'People cast me as hardcore, motorcycle-riding demons'

Gina Gershon, the star of cult classics including 'Face/Off', talks to Adam White about her new film, being in 'Showgirls', and why she stopped her viral impressions of Melania Trump

- Adam White

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.

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 smiles. "People don't quite know where to place me, or they tend to see me one way. Like, 'hardcore, motorcycle-riding, lesbian, mankilling demon- let's cast her as that?" In fairness, she is really good at it.