Latest news with #GinaGershon
Daily Mail
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Showgirls star Gina Gershon reveals she almost BROKE Tom Cruise's nose when he tickled her during sex scene for 1988 classic Cocktail
Gina Gershon has detailed the shocking moment she almost broke Tom Cruise 's nose when he tickled her during a sex scene. The Showgirls star, 63, starred alongside the Mission: Impossible star, 62, on the 1988 classic Cocktail and filmed her very first love scene with him. However, things didn't go exactly to plan as Gina - who was in her 20s at the time - was left fearing her Hollywood career was over when she injured megastar Tom. She recalled how Tom was meant to be under the covers before popping up during the raunchy scene, but she had warned him in advance not to tickle her because she is very ticklish. However, Tom accidentally tickled her while grabbing her waist, leading to her unintentionally lashing out and nearly breaking his nose She told The Guardian: 'Right before the take, he was down there and grabbed my waist in a tickly, sweet manner, I didn't mean to, but I had a kneejerk reaction right into his nose. 'It was full of blood, I thought: ''I just broke Tom Cruise's nose, I will never work in Hollywood again''. 'I was mortified because I really kicked him good, I didn't mean to.' Though she initially feared for her career, Gina said 'gentleman' Tom insisted it was his fault because she had warned him in advance and was very 'kind and sweet' with her. Despite the mishap, Gina said she is still glad that she filmed her first ever sex scene with Tom, insisting he was very 'protective' of her and made sure to put her at ease. Cocktail followed Tom's character Brian Flanagan, who is fresh off a stint in the army and is pursuing a business degree while working as a bartender in Manhattan. He learns the tricks of the trade from his business partner Doug (Bryan Brown) before discovering his friend has slept with his romantic interest Coral (Gina). Brian then moves to Jamaica where he meets Jordan (Elisabeth Shue) and they fall in love, while he continues to battle challenges as he tries to pursue his original dream. While the film was panned by critics, it earned $78.2million domestic ($207.6million in 2024 when adjusted for inflation) and $171.5million worldwide ($455.4 million in 2024), taking the ninth spot on the year-end box office top 10. In another insight into her career, Gina also recently revealed her agents advised her against taking a lesbian role in the 1996 neo-noir crime thriller Bound. Gina, 62, played a lesbian ex-cop who was in a romantic relationship with Jennifer Tilly's character in the Wachowskis-directed film. Speaking on the It Happened In Hollywood podcast, Gina said her agents told her not to play Corky - even telling her the role kill would her chances at a successful acting career. But, impressed by the script and the the filmmakers, Gina went against their advice and joined the cast anyway. She detailed: 'It was a great script and I could tell they were incredible directors, but my agents were like, "We will not let you do this movie. You are ruining your career. We will not be able to let you represent. You will never work again."' Undeterred by their words, Gina shared: 'I just said, "Oh, well, I guess if you can't represent me, I'll go somewhere else." You know? No hard feelings.' The Hollywood actress also took issue with the fact the film was being referred to merely as a 'lesbian movie' - when it spoke to larger issues. 'I said, first of all, it's so shortsighted to say, "Oh, this is a lesbian movie." I mean, they happen to be lesbians,' she said. 'They happen to be into women, but it's really a movie about trust. 'There's a bigger issue, and I really hated that, I thought that was so small-minded and shortsighted. And if that's what we were up against, I was in.'
Irish Independent
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Gina Gershon: ‘People like to cast me as a hardcore, motorcycle-riding, lesbian, man-killing demon'
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 says, smiling. '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 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 1980s 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.) Acting proved more immediately successful, so she's had to settle for an occasional jazz residency and being friends with Bob Dylan, Joan Jett and Lenny Kravitz. 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. But now she admits she's had a change of heart on it. 'I realised I have a lot of PTSD around that movie,' she says. 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.'' 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 says, laughing. ''I wanted to do Chekhov. How did I get here?'.' ADVERTISEMENT Learn more I knew it was going to be a disaster 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 going to be huge – but I knew it was going to be a disaster,' she says. '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.'' Gershon's next project 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. 'I do think my career would have been much easier if I'd had agents that really got me. 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 has 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 adore John Travolta, and I was really eager to work with him again 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 says – to a 2024 movie called Cash Out – 'and someone else [Sex and the City's Kristin Davis] had played my character, but wasn't coming back.' Travolta put her name forward. 'I adore him, and I was really eager to work with him again.' 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 would 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. 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 they decided to move on,' she says. The Melania skits have also stopped. 'They just started making me feel nauseous,' she says. '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.'
Perth Now
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Gina Gershon 'suffered PTSD over Showgirls'
Gina Gershon suffered "a lot of PTSD" following the release of Showgirls. The 63-year-old actress starred alongside Elizabeth Berkley in the 1995 erotic drama film, which centres on a woman who hitchhikes to Las Vegas to pursue her dreams of being a showgirl, but Gina admits that she didn't enjoy making the much-maligned movie. She told The Independent: "I realised I have a lot of PTSD around that movie." The film was a box-office flop and was widely panned by critics. Gina now admits that she "knew it was going to be a disaster". The actress shared: "They were like, this is gonna be huge – but I knew it was going to be a disaster. "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.'" Gina has hired and fired lots of different agents over the years, but the actress doesn't have any regrets about her approach. She explained: "I do think my career would have been much easier if I'd had agents that really got me. "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." Gina believes that a lot of her projects take years to be fully appreciated, including Showgirls, which has become a cult film in recent times. The veteran actress said: "I remember I was doing Cabaret on Broadway [in 2001] and there was a whole side of a building with my face on it. 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."
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
High Rollers review – John Travolta leads a charmless casino raid of staggering stupidity
Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean's Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman. High Rollers is a heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can't help but guffaw. The idea is that Mason Goddard (John Travolta, who has finally given up on hairpieces and embraced the bald) leads a rodent pack of skilled thieves and conmen. The gang is first met at the beach wedding of two of the group's younger members, tech whiz Link (Natali Yura, mouth permanently agape) and dim hunk Caras (Swen Temmel). Alas, the nuptials are interrupted when international criminal Salazar (Danny Pardo) and his henchmen swoop in and kidnap Mason's wife Amelia (Gina Gershon, somehow surviving this with dignity intact). Salazar demands that Mason and his crew, which also includes his gormless safecracking brother Shawn (Lukas Haas) and sidekicks Anton (mononymed Quavo) and Hector (Noel Gugliemi), must steal the contents of a safe in the suite of casino owner Zade Black (Demián Castro) at his supposedly classy New Orleans casino the Scarlet Pearl. Even the name of this fictional gaming facility sounds trashy, and when we see its interior – all lurid carpeting and easily wipeable soft furnishings – it looks less like Monte Carlo's finest than the kind of seedy regional gambling den that the producers could hire cheaply. The air of tawdry cost-cutting pervades every level of the film, from the casting to the costumes to the paste jewellery that's supposed to stand in for posh gemstones. There are tons of holes in the plot, but those are too tedious to parse; just study the frame closely and you can have a laugh at the truly hideous pictures on the walls that someone on the team thought would pass for fancy art. High Rollers is on digital platforms from 16 June.
Hamilton Spectator
11-06-2025
- General
- Hamilton Spectator
Horoscope for Tuesday, June 10th, 2025
As Wednesday's full moon approaches, there may be a tinge of moodiness in the air. We'll need to be mindful not to blow trivial matters out of proportion as we may be prone to negative thinking. We shouldn't expect the worst, but we should try to manage our expectations. A can-do attitude and a realistic plan can help us overcome blocks or obstacles. Additionally, we should avoid rushing into decisions since our judgment could be clouded by our emotions. On the plus side, today does provide opportunities to get to the bottom of what may be troubling us. ARIES (March 21 to April 19) Consider ways that you can learn from the past rather than ruminating on it. TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) You may need to face the truth about something, but acknowledging this truth can be liberating. GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) A collaborative effort will be more successful than a solo one. CANCER (June 21 to July 22) Don't allow self-doubt to get in the way of your progress. Take things slow if you need to, but keep going! LEO (July 23 to Aug. 22) Beware of cynical thinking. Don't lose your connection to wonder or hope. VIRGO (Aug. 23 to Sept. 22) You may not be able to solve all the world's problems, but you can pick one cause that you care about and focus your energy there. LIBRA (Sept. 23 to Oct. 22) Don't assume that you'll get a 'no' to your request or offer. Why not ask first or start up a conversation? If the answer is 'no,' there may be a backup option available. SCORPIO (Oct. 23 to Nov. 21) You may need to be more realistic about how much work you can take on or accomplish. SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22 to Dec. 21) Self-care may be the answer to whatever ails or drains you today. CAPRICORN (Dec. 22 to Jan. 19) The kindness or generosity that you show to others can impact you just as positively as it impacts them. AQUARIUS (Jan. 20 to Feb. 18) You may need to lean on the support of friends and family to deal with the challenges that the day brings. PISCES (Feb. 19 to March 20) Your resourcefulness or creative thinking will enable you to achieve your goals. FOR TODAY'S BIRTHDAY You pride yourself on your ability to be objective and non-judgmental. You're not the kind of person who rushes into decisions or makes assumptions without finding out the facts first. You prefer to take a thoughtful and rational approach. You enjoy working with others on shared projects. Although you are a team player, you may need to make sure that you're not overly accommodating to others at the expense of your needs. At your best, you are a vibrant soul with a charismatic personality. This year, focus on creating more win-win relationships. BIRTHDATE OF: Bill Burr, comedian/actor; Gina Gershon, actress; Kate Upton, model/actress.
