Pamela Anderson Explains Why She Would ‘Like’ to Change Her Name to Pamela Hyytiäinen

Pamela Anderson is embracing her family’s little-known Finnish heritage.

The Baywatch icon, 58, reflected on her close relationship with her grandfather Herman Hyytiäinen, a native of Finland, in an interview with Vogue Scandinavia published Tuesday, Dec. 2. “He was the closest person to me in my life,” she said in the article, adding that she is interested in formally going by the last name Hyytiäinen.

“Sometimes I don’t want to be Pamela Anderson. I want to be Pamela Hyytiäinen,” she said. “I would like to change my name, but they won’t let me.”

As Vogue Scandinavia reported, Anderson’s family used the surname Hyytiäinen before arriving in Canada, when they changed it to a more North American-sounding Anderson. Anderson’s grandfather, Herman, taught her Finnish growing up. As a child, she thought it was “a magical language that no one else could understand,” per the outlet.

“[The language] kind of left with him,” she said of her grandfather, who died when she was around 11 years old.

Anderson has made note of her international heritage in the past. In 2019, she wrote in a post on X (then known as Twitter) that her great-grandfather was the first member of her extended family to move from Finland to Canada, where the Naked Gun actress was born.

She also described her grandfather as “a healer from Finland” in a 2015 interview with Esquire. “All of his brothers changed their names, too, so I have a feeling that maybe something bad happened in Finland,” she said of the family’s move from the northern European nation. 

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Despite Anderson being generations removed from life in Finland, she visited the country in 2007 with her father, per Vogue Scandinavia.

“I just wanted to go, to feel that connection. I’d love to go back to Finland, maybe with my sons,” she told the outlet. (Anderson shares sons Brandon Thomas Lee, 29, and Dylan Jagger Lee, 27, with ex-husband Tommy Lee.) “To find out more about myself, to explore that side of me. Maybe we will change my name and go back, to answer to my roots.”

“It feels distant, but it’s a part of me. I’ve always been proud to tell people I’m Finnish, even before I knew what that really meant,” she added, noting that when she sees herself with the copper red hair she embraced in October she thinks, “Who is that? Maybe it’s Pamela Hyytiäinen.”