Pamela Anderson has been cast as the female lead opposite Liam Neeson in the Naked Gun reboot, and it’s her best career move in decades.
Pamela Anderson has been cast to play the female lead opposite Liam Neeson in the upcoming Naked Gun reboot, and it’s her best career move in more than two decades.
Directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer from a script penned by Family Guy’s Mark Hentemann and Alec Sulkin, the Naked Gun reboot will star Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling detective from the original trilogy. The reboot is set to be released on July 18, 2025.
Filming for the Naked Gun reboot is scheduled to begin in Atlanta in May, and the shoot is expected to run through June.
In anticipation of that fast-approaching principal photography, the producers have announced that Anderson has been cast in the Naked Gun reboot as the female lead.
Neeson and Anderson are certainly a unique pairing that will give the reboot a comedic rhythm of its own. After decades of disappointments, this could be just the comeback that Anderson’s career needs.
Naked Gun Will Be Pamela Anderson’s Biggest Movie Role Since Barb Wire
Anderson’s part in the Naked Gun reboot will be her biggest movie role since Barb Wire way back in 1996. Barb Wire should’ve paved the way for a nice, comfortable career in campy, schlocky B-movies, but Anderson didn’t land another lead role for 28 years.
In that interim, she’s mostly played minor roles in smaller productions. She reprised her role as C.J. Parker in the 2003 made-for-TV movie Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding, and she had cameos in the spoofs Scary Movie 3 and Superhero Movie.
Her best-known movie role since Barb Wire is her turn as herself in the climactic sequence of Borat, which leaned more on her public persona than her acting abilities (although she did a great job of playing fake terror in a scripted scenario).
In those 28 years, Anderson never landed anything close to being the female lead opposite Liam Neeson in a major franchise reboot. Her role in the Naked Gun reimagining is finally living up to the movie-star promise of her role in Barb Wire.
Pamela Anderson Could Be Perfect For The Naked Gun Reboot
Anderson could be the perfect foil for Neeson in the Naked Gun reboot, the same way that Priscilla Presley was the perfect foil for Nielsen in the original movie. The love interests in Naked Gun movies are often depicted as the “straight man” opposite the buffoonish protagonist who already plays every scene totally straight. As long as Schaffer can get the tone right and give Anderson good material to work with, she could fit the Naked Gun reboot very well.
