Pamela Anderson’s celebrated renaissance can be traced to her roots – to a kind of Nordic alter ego called Pamela Hyytiäinen, an artist of disarming intellect, inspired by nature and storytelling. Between Copenhagen and Paris Fashion Week, we meet her at a defining moment for Vogue Scandinavia’s cover story
Before the world knew Pamela Anderson, there was Pamela Hyytiäinen – a child raised on myth and magic. Her Finnish grandfather, Herman Hyytiäinen, was a logger and a poet who believed in folklore, fairies, and trees that whispered secrets to each other. Between grandfather and granddaughter, a whole imaginative universe bloomed. “He was the closest person to me in my life,” she says.
Hyytiäinen was her grandfather’s surname before it was changed to Anderson when the family arrived in Canada, tucking her roots behind a slightly more North American gloss. Still, the Nordic spirit endured. Herman taught her Finnish – or what she thought at the time to be a magical language that no one else could understand. As a child, she carried a small white Finnish dictionary everywhere under her arm, learning new words to impress him. The language and connection was theirs alone. “It kind of left with him,” Anderson says of the way the words she once spoke fluently slipped away from her at the same time he passed, when she was around 11 years old.
“Sometimes I don’t want to be Pamela Anderson. I want to be Pamela Hyytiäinen,” she says lightly, decades later, from a hotel room in Paris. “I would like to change my name, but they won’t let me.” 58-year-old Anderson has spent a lifetime seeking change, shape shifting. “My imagination has run wild with me over the years. I’ve been trying different people on for size,” she reflects. “You have to peel it all back, many times, and start over and over again.” These days, Anderson – as an actor, model, writer, entrepreneur, and in her own words, “homemaker” – plays with characters the way her grandfather once played with myths and fairytales: slipping between them, finding joy in new incarnations.
A case in point: her new copper-toned crop, the main event atop her hotel robe and square-framed reading glasses. The transformation took place shortly before our conversation, but after our Vogue Scandinavia shoot in Copenhagen, where she still wore her blunt, Joan of Arc-esque bob, slightly grown out since its debut at the 2025 Met Gala.
Before moving to Canada and adopting the name Anderson, Pamela’s grandfather’s surname was Hyytiäinen. Sometimes, Pamela, who feels a deep connection to her Finnish roots, fantasises about changing her name to ‘Pamela Hyytiäinen’.
Wool jacket, €1,390, Wool pants with heels. Both Victoria Beckham. Round 14k gold plated hoop earrings, €95,
Organically shaped 14k gold plated bangle, €150. Both Pandora. Photo: Casper Sejersen
The new look was spontaneous, but not random. “One of my favourite films is Scenes from a Marriage,” she says, referencing Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s 1974 classic. “It’s so torturous to watch, but there’s such a great character, played by Gunnel Lindblom, with a feathered red hairstyle.” A few days prior to our chat, whilst at Deauville Film Festival, she’d met a Parisian hairdresser and brought him that exact reference, with her next film role in mind. The other red-headed reference she took to the salon was Marlene Joubert’s character in Maurice Pialat’s 1972 film Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Won’t Grow Old Together).
Sometimes I don’t want to be Pamela Anderson. I want to be Pamela Hyytiäinen
Pamela Anderson
Bergman and Pialat aren’t the only cultural touchstones Anderson brings up as we talk. She casually peppers our chat with other directors’ names, like they’re old friends around a dinner table. Fellini, Godard, Moreau, Kiarostami, Lynch – offered with admiration, not pretension. She quotes Dostoevsky, adores Gertrude Stein. This is the Anderson that people are only now catching up to: a woman whose intellect and curiosity runs deeper than anyone gave her credit for. After all, who decided that the bombshell sprinting along Californian sand in slow motion couldn’t also be well versed on Bergman’s lens or Stein’s syntax?
It’s this dimensional version of Anderson that filmmakers are finally writing for. Her next project, Love Is Not the Answer – Michael Cera’s directorial debut – is, as she describes it, “a wonderful portrait of a woman who is interesting and layered.” Anderson is deep in preparation: studying with an acting coach late into the night and sketching out the psychology of her character, even taking her out for a walk around Paris. “I wanted to see how she might move through the world,” she says.
Cera, who also wrote the film, tells me in a statement for this story that Anderson’s casting felt fated. “Pam’s response to the script and character, the place she is at in life right now personally and professionally and creatively speaking, her appetite to push herself and dismantle the perceptions that people have of her as an actor, all of that felt like divine cosmic timing with the emergence of this movie and this role,” he says. “Pam feels like a fearless performer to me.” Anderson doesn’t deny it’s taken time and grit to arrive at this point in her career. “It’s been a rollercoaster, but everybody’s life is,” she says. “It’s just been a wild, wrecking-ball journey that’s landed me here and given me the chance to actually try all this again.”
The film follows her recent comic turn in The Naked Gun with Liam Neeson, her poignant role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, and her eight-week Broadway stint as Roxie Hart in Chicago – the stage role that had officially marked her return to acting in 2022. “I’m enjoying being able to tell beautiful stories, not ones that are salacious or gratuitous, but with real human characters that I get to dig into,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d ever get the opportunity to do that.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Jamie Lee Curtis, who produced and starred opposite Anderson in The Last Showgirl, and shares the experience of evolving beyond a Hollywood archetype. When I reach her via email, she considers the parallels between her and Anderson’s careers. “I think maybe we were underestimated, as our physical beings took precedence over our ability as performers,” she writes. “We were objectified, but we also objectified ourselves.” Reflecting on Anderson now, she adds, “there is a freedom to Pamela’s life today that she has fought and sacrificed for, and I’m excited by it and her.” As her film work intensifies, Anderson’s orbit keeps expanding. From Copenhagen Fashion Week as the face of Pandora, to the front rows of Tom Ford, Valentino, and Mugler – where she sat just hours before our call, poised between Anna Wintour and Naomi Watts – Anderson remains one of fashion’s most magnetic figures.
It’s been a rollercoaster, but everybody’s life is
Pamela Anderson
As much as she enjoys fashion, fashion seems to enjoy Anderson more. The late Vivienne Westwood, (who Anderson describes as being “a dear friend”) cast her in campaigns, sent her down runways, and championed her since the early 1990s. French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus considers her an enduring muse, and just this season, Alessandro Michele tapped Anderson to open and close Valentino’s spring/summer ’26 runway with a powerful reading of, and commentary on, a letter by Pier Paolo Pasolini. How did it come to be? “Alessandro just called me – he wanted my voice in the show,” she explains, simply.
For all her reverence for fashion as an artform (“I love to see things that took real blood, sweat, and tears,” she says), Anderson has always approached it instinctively. Even more so, playfully. Throughout her career, she’s preferred to style herself, keeping a direct dialogue with designers. Take, for instance, the fluffy pink Ivy Supersonic hat she wore to the 1999 VMAs “just for fun”. On a whim, with a glass of champagne in hand, she teamed the riotous hat with a snatched corset and beaded Dolce & Gabbana trousers – a look that is now pop culture canon. Jacquemus was reportedly floored to learn it was self-styled. As Anderson recalls, the designer said to her: “I’m going to cry, that was so inspirational… I can’t believe you put it together yourself.” “I just laughed, it took me a few minutes. I really don’t think any stylist would’ve let me out of the house that way.”
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When you orbit as widely as Anderson does, you need a point of gravity. For her, that point remains the same as when she was a child with a Finnish dictionary tucked under her arm: her grandparents’ estate on Vancouver Island. 30 years ago, she bought the property and surrounding land from them. “I live in the house I grew up in, which is triggering and crazy,” she laughs. “Even though I’ve renovated, I’ve kept a lot of the charm of my grandparents’ place. I feel him there,” she adds of her grandfather. “Herman was very tall, six foot three. I can see him sitting in his La-Z-Boy chair, and I can hear him, he had such a low voice. He still has such a strong presence in the house.”
Most of her time, though, is spent outside in the garden, which she’s named Arkady. “I’ve always loved gardens, my roses especially,” she says. “I have a beautiful rose garden and a vegetable garden. Actually, it’s more of a ranch. I don’t know how everything grows so well there. Neighbours tell me their garden is not doing well, and I’m like, ‘What’s happening? Mine’s going wild! The pumpkins are growing over the fences and down onto the beach’.”
She gives most of the produce away, to local schools, First Nations communities, and neighbours. “My garden does a lot of good,” she says. “Nothing goes to waste.” When she’s home, she cans everything she can, including “tomatoes roasted and stewed, with lemon and garlic – all heirloom. I just love it. And it’s fun to make my dad eat more vegetables.” The garden, she says, is also where she and her mother, Carol, find common ground. “We’ve had a complicated relationship over our lifetime, as many of us do with our mothers,” she admits. “But we get along great in the garden. That’s our neutral zone. We don’t argue there.” It’s clear that Arkady mirrors Anderson’s approach to identity. “You can replant your garden every year, rotate your crops,” she says. “I started learning a lot about it and thought, ‘This is how I want my life to be’.”
Pamela purchased her grandparents’ estate on Vancouver Island 30 years ago.She describes living in the house she grew up in as “triggering and crazy”. Wool coat. Jacquemus. Leather and silk gloves, €750. Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Bespoke lab grown diamonds pavé bangle in 14k gold. Pandora. Leather pumps, €470. Filippa K. Photo: Casper Sejersen
Of everything blooming at Arkady, Anderson is most proud of her raspberry-hued Yves Piaget roses. “It took me a long time to get them, but I have them, and the fragrance is amazing,” she says. “They’re garden heritage roses so they fit in your hand. They’re my favourite.” It feels fitting, then, that roses surrounded her on our Vogue Scandinavia set in Copenhagen. Between looks, she recited lines from an interpretation of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Sacred Emily’ for the camera: “A rose is a rose is a rose,” almost like a spell.
My garden does a lot of good
Pamela Anderson
She shares her green thumb with the most important men in her life right now, her sons, who love to work alongside her in the garden. Anderson’s storied history with men has been well documented, but it’s Brandon and Dylan, both fathered by Tommy Lee, who have been her most constant and rewarding loves. Anyone wondering how she manages to juggle it all would find their answer in them. The brothers are deeply woven into every part of Anderson’s world: helping steer her co-founded skincare line Sonsie Beauty, joining her on red carpets, supporting the creation and release of her cookbook, and most recently, forming an independent production company ‘And Her Sons’ alongside her.
Her youngest, 27-year-old Dylan, tells me that championing his mother’s vision feels like “carrying forward a legacy of authenticity”. “I treasure her ability to turn life into art. She’s taught us to appreciate every moment, good or bad,” he says, “and to lead with compassion, curiosity and courage.” Brandon, 29 years old, echoes his brother in his response. “My mother has always lived with a kind of radical honesty,” he writes to me. “I’ve watched her transform vulnerability into strength time and time again.” Anderson, for her part, credits her sons with creating the space that allows her to live that way. “I feel like they really took it upon themselves to clear up and take over certain business parts of my life so I could be more free to be an artist,” she says. For Brandon, it simply comes down to “building a family legacy”.
Legacy, after all, has always mattered to Anderson – not just the one she’s building with her sons, but the one she inherited. It’s what drew her to Finland in 2007, on a trip with her father to visit relatives, during which she joked that she wanted to “open a strip club called Lappland” – a mischievous line that quickly made headlines. Beneath the humour, though, was a genuine desire to see the country that had lived in her imagination since childhood, the land of her grandfather’s stories and myths. “I just wanted to go,” she says, “to feel that connection. I’d love to go back to Finland, maybe with my sons. To find out more about myself, to explore that side of me. Maybe we will change my name and go back, to answer to my roots. It feels distant, but it’s a part of me,” she reflects. “I’ve always been proud to tell people I’m Finnish, even before I knew what that really meant.”
As we wrap up the call, Anderson apologises if she seemed distracted during the conversation (she didn’t). “I keep seeing the image of myself there in the corner of my screen, I don’t recognise myself with that red hair,” she giggles. “Who is that? Maybe it’s Pamela Hyytiäinen.”
Photographer: Casper Sejersen
Stylist: Rikke Wackerhausen
Talent: Pamela Anderson
Makeup Artist: Riku Campo at Walter Schupfer Management using KICKS-BeautyAct
Hair Stylist: Neil Moodie
Photographer Assistants: Marius Krab, Maka Thuc Andersen & William Ruggard
Stylist Assistants: Philip Sandau, Sophia Edens & Nete Scheving
Production: Emil Eskesen & Nina Brinkmann Jønler at The Lab
Set designer: Leo Maribo
Florist: Christian Ravnbak
Hair Assistant: Gordon Chapples
Set Design Assistants: Siggy Sonne & Fanny Myhre
