The director of the new Hulu docuseries on iconic 90s TV drama Baywatch has revealed the real reason behind alum Pamela Anderson’s absence after the actress claimed she refused to appear on the show because it would be a step backwards in her career.
The glory years of the popular action series have been brought back to life in hit documentary After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun, which explores what happened to the show’s stars once the cameras stopped rolling.
David Hasselhoff appears, as does the still glamorous Carmen Electra.
Also on board is Nicole Eggert, who despite suffering from breast cancer, was one of the driving forces behind the project.
There too is Jeremy Jackson, who played Hasselhoff’s son in the series, and has recently been back in the news after his ex-wife was photographed living rough in Venice Beach.
But the most recognizable name is missing. Pamela Anderson, the original Baywatch bombshell who last week dramatically distanced herself from the project.
Ramping up the drama, in true Baywatch style, she told Glamour magazine last month: ‘They begged everybody around me. They tried to get my kids to talk me into it. They said they’d give them producer credits.
‘I mean, they were trying everything. And I said, “No, I really don’t want to go backwards”.’
But that, says director Matthew Felker, 44, isn’t entirely true.
A genial blonde who looks like he could have starred in the show himself, Felker says the real hurdle was cash – while pointing out that the 57-year-old is managed by her children.
‘I did speak to her son – who is also her manager – and it wasn’t a no. At first it was “how high?” and that’s fine,’ he said in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.
‘Then when I go, what do you mean? They’re like “a lot” [of money.] I asked how much is a lot? What does that mean?
‘I’m not just going to throw a number up. It’s not professional. I’m just not going to do it.’
He added: ‘I think Pamela’s got a great story, but unfortunately, she [already] told her story for me.
‘We had talked on and off with multiple people that handle her, who are friends with her. We did go every single route. There’s a lot of truth to that.
‘I never had a direct conversation with Pamela. I never offered her children a producer credit and I’m the only person that could offer her children producer credit.’
Anderson’s absence from the series and the ensuing drama is the main fly in Felker’s ointment which comes after he spent five years and thousands of dollars of his own money getting After Baywatch made and on to the small screen.
The model turned director lives in a $12million Malibu home with his glamorous New Zealand-born wife Elizabeth, a former soap actress.
The couple share the modernist cream-painted house, which is just a few miles from Zuma Beach where Baywatch was filmed, with two dogs, a tiny chihuahua and Felker’s rescue dog Rosie.
After an early career in modeling, which included playing Britney Spears’s love interest in the 2003 smash-hit Toxic, Felker began moving into production – racking up a string of credits on movies and made-for-TV movies, as well as appearing as himself on 2018 documentary The American Meme.
A scriptwriter since his college days, Felker had also begun to dream of directing and producing films of his own but never quite managed to make the switch.
That all changed during a miserable trip to Lake Tahoe with Elizabeth six years ago.
‘I told him, you can’t be the Toxic guy forever,’ she told DailyMail.com. ‘You’ve got to sort yourself out.’
She added: ‘He didn’t like me very much for a while after I said that.’
The result was four-part docuseries After Baywatch which takes a deep dive into the lives of the show’s stars after the TV juggernaut finally came to an end in 2001.
According to Felker, many of the actors involved needed some persuasion to appear due to them having moved on from the show and its shallow glamor.
‘You all start somewhere and there’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ says Felker.
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed about being in a Britney Spears video.
‘It’s like it was cool, it was an iconic video. There’s nothing to be ashamed of about being in Baywatch.
‘It wasn’t an Oscar-winning production, but it was a huge piece of pop culture, and I think you should lean into those things.’
Nevertheless, the vast majority of the show’s stars do appear – among them the biggest of them all, David Hasselhoff.
He was one of the very few to be paid and has an executive producer credit but, says Felker, became disillusioned with the project for a time because making it took so long.
He said: ‘He’s of this generation where you do a documentary, you turn it out in three weeks, two shoots, like edit, let’s go.
‘So he’s like, what is this thing? What is this? Is it real? I’m like, well, my bank statement says it’s real as it depletes.’
Felker added: ‘As time went on, I think he lost a lot of hope in it. Then we had a competing project that then started happening because we were doing it.
‘He was like, “well, I’ll just do it. I’m going to do it now”.’
Despite that, Felker says he has no hard feelings where either Hasselhoff or Anderson are concerned – noting he took pains to tell their stories as accurately as possible.
His favorite stories though, were those of the smaller stars in the Baywatch firmament, among them that of Michael Newman, the only real lifeguard in the series, who talks about the impact that a 2006 diagnosis of Parkinson’s has had on his life.
Another favorite is Jackson, now 43, to whom he became close.
‘Jeremy’s story is really important,’ says Felker.
‘There’s a lot of criticism and judgment about him, which is just not based in reality.
‘He’s acknowledged [his past drug addiction] and he owns his behavior, but he’s a success story because he’s not that person anymore.’
Felker told DailyMail.com that Jackson has tried to help ex-wife Loni Willison but has had little success due to her mental health and ongoing drug addiction.
He said: ‘The girl has severe mental illness. It’s not his fault that she has severe mental illness.
‘She wants and chooses to be homeless. He didn’t drive her to be homeless.
‘It’s a tough thing for him because he is super empathetic. You wouldn’t think so because he’s this jacked, bearded like mountain man guy that looks like a MMA fighter.\
‘He’s super sensitive and he reads all that stuff [about Willison] and it actually really hurts his feelings.
‘But because of what he looks like, people assume he’s a monster.’
Felker is now working on a documentary with Dita von Teese which he is producing, but still loves Baywatch and says he thinks the original series remains a show to be proud of, despite the brickbats at the time.
He said: ‘When you’re getting made fun of and on Saturday Night Live and everyone’s ripping you, you did something right.
‘You are not going to win the Emmy, but you made a hit. And you should be proud of that. It’s better than making a show that wins an Emmy that nobody watches.
‘It just depends on what your outlook is on it. But I would be very proud if I was any one of the actors that were a part of it, or any of the creators that created it, because it was definitely lightning in a bottle for a decade and a generation. I think it defined my generation for sure.’
Source: Daily Mail
