Gina Gershon stands her ground.
In her new memoir, “AlphaPussy,” the sultry actress recounts how she “survived” growing up in California’s San Fernando Valley in the 70s and 80s —”right smack in the middle of the explosion of porn” — and went on to thrive in Hollywood on her own terms.
Gershon, whose credits include “Face/Off,” “Curb Your Enthiasm,” “Riverdale” and “Rescue Me,” writes of dodging pervs on the street — and at the Playboy Mansion — in her youth and then standing up for herself as she came up in the entertainment industry, even when it meant refusing to work with Prince and locking horns with famous directors.
“It’s like a collection of my personal stories about navigating toxic situations and difficult people … and maintaining my sovereignty,” she told Page Six in an exclusive interview.
Not everyone was unpleasant. Gershon remembers brief-but-positive encounter with a range of A-listers, including Bruce Willis, who tended bar at the cafe she worked at in college and made her boyfriend feel threatened with his “charm and swagger”; Bob Dylan, whom she boxed with at the gym; and Sharon Stone, who advised her to lie about her age.
However, filming with director Paul Verhoeven on 1995’s “Showgirls” — a massive flop in its time that has since become a beloved camp classic — was very challenging.
It “was a constant psychological tug-of-war between Paul, [co-star] Elizabeth [Berkley], and me … Paul was infamous for fighting with his stars, and — lucky me! — I guess I was his chosen sparring partner on ‘Showgirls,’” writes Gershon, who played the stripper Cristal in the film.
One day, the director sauntered into her trailer. “In today’s scene, I think it would be good if you showed your vagina,” he declared, noting that Berkley would be doing so and that Sharon Stone had so done on his last film, “Basic Instinct,” in an infamous scene.
Gershon wasn’t looking to fight, but she wasn’t up for baring all and doing so wasn’t in her contract. She took a moment, came up with a plan and then had a sit-down with Verhoeven.
“I totally understand what you want to do with this shot, but truth be told — we’ve seen it. As you already pointed out, we’ve seen Sharon’s vagina, and we will see Elizabeth’s vagina,” she told him diplomatically, as she recalls in the book. “So I was thinking, well, just imagine this: It’s dark. We don’t know where we are. It’s murky. Then pink. Then kind of fuzzy. Next thing you know, we’re in Cristal’s dressing room . . . But wait! How did we get here? We then realize we’ve been inside of me! We have been inside Cristal’s vagina!! Instead of just showing my pussy like Sharon and Elizabeth, let’s do the shot from inside my vagina! … We can even use a microscopic probe lens! No one has ever seen that before. It’s brilliant.”
Verhoeven was taken aback and said he was unsure if they could execute such a shot. He looked at Gershon like she was “bonkers,” said it was fine for her to just do the scene as originally written, no crotch shot needed, and walked away. (A rep for Verhoeven said he was unavailable for comment.)
She dodged another sketchy bullet at age 15, when she went to a party at the Playboy Mansion with a friend.
Another guest hit on her and gave her a tour of the mansion, including the infamous grotto.
When he asked if she wanted a dip, Gershon pumped the brakes.
“I remember looking at him and just laughing, going, ‘You know, I’m only 15? You could get in so much trouble,’” she told Page Six.
Thankfully, he slunk away.
By contrast, Gershon writes that Tom Cruise was the “eternal gentleman” when they starred together in 1988’s “Cocktail.”
She was shooting a love scene with him, her first ever, and the script called for them to frolic naked around a hot tub and kiss, “which just seemed gratuitous and lame.”
Gershon suggested something subtler under the covers in bed, and Cruise was game.
“I couldn’t have asked for a more supportive and communicative and trustworthy partner,” she writes. “He even suggested that I turn away so that my breasts weren’t on camera, just facing him.”
The beauty had a less positive experience with Prince when she was an acting student at New York University.
One day, she received a call from an old friend who was working with the late musician and told Gershon that, “Prince wants to meet you. He’s doing a movie and the lead woman has to be able to sing, dance, and act. I told him about you.”
Naturally, Gershon was thrilled and hopped on a plane to Minnesota, where she was greeted by a purple stretch limousine with Prince inside.
He played her the title song from his upcoming movie, “Purple Rain.” She was blown away and the two went somewhere to talk, drink, and dance.
Then the musician turned to her and said, “I think I’m going to call you Ghee-na, (A hard G sound).”
“Gheena?” she responded, trying not to laugh. “As in Ghee-na Gershon?”
“No,” he responded in all seriousness. “Just Ghee-na.”
It was all too much for her. She told Prince that didn’t want the role, even though it would have been a huge break for her.
“I don’t want to be called ‘Ghee-na’ for the rest of my life,” she told Page Six, adding, “It was more than that … I never had someone look at me that way. I felt as if he were, like, rearranging my molecules…I felt very uncomfortable with it.”
In the book, she admits that “Many times I have regretted not working with Prince. I would kill for the chance to have been able to make music with that genius. But I didn’t love being controlled … For better or for worse, I listened to my instincts.”
Gershon also trusted her gut, when, after wrapping “Showgirls,” she was sent a new script to read, called “Bound.”
The noir thriller featured a romance between two women, and Gershon’s agents at the time refused to let her do it, as she had just played a bisexual in “Showgirls.” They feared another sapphic romance on screen would tank her career.
Reluctantly, Gershon fired her agents and signed on for “Bound” opposite Jennifer Tilly.
She’s proud to have been a part of the movie, which was one of the first mainstream films to feature a lesbian relationship and love scenes.
“The lesbian community really embraced it because they’d never been represented that way before,” she said. “It was a big deal, and I feel really proud about that. When people come up, and they’re like, ‘You really helped. That movie helped me; it helped me realize things.’ That was icing on the cake.”
More recently, Gershon was introduced to a new audience when, last year, she played Bowen Yang’s clingy girlfriend in a “Saturday Night Live” skit titled “Bowen’s Straight.”
“I’m in love with him,” she said of the “Wicked” star. “I just adore him. He’s a wonderful guy.”
Even though she swears “AlphaPussy” isn’t a self-help book, she still hopes that “it’s empowering in a way” and teaches women to be direct and stand up for themselves.
“There’s a lot of toxic people out there,” she said, “and they want to tell you what to do, what to think.”
