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.
