Lily James on the Work She Did to Become Pamela Anderson: “It Needed That, and It Deserved That”

In May 2021, when Hulu released the first images for its Pam & Tommy limited series, you may have felt a seismic shudder in the earth from the weight of all the jaws dropping at once. The first response: Wow. Shortly followed by, that’s Lily James?

James, who stars as Pamela Anderson in the eight-episode series, alongside Sebastian Stan as Tommy Lee, is best known for her turn in 2015’s Cinderella, the ultimate Disney princess. To see James in full bombshell form as Pam, teeth clenched around Stan-as-Tommy’s nipple ring? That glass slipper shattered. James had sunk so deep into the character as to be unrecognizable.

“It was quite a process,” David Williams, the show’s makeup department head, tells Vanity Fair about the four-plus hours James spent in the makeup chair to transform into Anderson. “It’s just insane to look in a mirror and really not see yourself anymore,” James says. “It just meant that I felt so much braver. I had less of my own self-inflicted boundaries of what I am and how I perceived myself. And this was just like, all gloves are off. I could just be anything.”

James, who was a child when the scandal around Anderson and Lee’s sex tape broke, found her armor and her disguise in the character’s look, which included (but was not limited to): dentures, a vest-like contraption over her chest to shape her bust to Anderson’s iconically buxom image, contact lenses, three wig styles, and even a forehead prosthetic that covered James’s iconic brows. The brows, it turns out, were the subject of much debate: “Like, many meetings about the eyebrows,” Lake Bell, who directed two episodes, says. “So many meetings about eyebrows.” The prosthetic forehead was also used to move James’s hairline back just a little, under an inch, so her facial proportions more closely matched Anderson’s.

Special makeup effects lead Jason Collins, working closely with Williams, used a mix of technology and physical artistry to first identify the parts of James he needed to tweak, taking a life cast of James’s head and upper body—and also digitally overlaying images of the two actors, mapping their faces and noting where they met and diverged.

James used her Anderson expertise to help shape the look as well: She pointed out the three leech mark birthmarks Anderson has on the back of one arm, and asked that they be incorporated. “I didn’t know what it was the first time I saw it on set, I thought it was like a bruise or it was supposed to be a bruise,” Seigel says. “That was something Lily really wanted, she wanted the birthmark.”