When she agreed to play Pamela Anderson, Lily James expected she’d eventually receive the “Baywatch” star’s blessing.

“Pam & Tommy” was, after all, about consent — an exploration of the disturbing privacy violation Anderson and her then-husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, suffered when their sex tape was stolen in 1995 and subsequently distributed online.

But as the start of production on the Hulu series approached last spring, inquiries to Anderson remained unanswered. Not only did the 54-year-old choose not to be involved with the miniseries but she apparently opposed its existence altogether. Tabloid reports, citing sources close to the actor, claimed she found the series “very painful,” calling it a “cheap knockoff” she’d never watch. A month into production, Courtney Love said on Facebook that the tape had “destroyed my friend Pamela’s life,” arguing the show was “further causing her complex trauma.”

“而令人遗憾的是百合詹姆斯，”爱情补充道，“谁是她的。”

毁灭性：那是詹姆斯现在的谁。这位32岁的孩子已经花了一年的成就转变为前戏剧，只有留下的想法：通过制作关于安德森如何被开发的电视节目，是詹姆斯只是增加了剥削？

“我对它非常敏感，”她说，试图擦掉咖啡的污渍，她刚刚洒在她的衣服上。“我只知道我的意图 - 我们的意图 - 很好。如果我不认为这是一个值得一看的故事，我永远不会在船上来上，以挑起关于我们如何对待女性的谈话。“

这是一个棘手的话题 - 一个她继续努力的人。在我们采访后五天，詹姆斯发了一封电子邮件，说谈话中提出的问题有多少钱“一直在我的脑海”。She said she’d only learned that Anderson wouldn’t be involved “quite late in the process,” and though she was “incredibly disappointed,” she’d channeled her feelings into a heightened sense of “responsibility to do absolutely everything I could to try and do her justice.”

It’s cast a shadow over what is otherwise the biggest moment in James’ career to date. For the past decade, she has largely played amiable, pleasant types: the lead princess in Kenneth’s Branagh’s live-action “Cinderella,” the younger version of Meryl Streep in the “Mamma Mia” sequel, the waitress on the run in “Baby Driver.” But though she’s appeared in around 20 films, she’s not uniformly identified with any one performance.

“Pam & Tommy” should change that. As Anderson, James is both sweet and audacious, embodying the wide-eyed, 20-something Canadian who at once relished an invite to the Playboy mansion and fought to make her collaborators on “Baywatch” and the 1996 film “Barb Wire” see her as more than a body to push and prod.

“This is a game-changer for Lily,” said Lake Bell, who directed her in two episodes of the series. “I see her ferociousness. She knows how to exercise restraint, and she knows when to release the storm inside. People don’t know that yet about her.”

詹姆斯一直在考虑变形,当她佤邦s approached about “Pam & Tommy,” which co-stars Sebastian Stan as Lee. She’d recently gone up for a dark, complex character only to be told by the director that she was “too likable.” She took it as a sign that she needed to mix things up.

“I was feeling fed up, like I was repeating myself, or boxed in,” she recalled. “’You’re so likable’ is diminishing, in some way. That’s not a compliment.”

在英格兰萨里举起的詹姆斯，距离她最近在伦敦北部购买的家中大约一个小时，是一个原型的剧院小孩。在她表演艺术高中，她在观看“油脂”时向歌曲写出了所有的歌词，并有一个玛丽莲梦露盒装。在毕业后，她在佛罗里达州音乐和戏剧学院学习，他的校友包括Michaela Cole，Daniel Craig和Jodie Whittaker。

表演也在她的血液中。她的祖母海伦霍尔顿是一位美国出生的演员，他在沃特利斯科特的“外星人”中致力于“母亲”船电脑。她的父亲，杰米汤姆森 - 从2008年死于癌症 - 是一个表演者。在20世纪70年代，他住在日落大道上，并作为服务员完成了结束。在车祸离开他的脸后，他发现了一个新的利基作为演奏歹徒的角色演员。

“My dad was such an artist — I barely ever heard him speak in his voice. It was always accents, always stories, always songs,” James said. “He was a clown, though. I’m less of a clown. I really want to do a comedy. My dad was freakin’ hilarious. I’m only funny by accident. I feel like when I watch movies I’m in, I’m like, ‘Oh, they cut my joke,’ which can’t be a good sign.”

James is prone to taking casual jabs at herself like this, and those who have worked with her say she is often her own harshest critic. To prepare for “Pam & Tommy,” the actor trained with dialect coach Liz Himelstein for six weeks prior to production. She also requested Himelstein’s presence on-set, and the two would run lines and do tongue twisters or consonant drills in James’ trailer while she was having her hair and makeup done.

“She was very hard on herself,” said Himelstein. “She would say a line and then say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound right.’ I said, ‘It actually does.’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, I need it again.’ I said, ‘Fine, let’s do it again.’ But I’d tell her: ‘Oh, my God. My darling, you are nailing it.’”

詹姆斯花了几个小时观看每一个面试，她可以在YouTube上找到Anderson，并指出她的节奏，音调和变形。然后在她的iPhone上，詹姆斯记录了自己模仿面试并保存了文件以供参考。

“So like this one,” she said, hitting play on one of the clips, “it’s Pam’s main note. I would use these to find her pitch on the piano.”

During the four months that “Pam & Tommy” filmed, James went full Lady Gaga, speaking only in Anderson’s Malibu-influenced cadence. (“Except when I would get a little drunk. That’s when it was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I sound like. Back to my extremely dry sense of English humor.’”)

In person, James bears little physical resemblance to Anderson. She’s a brunette with a slight frame who rarely tousles her hair or wears heavy eyeliner. So while she spent six months working out with a personal trainer before sporting the blonde’s iconic red swimsuit, much of James’ physical transformation was aided by prosthetics. She was cast without having to do a screen test, and the first time production tried out different looks on her, it didn’t go well.

“I looked Italian,” she said, laughing. “I was panicking, like, ‘I can’t do this.’ I looked nothing like Pamela Anderson.”

When the team nixed a cheap blond wig and stopped shaving James’ eyebrows, things started to improve. She wore two prosthetics on her face, but the majority of the Anderson effect was achieved through makeup: shaving down her nose, using contour and shadow to make her cheeks look fuller, adding liner to plump up her lips. To complete the transformation, she wore long fake nails, colored contacts, fake teeth and a chest prosthetic. She also bleached her eyebrows and got weekly spray tans for the entirety of shooting.

She found the smoke and mirrors to be both a support and a hindrance.

“Sometimes it felt like this amazing armor that you could hide behind and disappear inside of,” James said. “And other times all I could think was: ‘No, wait, but that doesn’t sound like her.’”

James also felt conflicted about watching the sex tape - less explicit parts of which are emulated in “Pam & Tommy.” Asked if she’d viewed the tape in her research, James demurred.

“It’s not that I don’t want to say - it just makes me feel really uncomfortable because it’s a really difficult subject to talk about because of the damage it caused to their lives,” she said. “The show does so well at exploring the problems and consequences and repercussions of it, so in a way I want the show to explore that rather than me giving any answers that become tricky and uncomfortable.” (Craig Gillespie, a director and executive producer on the project, clarified that after extensive conversations with James, the team decided only to pull from the tape on an “emotional level” and not use it to guide “anything sexual” in the series’ depiction of Anderson and Lee.)

詹姆斯表示，她通过阅读她的2015年诗歌书籍，“生”和她写的信件来获得最深切的安德森，以支持动物权利。由于她的性别和性行为，她也与Anderson“最小化和光顾”的方式有关。

随着“PAM＆TOMY”强调，性磁带的传播对安德森的声誉更加损害，而不是李的声誉。由于安德森在花花公子上裸体摆弄，并且在电视上戴着泳衣，胶带用于进一步把她作为没有物质或野心的性器。与此同时，李为他的大型生殖器而被鼓掌，并进一步被拒绝作为一个女人化摇滚乐滚筒。

James herself has faced public scandal in her personal life In October 2020, the Daily Mail published paparazzi photos of her and married actor Dominic West, her co-star in the Amazon series “The Pursuit of Love,” intimately embracing in Rome. Days later, West kissed his wife in front of photographers outside his home in London. “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together,” read a note the couple tacked to their home.

At the time, James said nothing about the incident, and she still isn’t ready to talk about it more than a year later. Asked if she felt she’d been slut-shamed by the media in ways similar to Anderson, she tried to avoid any allusions to herself.

“I just feel that, sadly, this question and this conversation is ongoing, because it happens to women all the time,” she said. “There aren’t many women in the public arena who don’t feel like their privacy has been violated. And so that was something I really wanted to look at, because it’s incredibly damaging.”

So did she take on “Pam & Tommy” in an attempt to explore the issue?

“No, I signed onto this two years ago,” she clarified. “I worry about not articulating myself properly - especially when things get written down and that’s your statement to the world. I would much rather explore what I feel through my work. Like, even now, we’re talking about my private life when I really want to be talking about work and in a way, that’s what we’re exploring in the show.”

Without going into detail, Bell said that she and James - “like most women in our industry” - connected through discussions of the “theft in female image, bodies, and sense of safety and comfort.” In 2014, Bell had nude images of herself stolen and distributed as part of a large-scale celebrity hacking effort referred to as the Fappening.

“进入这个故事，我所说的第一件事之一是我觉得几乎就像我被触发一样，”她说。“从一个角度来看，你可以说这个节目的创造者是独联体，白人男性，但在同一呼吸中明白，有强有力的创造力，谁是经过非常相似的情况。我们有责任不再利用帕姆。“

贝尔说,她和詹姆斯有一个潜在的collaboration in the works, and the actor said she’s eager to produce more of her own work in the future. She admires performers like Helena Bonham Carter and Amy Adams, who do not display a particular allegiance to any genre. In college, James said, one of her favorite teachers drummed into her head that “repetition is the death of creativity.” The instructor was so insistent upon the lesson that students were never allowed to sit in the same seat twice.

“我永远不想依赖某些属性或人物，感觉好像他们更容易到我，”她说。“我对我迄今为止的角色感到满意，但我只是想现在继续前往比例的相反目的。我迷上了。“

She’s also committed to taking care of herself offscreen. Last year, she began meditating and seeing a therapist and a shamanic healer, with whom she consults over Zoom.

她的一个主要目标是在“切换她的头上”，安抚发言不断批评的声音。她正在寻找一个职业的东西，在那里她经常感到不受欢迎 - 玩别人，越来越靠近新人，只是为了离开他们，生活在一个陌生的地方，而不是看到朋友或家人。

这就是谈论安德森的一部分，感觉如此柔软。她不会想要背叛那些现在感觉到她一部分的人。

“这很奇怪和超现实，花了这么长时间的学习和学习，从未遇到过他们。我想永远思考和敏感，“她说。“然而，我宁愿谈论与我的工作有关的困难，细微的问题。这就是我想表达自己的方式。“