Gina Gershon has been looking back on her involvement in a notorious cult film — one she admits she couldn’t bring herself to watch again ‘for years’.
The actor has built an extensive career across film and television, but one title that still tends to dominate conversations about her work is Showgirls.
Released in 1995, the erotic drama dives into the underbelly of Las Vegas and follows an ambitious drifter (played by former Saved By the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley) as she fights her way up from stripping to the bright lights of a major casino stage production.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the movie became infamous for its graphic sex scenes and made history as the first major US studio release to receive an NC-17 rating. Critics were brutal at the time, and it struggled commercially, earning less than its reported $45 million budget.
In the years since, though, audiences have reevaluated Showgirls. Its over-the-top tone and feverish energy have helped it earn cult classic status, and it’s now frequently referenced and revisited.
For Gershon, who appears in the film as well, returning to it was complicated — and not only because of the movie’s reputation. She’s said she also struggled with how her accent situation played out behind the scenes.
The California-born star has explained that she wanted her character to have a Tennessee accent, so she claimed to Verhoeven that she was from the state. According to Gershon, the director didn’t want her using an accent at all.
Speaking on SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, Gershon shared: “You know, I couldn’t watch it for years ’cause I was like, I was too, a little bit of PTSD, I think, in a very slight way, no disrespect to real PTSD, but I would get very tense and anxious when I thought about certain things and stories, and so I never really watched it again, and I would kind of use the excuse of like, ‘Well,’ and it was a real excuse, like, ‘I can’t deal with my accent, ’cause I had to lie about my accent.”
She also said she expected the finished movie to resemble Verhoeven’s earlier work more closely. Gershon noted she thought it would land “closer to one of [Verhoeven’s] Dutch films, which are a little bit seedier, a little bit darker, and I think his American films, now that I’ve kind of studied it and I’ve stepped out of it, I mean, they’re really interesting comments on America and fascism.”
With time and distance, she’s been able to view Showgirls through a different lens. “Going 30 years later, 25 years later, a friend of mine, a writer friend, she said, ‘No, you don’t understand how great Showgirls is.’ I’m like, ‘I guess I really don’t,’ but when I saw it from afar, not being in it, and all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Oh my god.’ It was really a comment on ugly America and on capitalism and power struggles and dynamics and all those things that of course that rape scene has to be there.
“It’s the grossest thing in there and the powerful men, they’re all protected and, you know, so that’s why it’s exciting when she kicks the guy’s ass.”