Even before her traumatically hilarious performance in the trailer-park comedy of horrors Killer Joe, Gina Gershon has been an actor who fiercely commits. It's the quality through which she transformed her scenes in Showgirls into delirious, campy perfection. And, in real life, she's equally dedicated to the thing she loves most: her cat, Cleo. In Search of Cleo: How I Found My Pussy and Lost My Mind (Gotham) is Gershon's supposedly true, undeniably crazy stream-of-consciousness retelling of a bizarre search for one special missing pet.
How did the stories in the book come together? I wanted to do a book called Cat Tales, because I have all these weird cat stories. I was writing the Cleo story, and I kind of married the Cleo story with memories of all the other cat stories. I just tried to write it as though I was telling the story out loud. I wish I could call it something other than “a book that I wrote.” It’s more a story that I’m telling.
When you were doing some of the things you describe in the book, like peeing in a Tropicana bottle and searching for Cleo on the street holding bottles of your urine, where was TMZ? Thank God they weren’t around. Seriously. I would’ve gotten nailed.
While you were doing that, were you thinking, “This has really gotten out of hand”? I was so intent upon finding Cleo, I didn’t stop to think about it until later on. I had a mission. It’s like when someone is about to get hurt, you just jump in and save them without thinking. Then later you think, “That was scary.”
You write that you always wanted to be an actor, even as a child. What did you imagine success would be like? I don’t think I thought about success when I was little. When I saw people acting in a play, I thought they were cool, magical people. And then one day, I thought, “I could do that.” I never really thought about being a successful actress or being on the cover of a magazine. That’s kind of a newer phenomenon. You just want to do the thing you love.
Do you ever rewatch your movies? No. If there’s a movie that’s great that I love as a film, I’ll watch it just because I love the movie. Then in the middle of it, I’ll think, “I love this movie, I wish I was in movies like this.” Then, I’m like, “Wait, I am in this movie.” A lot of the movies I don’t even go to. I’ve seen Killer Joe. And I have to say, I’ve seen The Exorcist over 100 times. [Director William] Friedkin is such a great filmmaker. I could watch The Player forever. I could watch The Insider again and again. If I really didn’t like a movie, I wouldn’t sit through 10 minutes. That’s the hypocrisy of Showgirls, where people said, “I hate this movie, I’ve seen it 15 times.”
I’m resisting asking you about Showgirls, because I know you’ve talked about it a lot. I knew I liked you right at the beginning of this interview.
