Pam and Liam: They played lovers in the reboot of The Naked Gun, but has their on-screen romance spilled over into real life?

Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson are a bit dazed. They’ve just turned the lights on in the screening room on the third floor of the Paramount Building in Midtown Manhattan, where they sat next to each other in an otherwise empty room, watching their sequel to the slapstick 1980s and 90s comedy series The Naked Gun for the first time.

‘I’m thinking, “My head is too big. She’s gorgeous. The side of my face!”’ Neeson frets after sitting down in a small room behind the screening room, with windows looking down on the Broadway Theatre District.

‘It’s tough to watch yourself. You take yourself apart. I hardly even look in the mirror,’ says Anderson, sitting a few inches from Neeson in a matching chair.

‘I’ve made 106 movies, believe it or not,’ he says. ‘But you’re seeing yourself 20ft high.’

‘It’s not normal,’ she adds.

Anderson, 58, has a curled blonde bob, her fringe pushed away from her face. Edging away from the make-up-free look she has rocked for the past few years, she’s wearing a little blush and light-coloured lip gloss. She is dressed in black trousers, a black jumper and open-toed black shoes, and she leans over the arm of the chair to look up at Neeson, catlike.

Neeson, 73, his glasses perched on his forehead, is in grey trackpants, a black puffer jacket worn over a T-shirt with a drawing of a tree on it, and black Kizik trainers. He is eating the foil-wrapped remains of a Tony’s Chocolonely bar that he stores in the upside-down trucker cap he’s put on the table in front of them. His Irish voice is so slow and gravelly, like an anti-leprechaun, that he is sometimes impossible to hear. When I ask Anderson if he’s different than she expected before they met for the first time on set, Neeson glares threateningly at her and mimes pumping a shotgun with one hand, as if he’s done the action hundreds of times before. Which he has.

They are an unlikely pair. He is a 6ft 4in actor who learned to box during the Troubles, as a Catholic growing up in Northern Ireland. She is a shy, 5ft 7in, small-town Canadian vegan who was discovered on a video screen at a football game in 1989. Until The Naked Gun director Akiva Schaffer (Saturday Night Live; Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), asked if he could show Neeson Anderson’s audition tape to gauge his opinion, the actor had never even seen her perform.

‘I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch Baywatch,’ he says.

‘Oh, you didn’t?’ she teases.

‘It wasn’t my thing,’ he explains.

‘I watched Schindler’s List,’ she says.

But when Neeson saw the tape, which was before Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, (featuring a Golden Globe-nominated performance by Anderson) was released in the US in January, he was impressed, and says, ‘It was a no-brainer. She was real. She was funny. Incredibly sexy.’

‘The chemistry was important, too,’ Anderson says.

‘That just came naturally,’ he adds.

‘I think it did, didn’t it?’ she says.

‘I think so,’ he agrees.

Let’s talk about that chemistry. Don’t just take their word for it. When YOU’s photographer gives them props and a Polaroid camera to play with (see the results below), they’re all over each other. And while a transcript search shows me he only called her ‘sexy’ twice, it felt like a lot more.

Much like in the three original Naked Gun films, made between 1988 and 1994, of which both were fans, the two leads are purposely mismatched. Neeson plays a cop who is the son of Lt Frank Drebin, the role played by the late actor and comedian Leslie Nielsen, and Anderson fills the role that was Priscilla Presley’s. ‘Priscilla is so sweet. She sent me a message saying, “Just have fun with it’,’’ Anderson says.

The film, produced by Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, Ted), is a joke machine. Even the original director and co-writer David Zucker didn’t have anything bad to say about the casting – despite the fact he’d previously written his own fourth (unmade) instalment and refused an honorary producer credit.

Anderson and Neeson, oddly, don’t seem an unlikely pair in real life. They both have new puppies and they both garden – he at home in Upstate New York and she on her seven-acre estate on Vancouver Island, which once belonged to her grandmother. They both read at night before going to bed early, and neither likes to carry their phones, especially on set; Anderson doesn’t even have any apps on hers because she found she wasted hours on them. They both have grown-up children who have flown the nest, and no grandkids yet. He occasionally puts his hand on her shoulder or knee, and she playfully slaps his arm when he makes jokes, at which she invariably giggles. During shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, she dropped off homemade sourdough bread and muffins with notes in his trailer. ‘I was testing my cookbook recipes on Liam,’ Anderson says, referring to her 2024 vegan cookbook, I Love You: Recipes From The Heart. ‘I made him a birthday cake – my rose olive-oil cake.’

Although Anderson was physically shaking from nerves on her first day, she says it didn’t take her long to get comfortable. When I ask them what their favourite part of shooting the film was, Neeson says, ‘the sex scenes’ – for which they had an intimacy coordinator. ‘I’d never had one before. But she was in the background. There was no kind of, “OK! Excuse me!’’’ Neeson says.

‘She knew when to walk away,’ Anderson jokes. Imitating an intimacy coordinator throwing up her hands and storming off, she adds, ‘I can’t take this!’

‘She said, “This is too hot for me. I’m going for coffee,”’ Neeson adds.

Even their careers aren’t as far apart as they might seem. If you don’t know the Pamela Anderson backstory, it goes something like this. Born in Ladysmith, British Columbia, Canada, to Barry, a furnace repairman, and Carol, a waitress, she was 22 when a cameraman picked her out from the crowd at a football game in Vancouver and put her on the big screen. Modelling gigs rolled in. Her first ever plane trip, which she took alone, was to LA to pose for Playboy. Then came her role as the red-costumed lifeguard C J Parker in the TV series Baywatch, from 1992 to 1997. And, of course, that terrible incident with the home video.

Neeson, meanwhile, was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. An amateur boxer, he studied physics and computer science at university but left after a year, became a forklift operator and took drama classes, joining the prestigious Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1978. In 1992 he made his Broadway debut in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, co-starring Natasha Richardson. (The couple married in 1994; Richardson died in 2009 after sustaining a head injury in a skiing accident.) The production caught the attention of dIrector Steven Spielberg, who cast Neeson as the Holocaust hero Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List. His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor. The mega-hit Star Wars and Taken franchises followed.

So sure, he’s an Oscar/Bafta/Tony nominee and she’s a former Playboy model, but in the past few years they’ve come closer to the cultural middle. He’s a late-life action star. She got such great reviews for The Last Showgirl that she won the lead in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Royal at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer; plays Ellen Burstyn’s daughter in Place To Be, an upcoming film by White Dog director Kornél Mundruczó, as well as Elle Fanning’s mother in Rosebush Pruning; and stars with Dakota Fanning in Sally Potter’s Alma.

‘I couldn’t have done this 20 years ago. I still was in the mess of my personal life,’ she says. Assuming she wouldn’t be working much as an actress any more, Anderson had moved to Vancouver to her grandmother’s old house. ‘The garden is truly a metaphor. You can replant your garden and a new garden grows. It was therapy. Going back to your childhood and everything you’ve experienced, rewriting your life, understanding it, and bringing that into your work.’

‘Can I say something?’ Neeson asks.

‘Whatever you want. I trust you,’ she says.

‘An agent from very high up in the business said to me a few months ago, after seeing a cut of Showgirl, “If Marilyn Monroe had lived, this could have been potentially what would’ve happened.”’

He apologises if that somehow offended her, but she says it definitely does not.

‘When I auditioned for you guys, Showgirl hadn’t come out yet, so Akiva really took a chance on me. I was so excited when I got the job,’ she says. ‘I don’t think too many people get second chances. So I’m not taking it for granted.’

He feels similarly about the intense action roles he keeps getting. ‘I’m 73 next month…’ he says (speaking in May).

‘Seventy is the new 50,’ Anderson interjects.

‘My conversation with my agent usually goes, “Hey, Chris… Yeah, I read it… They know what age I am, right?… OK. I’ll be there,”’ he says.

Since shooting The Naked Gun seven months ago, he has done four more films, and she has made two. None of those six were comedies, a genre neither feel comfortable with, which might explain why, an hour into the interview, they apologise for still being shaken by the screening. Anderson has more comedy experience, having played the Tool Time Girl in the sitcom Home Improvement, a bookshop employee in the sitcom Stacked and herself in Borat.

‘I did one comedy with my pal Neil Jordan many years ago called High Spirits with Peter O’Toole, Steve Guttenberg – a pal of mine – and Daryl Hannah,’ says Neeson. ‘I went to an industry screening of it with the producer in LA. The film started and you could have heard a pin drop. Steve was sitting beside me and, every time I looked, he was slipping lower in the seat, just saying, ‘F**k. F**k.’ It didn’t do very well.’

For The Naked Gun, Neeson says he’d shoot a scene and have no idea if it was funny, so he’d ask the director for reassurance. He was also thrown by the fact that, each day, the actors would be given a pile of alternate jokes – or ‘alts’ – and have more thrown at them on the set. ‘As you’re doing the scene, they’re still writing away,’ he says in disbelief.

‘You get this whole stack of alts and it’s like, “What’s an alt?” I’d never heard of this before,’ says Anderson.

Both had hosted the top US comedy show Saturday Night Live – Anderson in 1997 and Neeson seven years later – but had very different experiences. ‘Oh my god. I loved it. It was really fun,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know it, but I was pregnant with my second son.’

Neeson didn’t think he did well. ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ he says again about his comedy work. ‘In those days, my kids were small. My wife and I were in bed by 10pm. This started at 11.30pm.’

Since the death of his wife, Neeson – who earlier in life had dated Helen Mirren and Barbra Streisand – has been largely single. Anderson, who has been married five times, has been single since divorcing her former bodyguard in 2022. Both have dual citizenship and two sons living in the US. ‘I’m very proud of that, even in these times,’ Neeson says, before launching into a very good Donald Trump impression. ‘Lyle Nelson, he’s Irish. Beautiful, saw his Schindler’s List,’ he says with a perfect Trump wheeze. Anderson, of course, can’t stop giggling at this.

Anderson’s sons – Dylan, now 27, and a musician in the band Motel 7, and Brandon, 29, who co-produced Pamela, A Love Story – saw a screening of The Naked Gun before she did. ‘They called me after and they were still laughing. So that’s a good sign.’ When I ask if they’re not supportive of all her work, she rolls her eyes before giggling. ‘No. Kids are always your toughest audience.’

She and Neeson may still be processing the movie they just saw, but they have already worked out if they would do a sequel. ‘I would, absolutely. In a heartbeat,’ he says. To which Anderson adds, ‘I’ll follow him anywhere.’

The Naked Gun is in cinemas on 1 August 

WHEN PAMELA MET LIAM

The last photo you texted to someone?

Liam One of my new pup. He’s five months old. He’s called Finbar. ‘Finners, get off that couch!’

Pamela Mine’s a dog, too. He’s named Zou Bisou Bisou, like the song.

Do you have three favourite emojis?

Pamela No. But you do, Liam.

Liam Thumbs up, green shamrock, green heart.

What’s your Wordle starting word?

Pamela I’ve never done Wordle.

Liam What is Wordle?

What are you watching on TV?

Liam The Righteous Gemstones. And The Studio. I just watched episode nine. I’m a big Kathryn Hahn fan.

Pamela I don’t watch TV. I watch a lot of movies. I love The Criterion Channel.

Picture director: Ester Malloy. 

Styling: Bailey Moon and Alison Edmond at The Wall Group. 

Hair: Marcus Francis at Tomlinson Management Group. 

Make-up: Shayna Goldberg at The Wall Group. 

Grooming: James Mooney at Art Department. 

Prop stylist: Jenny Correa at Walter Schupfer Management. 

paramount pictures, rex features