Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka Discuss ‘The Last Showgirl’

Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka star as Mary-Anne and Jodie in The Last Showgirl. The film will be released in theaters on January 10.

The Last Showgirl, a poignant film of resilience, rhinestones, and feathers, stars Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a glamorous showgirl who must plan for her future when her show abruptly closes after a 30-year run.

“Seeing it was really fun because I feel like in the moment, the character doesn’t exactly know how kind of sexual or overt the dance is and everyone around her does, and she’s not quite in on it. So I think playing it, I didn’t want to feel super in on it,” Shipka explained. “It was cool to see it from sort of an outsider view and go, ‘Oh, that’s really funny.’ That has humor, but it also has sadness and there’s shame and loss of innocence, and I was really happy with how the scene came together. It’s very fun to feel like a puzzle piece and then, to see the whole puzzle be put together by every single person, it’s always thrilling and this was one of those moments where it was particularly fun to see the finished product.”

“I loved my front-row seat,” Song added. “I didn’t see the dance until we started to film it because Gia wanted our raw reactions and I was like, ‘I’m about to give you Brenda’s real reaction, not Mary-Anne’s reaction,’ because we had gotten so close so quickly and I knew she’d been working on this dance, and the thing about it is people don’t realize how much work Kiernan puts into the intention of everything she does. So this dance, when I saw it for the first time, I was not just blown away by how amazing the dance was, but how much intention was in each piece, every moment that she paused. I was like, ‘Oh girl, girl,’ and it was amazing to watch and I was just so incredibly blown away.”