The entertainment industry is exactly that, a business. And it is a business where there isn’t a lot
of longevity. Even talented performers
often find their employability flagging after one hit TV show or a couple of
successful movie. Not everyone can be
Tom Cruise, whose track record from Risky Business in 1982 through Mission Impossible:
Ghost Protocol in 2012 (his post-2012 productions—Jack Reacher, Oblivion, Edge
of Tomorrow—show uncharacteristic missteps) was infallible.
It is even harder to maintain longevity when you don’t have
a lot of long-lived projects on your resume.
Kelsey Grammer had a great run, but when you’re on Cheers for nine years
and Fraiser for eleven, it’s easy to keep busy; or David Boreanaz, who played
Angel for 8 years and has been on Bones for twelve, managed to work for two
decades on only two jobs. Some actors
never have that security.
Therefore what Gina Torres has accomplished is
remarkable. Her IMDB profile says she
started acting in 1992, and she has kept busy for 25 years playing action
heroes, evil entities, Cuban spies, and even lawyers. The fact that she’s done all this while also
being African-American, female, and gorgeous makes it that much more
impressive. Halle Berry is all that, but
after she won an Oscar her career went nowhere; Torres never hit that height,
but she’s been steadier.
I wax poetic because of the news that after leaving the USA
show Suits she'll
be starring in a spin off. I know she’s been in a lot of science
fiction/fantasy shows, but her greatest acting challenge has been making it
believable that a high-powered Manhattan law firm would have a managing partner
that looked like her.
Torres had the good fortune to fall in with Sam Rami’s
troupe Renaissance Pictures making low-budget TV shows in New Zealand, first
playing Cleopatra (of course she’d be the most beautiful woman of legend) on Xena:
Warrior Princess, then playing a different role on nine episodes of
Hercules. She then got the lead in Renaissance’s
next series, Cleopatra 2525 (she didn’t play Cleopatra this time).
Cleo 2525 only lasted 28 episodes, but with a solid
background in fantasy/SF she moved on to a season on Angel as the evil Jasmine,
followed by her most iconic role, Zoe Washburn on Firefly. In the commentary for the movie Serenity Joss
Whedon says that the biggest problem in trying to set up the movie for people
who weren’t familiar with the TV series Firefly was explaining that the
gorgeous Amazonian woman was married to the scruffy-looking ship’s pilot.
She had lots of jobs—a seven episode run on 24, a bit in the
last two Matrix movies, a memorable role as Sydney Bristow’s nemesis on Alias
(her fight scene with Jennifer Gardner is one of the great woman-on-woman fight
scenes in screen history). She finally
settled in for a long run as Jessica Pearson, the high-powered managing partner
of the law firm in Suits. She had great
chemistry with co-star Gabriel Macht, yet they never went for the will-they-or-won’t-they
tease that would have been so easy (or was it because Macht had even better
chemistry with his legal secretary played by Sarah Rafferty?). She quit the show because she tired of
filming in Toronto, but supposedly her desire to live in Los Angeles has been accommodated
for her new, as yet untitled series.
No major awards, no Emmies or Oscars, but steady work for twenty-five
years. Plus she’s been married to
Laurence Fishburn since 2002. It’s an
impressive resume for any actor, but especially one given her ethnicity,
gender, and now her age. And apparently,
it is going to continue for a while longer.
Maybe her husband can get her a guest role on
Black-ish. She hasn’t done much comedy,
but I think she’d be good at it.
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