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Gina Gershon has recalled being warned by former agents that if she played a lesbian, she would “never work again.”
The 62-year-old actor remembered being given a “great script” from “incredible directors,” but “my agents were like, ‘We will not let you do this movie. You are ruining your career.’”
On a new episode of the It Happened in Hollywood podcast, Gershon recounted the agents telling her they wouldn’t be able to represent her and that she would “never work again” if she took the role.
“I just said, ‘Oh, well, I guess if you can’t represent me, I’ll go somewhere else.’ You know? No hard feelings,” Gershon continued, adding that she believed in the script.
Gershon ended up taking the lead role of Corky opposite Jennifer Tilly’s Violet in the 1996 sapphic thriller Bound, co-directed by sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski.
“I said, first of all, it’s so shortsighted to say, ‘Oh, this is a lesbian movie.’ I mean, they happen to be lesbians. They happen to be into women,” Gershon explained of the characters, “but it’s really a movie about trust.”
Bound is about a woman named Violet who falls in love with her ex-con neighbor Corky. As the two women embark on a passionate love affair, they come up with a dangerous plan for Violet to escape her gangster boyfriend, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano).
“Plus, when does the girl get to play the hero, you know?” Gershon added of her character. “I thought, well, I could cut off my hair, cut off my nails, have no makeup. I get the girl. I get the car. I screw over the mob. It’s a win-win all around.”
Gershon, who’s been in a long-term relationship with former soccer player Robert Dekeyser for several years, is considered a gay icon for her work in Bound and 1995’s Showgirls.
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“Those two movies... I dunno, spoke to [the gay community] and they liked me from there,” Gershon told Larry David in 2013.
She most recently appeared in an episode of CBS’s comedy-drama Elsbeth, as well as an episode of Comedy Central’s sitcom Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens.
Next, she will star in Eli Roth’s forthcoming film adaptation of the popular video game, Borderlands.
It also features Cate Blanchett, Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie), German actor Florian Munteanu, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black.
The movie follows a motley crew of infamous outlaws who band together to battle alien monsters to find a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
Borderlands will be released in theaters on August 9.
