"As an actress, I have one rule for myself," Gina Gershon is saying, lazily puffing on an enormous
cigar. "F--- the rules." As a journalist, I have one rule for myself--never let an interview subject
get you drunk. Well, it's not a strict rule exactly. More like a guideline. A suggestion, maybe... At
any rate, Gershon is sitting in the Martini Bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, plying this
reporter with a killer, vodka-based cocktail called a Cosmopolitan. Dressed in black, her auburn
hair tied in floppy pigtails, she looks a bit like Gina Lollobrigida doing Pippi Longstocking. After a
few Cosmos, she looks like two Gina Lollobrigidas. "Here, have another," she purrs, filling my
glass from the martini shaker. "It'll be good for your story." In her decade-long film career,
Gershon is probably best known for playing Cristal, the Las Vegas super-diva who kissed
Elizabeth Berkley right on the mouth in last fall's infamous Paul Verhoeven-Joe Eszterhas sex
epic, Showgirls. The role was a tremendously ballsy gamble, requiring her to dance naked inside
a fake volcano and recite some of the worst dialogue ever typed for the big screen ("You are a
whore, darlin'!"). But like the sole survivor of somescreen ("You are a whore, darlin'!"). But like the
sole survivor of some terrible accident, Gershon managed to walk away from that flaming
wreckage with her hair barely mussed. In fact, her ability to rise above the material and keep her
dignity, while others around her crashed and burned, pegged her as one of Hollywood's
scrappiest, coolest new stars.
And now, this summer, Gershon is taking another big risk, disrobing on screen once more in a film
so steamy, so boldly erotic, it makes Showgirls look like The Boatniks. Starring in a smart,
stylish thriller called Bound (due from Gramercy Pictures in August), she plays Corky, a
tough-but-gorgeous ex-con-turned-handywoman who happens to be a lesbian. Jennifer Tilly
(Bullets Over Broadway) costars as Violet, a luscious gangster's moll who, as it happens, is also
a lesbian. Together they hatch a scheme to steal $2 million from the Mob and pin it on Violet's
boyfriend. "It's like those old Robert Mitchum movies when he gets out of jail and some femme
fatale seduces him," Gershon explains. "Only I'm the ex-con and Jennifer is the femme fatale and
we fall in love in the end. I get the girl. I get the cash. I come up a winner any way you look at it."
It should be noted that Gershon does not always fall for girls in her movies. In 1988's Cocktail,
she was the sultry socialite who seduced Tom Cruise. That same year she played an ex-hooker
opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Heat. She also had small parts in John Sayles' 1991
urban drama City of Hope and Robert Altman's 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, and this
August will start filming Original Sin, Eszterhas' latest script, about a woman obsessed with a
previous-life lover. In New York, her home for half the year (she spends the other half in her
hometown, L.A., hanging out with boyfriend and restaurateur Sean MacPherson), she performs on
stage in productions by the so-hip-it-hurts Naked Angels theater troupe (other Angels include
Matthew Broderick and Fisher Stevens; John F. Kennedy Jr. is on the board of directors).
It was, however, her under-dressed, over-the-top performance in Showgirls that put Gershon on
the map--and turned her into something of a cult figure. "It's become this big thing, like The
Rocky Horror Picture Show," she says, puffing her cigar some more. "All these drag queens
show up at midnight screenings wearing hospital gowns and cowboy hats. RuPaul came up to me
once and not only knew Cristal's lines and dance routines but the color lipstick she wore. That's
when I knew I had really done my job."
Bound probably won't inspire many drag queens, but its unconventional sexual aesthetics did
help make it a hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Treading a razor-thin line between
feminist-lesbian correctness and straight-male-slob lasciviousness, it may be the only movie ever
made that both Howard Stern and Valerie Solanas could love. Still, after the critical beating
Showgirls took, slipping into bed with another woman did give Gershon pause.
"It was a role that literally everyone said not to take," she recalls. "My agents thought it was
crazy. But when I read the script, I just thought it was amazing."
Filming Bound's torrid one-and-a-half-minute love scene turned out to be not so traumatic after all.
"We were very nervous going in," remembers Tilly. "But in some ways it was easier than doing a
love scene with a guy. With two girls, it's more like a slumber party. You're like, 'Put your hand
there so this roll of fat doesn't show' or 'Put your breast here so it doesn't look so squished.' We
were both kind of helping each other. It was really a bonding experience, especially 'cause you're
doing it all day long."
Gershon puts it slightly differently. "Really, the only difference with a girl is that you talk about the
sales at Barneys first," she says. "It was like, 'Oh, where'd you get those shoes?' Then they'd yell
'Action!' and we'd get into it."
