DWTS Alum Doing Better After Feeling Life Was a ‘Bundle of Mistakes’

Heavy/ABC A "Dancing with the Stars" celebrity started a new life.

“Dancing With the Stars” season 10 alum Pamela Anderson once feared that her life choices were all a mistake.

The actress and model spoke in an August 2024 interview with Better Homes and Gardens to explain why she decided to move from the U.S. back to her native Canada years after finding fame as a Playboy model and “Baywatch” star.

“A few years back, I kind of gave up at some point and needed a change,” Anderson, 57, told the outlet. “I  thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s just what people think of me.’ I was not in a good space when I moved back to Canada. … I felt very sad and lonely, I didn’t feel just misunderstood, I felt like I had really screwed up, that my whole life was a bundle of mistakes.”

The actress, who has been married five times, also admitted that she put her sons, Brandon, 28, and Dylan Lee, 26,  “through so much” and just wanted to “disappear.”

In the interview, Anderson revealed that after going back to her roots she now feels “so far removed” from her previous image as a sex symbol.

Pamela Anderson Said People Didn’t Like Her

GettyPamela Anderson in the movie “Barb Wire.”

Part of Anderson’s life transformation includes leaving her glamorous image behind. According to Glamour, in 2023 she showed up at multiple Paris runway shows with a bare-faced look that had people buzzing.

Anderson told BHG that she never thought anyone would notice her freckled-faced, makeup-free look. But it actually made people see her in a different light—and they told her to her face. “That was the beginning of me letting go of the image I had always had of myself,” she told the outlet, describing her former self as a “cartoon character.”

“I have people stop me on the street now and say, ‘You know, I never liked you before, but I do now.’ And then I think, ‘Hmm, I know there’s a compliment in there somewhere,’” she added.

Anderson previously told Elle that she gradually stopped wearing makeup after the death of her longtime makeup artist Alexis Vogel in 2019 and felt the make-up free move to be “freeing.”

Pamela Anderson’s New Life Was Documented in an HGTV Canada Series ‘Pamela’s Garden of Eden’

While Anderson is best known for her roles in “Baywatch” and the movie “Barb Wire,” her new life in Canada has been documented in the HGTV Canada series “Pamela’s Garden of Eden.”

The first season of the show was “a bit of a mess,” Anderson told People magazine. “I was thinking it was a little HGTV Canada show and that it was going to just be about sustainable design. I was wrong, unfortunately, and once again I felt slightly exploited,” she said.

Anderson explained, “I was allowing others to make decisions. I had no idea they’d use old photos or ex husbands, or any of my celebrity life. It always is shocking that that part of me seems interesting at all, when I felt my weakest and my worst.”

Anderson revealed that she ultimately took her power back and the second season of the reality series focused on the renovation of her childhood home in Canada and her close relationship with her sons.

“What I love about (the show) is people are actually stopping me on the street and saying how much they love it, how it’s just nice and lighthearted. It’s authentic,” she told Today.com in an interview in late 2023.