pamela says, she is putting her life back together and that things she once considered unimportant have become important to her. She also said that her sons, Brandon, 28, and Dylan, 26, from her marriage to musician Tommy Lee, are now old enough to understand the big picture, but some things in her life were revealed too early: she is referring to the leaked sex tape of her and Tommy Lee. Pamela says her children tell her it's "her time": "Of course, over the years, as they learned about things from my past, both age-appropriate and age-inappropriate, they unfortunately thought I was being taken advantage of in some way."
She says she had fun creating the character she had on "Baywatch" when she was younger, but she's not that person anymore: "But I'm not that person anymore. Looking back, I understand why I did it. But I always loved being a stay-at-home mom. All the kids were always at our house. I cooked for everyone, pots of spaghetti for the neighbors, and my kids always saw that side of me. And it hurt them to think that people only thought of their mom because of these other things, like being in Playboy. It's different now."
Pamela said she was tired of sitting in a dressing room for three hours to apply makeup, so she decided to give it up altogether: "But somewhere along the way I started thinking that I wanted to challenge the idea of beauty and this mask that we put on. Once I took the mask off, a whole world opened up to me. It was such a refreshing way of looking at everything, and I didn't think anyone would even notice. And now people stop me on the street and say, 'You know, I didn't like you before, but now I do.' And then I think, 'Hmm, I guess that's a compliment.'"
It should be noted that Pamela Anderson has really been experiencing a new wave of popularity lately. Many liked her trend of refusing makeup, she was invited to the Met Gala for the first time. In 2022, the series "Pam and Tommy" with Sebastian Stan and Lily James was released, which told about Anderson's difficult relationship with her first husband and how the scandal with the couple's sex tape leaked online affected her.
