Lily James Throws Down a Career-Changing Performance in ‘Pam & Tommy’ Episode 6

Hulu‘s Pam & Tommy has been slowly careening into a horror show for Pamela Anderson (Lily James) for weeks now, but Episode 6 “Pamela in Wonderland”, fully takes the character to the brink. In the 34 minute episode, directed by Hannah Fidell, we finally see how Pam’s backstory has laid the groundwork for her current humiliation. The episode is split between two storylines: a devastating deposition Pamela endures in 1996 and the tale of how Pam became a model in the first place. In both narratives, Pam & Tommy star Lily James shines, depicting Pamela as a character who believes she is living a fairy tale, only to discover she’s actually trapped in a horror story.

Pam & Tommy is Hulu’s darkly comic and wholly horrifying look back at the first real celebrity sex tape scandal. In the mid ’90s, an illicit tape of Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) and his new wife Pamela Anderson began being sold on the internet. It soon exploded in popularity, finding its way into pop culture and late night show monologues. The truth was that Lee and Anderson were the victims of a terrible crime. A contractor named Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen) broke into the couple’s Malibu home to steal Lee’s safe as revenge for being fired, stiffed, and held at gunpoint by the rocker. What Gauthier didn’t realize was that there was a sex tape in the safe. Rather than set it aside, Gauthier used his own connections to the pornography industry to sell it without Pamela Anderson or Tommy Lee’s consent.

As Pam & Tommy shows, the public didn’t treat the event as a violent crime against the famous couple. Instead, Pamela Anderson — already known as a sex symbol thanks to her Playboy shoots and work on the hit show Baywatch — was publicly shamed. Pam & Tommy Episode 6 shows us not only how Pam became a once-in-a-generation icon, but also how her work as a model was used to condemn her in both the court of public opinion and the actual legal court.

In the episode’s carefully chosen flashbacks, we meet a less glamorized version of the Pamela Anderson we’ve come to know. The episode takes us back to Vancouver in 1989, when a fresh-faced, honey blonde, Labatt t-shirt wearing Anderson is picked out of a football stadium crowd to be featured on the jumbotron. A marketing rep from Labatt approaches Pam with an offer to model for the Canadian beer brand. This leads to her getting a life-changing call from Playboy. This naive, but driven, version of Pamela is accompanied to the Playboy Mansion for her test shoot by none other than her mom. Her experiences there, especially with Hugh Hefner, aren’t depicted as smutty, but a celebration of feminine beauty. Pamela falls into nude modeling believing it to be a sort of “wonderland.”

Of course, if you remember Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, that mirror universe where roses are painted red and Jabberwockys roam is as nightmarish as it is enchanting. It is a place where everything is turned upside down and the rules of our world don’t apply. In the 1996 scenes, a nervous Pamela is asked increasingly disgusting questions by a rival counsel. They are questions that implicitly suggest that consensually posing for Playboy makes it legally fine for Pamela’s sex tape to be distributed without her consent. They also suggest she enjoys the tabloid attention and her main complaint has to do with business, not her privacy.

What makes all this sickening to watch unfold is the performance of Lily James. Since the first episode of Pam & Tommy, James has been throwing down an incandescent performance. 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. After “Pamela in Wonderland,” there should be no doubt that Pamela Anderson was one hundred percent a victim of a horrific crime and that Lily James is one of her generation’s best acting talents.

Where to stream Pam & Tommy