What The Cast Of Baywatch Has Said About Pamela Anderson

It may be hard to imagine now, but Pamela Anderson wasn't part of the original cast of "Baywatch." The iconic bleach-blond beach babe didn't step onto the sands of the Los Angeles shoreline until the show's third season, but as soon as she hit the airwaves and dove in slow-mo beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean, she was unstoppable.

In an oral history of the show for Esquire, the "Borat" star recalled the show's writers adjusting C.J. Parker so that she'd be closer to Anderson's off-screen persona. "My grandfather was really a big influence in my life and the whole, you know, crystals and incense and poetry," she recalled. "[T]hat hippie, bohemian kind of girl was me. So they wrote it for me and it ended up being good. It ended up being great for me."

The whole cast became sex symbols — especially as the paparazzi era really kicked into gear — but Anderson herself was a bona fide phenomenon. Her tight red swimsuit and knack for comedic timing made her a sensation; to this day, she's still the thing most people think of first when they remember those lifeguards and their increasingly sexy stunts and silly saves. As the media frenzy around Anderson's personal life swamped her time on the show, she eventually had to leave "Baywatch" and restructure her relationship to fame ... which means many of her "Baywatch" castmates have commented on what it was like to share the screen with someone at the absolute pinnacle of '90s success.

Before Pamela Anderson spent the latter half of the 1990s embroiled in a scandalous relationship with Mötley Crüe frontman Tommy Lee, she dated co-star David Charvet during her early years on the show. He played the hunky Matt Brody on "Baywatch," one of the show's headstrong young lifeguards whose romantic exploits drove some of the show's soapier storylines.

Their relationship began before they were both cast on "Baywatch," but it didn't last beyond their early years of stardom on the show. In an interview with a magazine called Big!, Charvet recalled what it was like the first time he saw his future co-star. "She's not just beautiful on the outside, she's beautiful on the inside too. She's just so caring," he recalled. "When I first saw her it was like, 'Oh my God, this is the woman of my dreams.'"

Charvet — who would later play a pivotal role in the stunning transformation of Brooke Burke — evidently wasn't happy when Anderson was cast in a movie called "Snapdragon" that would require love scenes with a co-star. Anderson told Big!, "He didn't want to share me with anybody."

Though Pamela Anderson soon came along and swept "Baywatch" audiences off their feet, the first few years of the show were anchored firmly by David Hasselhoff. As the kind, athletic lifeguard Mitch Buchannon, Hasselhoff pioneered the show's iconic slow-mo run that would soon make Anderson such a cultural mainstay. He'd also been part of the cast of iconic '80s series "Knight Rider," so he knew a thing or two about fame.

At first, when "Baywatch" looked to bring in a big new character like C.J. Parker, Hasselhoff wasn't sure Anderson was right for the part. According to casting director Joel Thurm, Hasselhoff considered "Baywatch" a family show, and Anderson's past — having posed for Playboy — seemed to bring a less family-friendly element to the beach, something that Hasselhoff wasn't certain about. He was won over, however, by Anderson's undeniable charm.

Speaking with Access Hollywood, Hasselhoff said that while everyone else fell head over heels for her looks, he was won over by her talent. "I remember that she had charisma," he said, "that when she auditioned for the show ... she had so much charisma, it was just dripping off her." Unlike everybody who just wanted to look at her, Hasselhoff said, "I went gaga because she could act."

When Pamela Anderson first joined the cast of "Baywatch," Jeremy Jackson was still just a kid. As MItch's son Hobie Buchannon, Jackson grew up on-screen, eventually becoming a lifeguard himself who could have romantic storylines all his own in the show's sleazier, sillier later years.

At that point, Anderson had known him since he was a child, so when he made an attempt to get into music as well as acting, she put in an appearance in his music video for a 1995 song called "French Kiss." He told The Music Factory, "It was such an honor to be able to do that with her, and I was so glad when she said yes. She said, 'No problem,' she'd love to come do my video, so it was really cool."

Unfortunately, Jackson's attempt to grow up in the spotlight wasn't without its dark side. Jackson's career was full of tragic details, like much of the cast of "Baywatch." In Esquire's oral history of the show, Jackson pointed out that he was actually making more money than Anderson at first, but he was a teenager who spent it all. "We would call a limo, be driven around all weekend, buy drugs, buy prostitutes, buy our way into clubs, and the money would be gone in a week or less," he said. Jackson was ultimately sent to prison for his involvement in a stabbing, though he is now out and sober.

While most of the show's action took place on the beaches of Los Angeles County, the crime-solving antics of the "Baywatch" lifeguards often meant roping in Garner Ellerbee (Gregory Alan Williams), a member of the LAPD. 

Unlike much of the cast of "Baywatch," Williams is Black, which means he had a different experience of fame in the 1990s than most of his co-stars. In fact, he found himself a participant in the 1992 uprising that followed the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles and saved a man's life at the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where some of the worst mob violence during the days of unrest took place. "I felt betrayed. It was a reenactment of an old injustice that you could beat a Black man," he explained to NBC4. "But in the face of that rage, I had to consider, what is my responsibility?"

Williams — who was also part of the cast of "Remember the Titans" — later spoke about what it was like to work on a show that prized actors who looked more like Pamela Anderson. In a docuseries called "After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun" (via Entertainment Weekly), Williams seemed emotional as he noted, "I was not what they were selling. 'Baywatch' was a show that celebrated European beauty." He'd been invited to a photo shoot for the show's third season — the one where Anderson joined the cast — and he was ultimately cut from the promotional material. "I put up a wall between myself and the show and decided I would have the fun and make the money," he said, "but I wasn't going to let it hurt me."

On several seasons of "Baywatch," Alexandra Paul played Lt. Stephanie Holden, a senior lifeguard who sometimes serves as a love interest for David Hasselhoff's character Mitch Buchannon. She was a sex symbol in her own right but joined the show at the same time Pamela Anderson did, and there was no denying that her co-star had a different experience of fame on the show than she did.

In an interview with Allison Interviews, Paul noted that Anderson deserved her success, pointing out, "[She] became really the most famous woman in the world during that time. She worked really hard. There are a lot of beautiful, sexy women in Hollywood. So, yes she's beautiful, yes she's sexy, but she also really, really worked hard."

Speaking with Esquire, Paul said that even though the show became ultra-successful for everyone at the same time, Anderson got a different level of attention. "I was uncomfortable going into places like malls or airports just because people would stare and things. It's inevitable," Paul recalled. "I remember that Pamela would be followed by one photographer — on weekends, she'd get up to do appearances and things, and I went home to my boyfriend and my cats 10 minutes away."

While the outside world was focused intently on Pamela Anderson's real-life love life — she's one of those stars who have been married at least five times — "Baywatch" wrote C.J. Parker a new love interest. They brought on David Chokachi to play Cody Madison, a blond surf-hunk who could match Anderson's steamy slow-mo runs down the sand, and the rest was television history.

In an appearance on "Pod Meets World" (via People), Chokachi said he was actually asked which "Baywatch" babe Cody should date. "It was a little bit surreal because they actually had come to me. I had like earned my status really quickly up the ladder and they were like, 'We're [giving] you the option for a girlfriend on the show,'" he recalled. Though he thought about pairing Cody up with Yasmine Bleeth's character Caroline Holden, he eventually suggested that Cody date C.J.

Chokachi said he barely understood how famous she'd become to the outside world. "I was obsessed with movies and actors, but I wasn't intimidated by other actors or actresses," he explained. "It was more, you know, it was just, I kind of felt like I belonged."

Gena Lee Nolin joined the cast of "Baywatch" during the show's fifth season, part of a cast refresh meant to bring new beauties to the beach. She played Neely Capshaw, a love interest for David Hasselhoff's character Mitch Buchannon; their relationship would turn out to be one of the show's longest-lasting and most tumultuous, but Nolin's experience of her "Baywatch" fame was significantly affected by what Pamela Anderson went through at the time.

She'd only been a model on "The Price Is Right" before joining the cast of "Baywatch," but she suddenly had to keep up with some of the most famous actors in the country. "I was literally thrown in the lion's den. I'm coming from a game show, showing microwave ovens. And then all of a sudden I'm in [a world with] Pam and David and Tommy Lee and paparazzi," she recalled to Cosmopolitan.

Anderson is still a beach babe without makeup, but at the time, there were photographers hanging around the "Baywatch" set hoping to snap a shot of any of the cast members in embarrassing situations. As Nolin told Cosmo, "You could not leave your trailer without knowing you'd have your photo taken, whether you're bending over, scratching your nose." She developed a way to cope, remembering, "I would just wear my robe."

As the 1990s drew to a close, "Baywatch" and Pamela Anderson had become cultural mainstays. The show kept adding new characters, hoping to refresh the fans' investment in the lifeguards on those Los Angeles beaches, and in 1997, that included bringing on Carmen Electra as Lani McKenzie. 

If there's one thing to know about Carmen Electra, it's that she had come up through MTV as one of the personalities on their game show "Singled Out." Her self-effacing sense of humor seemed like the perfect foil for Anderson on "Baywatch," and the two eventually went on to skewer their fame-hungry personas in several "Scary Movie" movies.

Decades later, as Anderson reinvented herself as a critically acclaimed actor in movies like "The Last Showgirl" and "The Naked Gun," Electra told People that she was proud of her old friend. "I'm really happy for her and her career," she said, explaining that she wanted the same things for herself. "[N]ow I feel like it's time for my edgy role! It's definitely time." Like Anderson, who wrote a memoir and worked on a documentary about her career, Electra said she was hoping for a similar comeback. "It's going to be tough," she said, "but it's going to be really beautiful at the same time."

In the first two seasons of "Baywatch," the show's quota for blondes was filled by Erika Eleniak, who played Shauni McClain. She was the romantic lead opposite Billy Warlock, who played Eddie; when Shauni and Eddie left at the beginning of the show's third season, they were some of the first high-profile cast departures that made people wonder what happened to the cast of "Baywatch."

You may recall that the third season premiere is also the episode that introduced Pamela Anderson's C.J. Parker character. Eleniak told Esquire that she left because she wasn't happy with the show's direction — its increasing focus on the bodies of the women, for example — but she said she was more than happy to hand it off to Anderson.

"My gosh, the show benefited so much when I left. My swan song was Pamela Anderson's introduction, and they couldn't have asked for a better goddess to fulfill what they wanted and needed," she said. Eleniak noted, "It was so perfect for them when Pamela came, because she would say, 'I'm an exhibitionist, I am out there, I love it. It's me, it's what I do.' And nobody does it better."

Nicole Eggert played Summer Quinn on "Baywatch," one of the show's younger characters who grows up on the sand. She was only 18 when she first joined the cast, and unfortunately, Eggert felt pressured to get plastic surgery to match the bustier women in the cast.

Eggert's breast augmentation joins the list of plastic surgery procedures celebs regret getting done. She later told People that after getting cast on the show, she was surprised to see just how revealing the show's costumes would be. Whereas everyone else seemed to be excited to be in a bathing suit all day at work, Eggert dreaded it. "All the girls worked out and were super tiny and fit and I was like, 'Whoops,'" she said.

That said, Eggert said that rumors of an on-set feud with her more-famous co-star were nonsensical. "I always knew Pamela was prettier and more natural," she said, denying that she felt like she had to compete with the "Barb Wire" star. "I kind of wondered why she always did so much makeup. But it was her thing and the look she was going for. It was the image she wanted to portray, so it worked for her."

In 2017, Hollywood returned to the beaches of Los Angeles County for a big-screen reboot of the "Baywatch" brand. A film version of the format starred Alexandria D'Addario, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Zac Efron as some of the iconic red-shorted lifeguards from the show, but the movie also featured cameos from some of the biggest stars to ever don those bathing suits.

Pamela Anderson shows up at the very end of the movie, bringing back C.J. in a small part without any lines. She told Variety that the movie's producers had insisted, and that she wasn't even paid for the appearance. "They said they wanted me to do it as a favor. I said, 'I do favors for animals, not for Paramount,'" Anderson said. "There was just so much bullying to do it."

Kelly Rohrbach, who played a version of C.J. in the reboot, told People that she felt a bit intimidated to follow in Anderson's footsteps. Rohrbach noted, "[A] lot of people outside the country sort of associate American, Southern Californian girls with Pamela Anderson." The Rock, too, shouted out the most iconic "Baywatch" beauty to ever do it, writing on Instagram, "We couldn't have made this movie without you. Welcome home. Thrilled you had a blast with us!"