Lily James' performance as Pamela Anderson in this week's Pam & Tommy episode should be career-changing

Decider

"Since the first episode of Pam & Tommy, James has been throwing down an incandescent performance," says Meghan O'Keefe of the "Pamela in Wonderland" deposition episode. "She simultaneously nails the Pamela we knew in the public sphere while revealing her hidden depths. Here, she balances both the flashback and deposition versions of Pamela with an equal wealth of vulnerability. The younger Pam is vulnerable like a fairy tale princess — open-hearted and thrilled about the magic world modeling opens up to her — but the one being dragged through the deposition is vulnerable like an open wound. We watch as each question lobbed at her lands like a blow. She is systemically broken apart, piece by piece, on an unflattering camcorder recording. Lily James is spectacular throughout Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, but Episode 6 is where she truly is at her career’s best. It is an episode designed to help us understand Pamela, but James’s performance makes us feel her every joy and pain."

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• Lily James hoped Pamela Anderson would be involved in Pam & Tommy, especially for this episode: "First of all, I really had hoped that she was going to be involved, and I wish she had been," says James. "I felt really confident I was surrounded by people who were focused on telling the story honestly, but also with total empathy. We admired her and we felt very protective of her and so every choice we made operated from that place. In the end, I felt I had to relate just as a woman and as a human and I feel like that's when it becomes universal and beyond what happened to her. It felt so necessary to explore this. Not enough has changed since she went through (that)—the double standards, the abuse that takes place by the media, the society as a whole. I just felt like I had to handle it with love and with empathy."
• Writer Sarah Gubbins and director Hannah Fidell were eager to work on this week's episode: “There’s so much depth, and it’s so layered, and I’m personally just drawn to stories of women in crisis,” says Fidell. “It just seemed like, really, the standout episode.” Gubbins adds: "I went very deep. I come from a family of lawyers. The law is something that I’m fascinated by, and I love reading depositions. This is something I really hope you don’t print, because I’ll never get invited to any cool events ever again.
• How costume designer Kameron Lennox approached Pamela Anderson's deposition: “She wanted to be heard. She wanted to feel self-assured and confident in that scene and not ogled,” says Lennox. “When you go to court, everyone says, ‘Wear your Sunday best.’ This was our version of Pamela Anderson in her Sunday best.”