Gina Gershon Says Agent Told Her She'd 'Never Work Again' If She Did Lesbian Role in 1996's “Bound”

"I just said, 'Oh, well, I guess if you can't represent me, I'll go somewhere else,' " Gershon recalled in an interview alongside costar Jennifer Tilly

Gina Gershon has no regrets about starring in 1996's Bound.

After the recent release of the thriller's Blu-ray special edition from the Criterion Collection, Gershon, 62, and costar Jennifer Tilly talked about their boundary-pushing roles in a joint interview on the It Happened in Hollywood podcast.

Helmed by the Wachowskis in their feature-film directorial debut, Bound tells the story of Violet (Tilly, 65), a woman who is trapped in a relationship with a mobster named Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) but falls in love with ex-con Corky (Gershon), a woman working on their apartment building.

"It was a great script and I could tell they were incredible directors, but my agents were like, 'We will not let you do this movie. You are ruining your career,' " Gershon said on the podcast episode, released July 2. " 'We will not be able to let you represent. You will never work again.' "

Her response? "I just said, 'Oh, well, I guess if you can't represent me, I'll go somewhere else.' You know? No hard feelings," the actress recalled.

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Gershon said her agents told her specifically that she "can't play a lesbian" as it would tank her career, even though she was a fan of the "well-written" project and "believed" in directors Lilly, 56, and Lana Wachowski, 59, who would go on to direct The Matrix and more.

"I said, first of all, it's so shortsighted to say, 'Oh, this is a lesbian movie.' I mean, they happen to be lesbians," Gershon said of her and Tilly's characters. "They happen to be into women, but it's really a movie about trust."

"There [was] a bigger issue, and I really hated that," she continued. "I thought that was so small-minded and shortsighted. And if that's what we were up against, I was in."

"Plus, when does the girl get to play the hero, you know?" Gershon said elsewhere during the podcast. "I thought, well, I could cut off my hair, cut off my nails, have no makeup. I get the girl. I get the car. I screw over the mob. It's a win-win all around."

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Tilly is of the same mind about the film to this day, saying on the podcast that there was more of a "stigma" in regards to scripts with lesbian characters in them, compared to now.

"The Wachowskis said to me, 'You would not believe how many actresses refused to come in and read for this,' " the Chucky star recalled, adding that she was "puzzled" due to the fact that Violet and Corky were "two of the best female parts I ever read."

As for her intimate sequences with Gerson, Tilly praised her costar, "Gina's the best person in the world to have a sex scene [with], because we have so much trust."

"I could say to Gina, 'Can you hold up my breast so it looks a little more juicy and and perky?' " she added. "We were really helping each other out, and she's just the coolest person in the world."

The Blu-ray special edition of Bound is now available.

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