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Gina Gershon hasn’t seen the movie she’s meant to be promoting. “I know I get kidnapped in it,” she says with a laugh. “How is it?” It’s up to me, then, to remind her of her finest scene in High Rollers, a fun, frantic action thriller in which she plays the smack-talking wife of John Travolta’s master thief. “If the person you’re killing really deserves to die,” her character snarls, “it kind of feels like sex.”
Call it a classic Gina Gershon moment – simultaneously intimidating and ridiculous, and acted with tongue firmly in cheek. This is a skill that she cultivated on the set of Paul Verhoeven’s brilliant 1995 mess Showgirls, when she realised that the only way to avoid going down with that particular sinking ship was to recite every line like the drag queens she could sense would eventually embrace it.
But Showgirls is just one wild entry in a career full of them: her turn as a hitwoman in Face/Off; as the rich girl who woos Tom Cruise in Cocktail; as the trailer-park depressive terrorised by Matthew McConaughey in the bleak Killer Joe. She played Donatella Versace in a made-for-TV biopic, as well as Larry David’s Hasidic dry-cleaner lover on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And looming large above everything else is her breathtaking work in Bound, the cult neo-noir from 1996 in which she and Jennifer Tilly play girlfriends attempting a big, dangerous score.
“I definitely haven’t had a typical career,” Gershon smiles. “People don’t quite know where to place me, or they tend to see me one way. Like, ‘hardcore, motorcycle-riding, lesbian, man-killing demon – let’s cast her as that’.” In fairness, she is really good at it.
We’re speaking today over Zoom, Gershon sat in her New York apartment surrounded by art prints and photographs, all of them rammed tightly together across her walls – there’s a Jean Cocteau, a Sally Mann, some paintings she’s done herself. She’s wearing spectacles and a green shawl, her voice as captivatingly smoky as it is in the movies. Banal as it might sound, she just seems cool.
There’s quite literally every chance she could have been a rock star – she comes from a family of musicians, and tells me there was a period in the Eighties when she had to make a choice between acting and music. (Prince wanted her to star in Purple Rain and become one of his muses – she turned him down.) “It was that moment where you had to choose, as you couldn’t do both, which you kind of can do now.”
Acting proved more immediately successful (she had a bit part in Pretty in Pink, for instance), so singing and dancing went on the back burner. Instead she’s had to settle for merely having an occasional jazz residency and being friends with Bob Dylan, Joan Jett and Lenny Kravitz, rather than pursuing her own full-blown pop career. See what I mean? Cool. And only a little nerve-wracking.
Gershon doesn’t tend to mince words, and has historically been reluctant to spend too long on the subject of Showgirls, a film she didn’t particularly like making and that nearly derailed her career just as it was starting up. But today she admits to a change of heart on it. “I realised I have a lot of PTSD around that movie,” she says. And it’s a recent epiphany: she saw it last year for the first time since its release, at the behest of a friend who insisted she give it a shot. “She’s like, ‘You’re coming to see Showgirls with me – you need to understand what people see in it.’”
Gershon has been writing scripts in recent years, and it’s only now that she feels able to see the film from the perspective of its makers. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is what Paul was trying to do.’” She always disliked an admittedly misjudged rape scene in the film. “But now I’m like, that scene needs to be there – it’s literally the epitome of the ugliness of the American dream that Paul wanted to explore.”
As Cristal Connors, the machiavellian, dog-food-munching rival to Elizabeth Berkley’s inexplicably volatile Vegas dreamgirl Nomi Malone, she made sparkling lemonade out of stupid lemons. She knew she had to come up with a plan B early into production, while being yanked topless up to the rafters above a stage filled with fire bowls and writhing extras. “I’m there on this rope, thinking, ‘I studied the classics!’” Gershon cackles. “‘I wanted to do Chekhov! How did I get here?’”
She has mentioned in the past that she expected the film to be far grittier than it ended up being, and played up the camp in her Cristal to try and match the gaudy set design and Berkley’s own, slightly erratic, performance.
Though it’s hard to imagine now, there was an assumption in the months before Showgirls’ release that it would emulate the stratospheric success of Verhoeven’s previous erotic thriller Basic Instinct – but Gershon was panicked. “They were like, this is gonna be huge – but I knew it was going to be a disaster,” she laughs. “I was always happy with my work in it, but I knew that it was not going to be what people thought it would be. And I was scared, so I just told my agents, ‘Get me another job before Showgirls comes out. I need to show that I really am an actress.’” (Berkley, famously, had no work lined up in the immediate aftermath of the film’s release, which only contributed to the bullying she received at the time.)
Gershon’s next project, arriving like a sapphic miracle, was Bound. But even getting Bound was difficult, with her agents insisting that she would ruin her career if she played a lesbian. “So I had to leave those agents,” she says. She’d previously left another team of agents after they clashed with her over her decision to turn down a Friday the 13th sequel. “I do think my career would have been much easier if I’d had agents that really got me,” she says. “I’ve had to go through several different ones, because I just don’t want to spend time playing characters I’m not invested in. It would have been nice if we were all on the same page, but at the end of the day, it’s my book, and it’s my story.”
It’s provided Gershon with one of those undeniably interesting careers, full of massive hits, cult classics and strange detours. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a tricky one to navigate, though. Potentially her greatest performance was in a 2003 film called Prey for Rock & Roll, in which she plays the gay frontwoman of an all-girl punk band – but the film barely came out, and few people have seen it. When I ask Gershon when she felt as if she’d made it as an actor, she says she’s “still waiting” – it’s a joke, I think, but part of me believes her.
“I remember I was doing Cabaret on Broadway [in 2001] and there was a whole side of a building with my face on it,” she beams. “That was huge! But then, of course, it goes away, and then I’m like, ‘Ooh, what if I never work again?’ And my movies always take, like, 20 years to be seen. Critics loved Bound, but people were very, like, ‘Let’s sweep this under the rug because it’s a lesbian movie and no one’s gonna want to see it.’ And Showgirls was shunned, but now it’s 30 years later, and screenings of it are selling out, and people love it.” And right on cue: Prey for Rock & Roll was last year rescued from oblivion and put back into arthouse cinemas in New York.
High Rollers came about partly because of Gershon’s history with Travolta, the film serving as a reunion between them 28 years after Face/Off. “I didn’t realise at first, but High Rollers is a sequel,” she explains – to a 2024 movie called Cash Out – “and someone else [Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis] had played my character in [the original film], but wasn’t coming back.” Travolta put her name forward. “I adore him, and I was really eager to work with him again,” says Gershon. And she makes the most of what was presumably a thin part on paper, wielding knives with aplomb and sassing out any number of thugs who square up to her. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” she jokes.
As much as she likes a good action thriller, though, she’d like to do more comedy in the future, and mourns a film from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone that she was due to shoot right before Covid. “It was going to be the funniest movie ever,” she teases. She describes it as a deepfake comedy that would have satirised the Trump administration, with Gershon playing first lady Melania, someone she’d already impersonated in a series of comedy skits during the 2016 election and the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency. “But then the pandemic showed up and we had to shut down filming. And by the time we were able to film again, I think everyone was so sick of hearing about Trump that [Matt and Trey] decided to move on.”
The Melania skits have also stopped. “They just started making me feel nauseous,” she explains. “All of a sudden it wasn’t fun, because [the Trumps] weren’t going away. Like, it was funny, but it’s just not funny any more.” She admits to being taken with the once popular idea that Melania was ultimately going to divorce her husband. “I had such high hopes – I thought, as soon as he was out of [the White House], she was going to be gone.” She sighs. “And she hasn’t left.”
Gershon is pondering moving to the UK, she says, but not as a direct result of the latest Trump presidency. Or, as she dubs it, “the world ending”. She just likes its pace of life, its parks and its people. Last year she posted several photographs to her Instagram of a few days she spent walking around Margate with Tracey Emin (again: cool!). “But I have to get a job there first,” she says. “I think it’ll be better to be working there.”
So, if you’re looking to fill any hardcore, motorcycle-riding, lesbian, man-killing demon roles in or around London soon, Gina Gershon is waiting by the phone.
‘High Rollers’ is out now
English (US) ·