A high stucco wall on a leafy street near the Hollywood Bowl, its lines broken at the center by an unlikely pair of primitive wooden doors painted a garish shade of blue. Her hand is extended in antic formality.
"Carla Gugino," she announces, like a woman at a job interview.
Goo-Jean-oh.
As if it is she who needs the introduction.
Michael J. Fox's girlfriend during the first season of Spin City. The MILF operative in the Spy Kids trilogy. Silk Spectre in Watchmen. Robert De Niro's forensic love interest in Righteous Kill. Karen Sisco, U. S. Marshal, star of the TV drama by the same name. Lucille in Sin City — has anyone ever carried a firearm through a darkened room more nakedly and with more élan? The man-munching superagent Amanda Daniels on Entourage. The pregnant retired porn star in Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx. The Polish therapist/madam in the surrealist grrls-in-chains fantasy Sucker Punch. Abby Rhoads, attorney, on Californication: Who better to defend and summarily ravish you in your hour of legal need?
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Forty years old, Gugino is the daughter of an Italian orthodontist and a self-styled bohemian who fled the bonds of marriage to live for some time with her young daughter in a tepee by a river. Eventually, mom remarried and settled in San Diego. Gugino shuttled between the two parents. While attending La Jolla High School, she was recruited into the corps of Elite Petite models. Her aunt is the iconic spokesmodel Carol Merrill from Let's Make a Deal; at her urging Gugino moved to Malibu one summer and tried an acting class. By sixteen she was legally emancipated, working steadily in Hollywood.
And now she's leading the way across the grass on gold wedges to a table in the yard of a rambling house behind a high fence that seems more fanciful than real, like the set for an adult fairy tale, art-directed by Diego Rivera. She shares the place with her longtime boyfriend, as she prefers to call him, Sebastian Gutierrez, who directed Gugino and a recurring ensemble of their beautiful and talented friends in the Elektra Luxx films, and also more recently in the full-length Web movie Girl Walks into a Bar. Later today she will go back to filming their latest, Hotel Noir, with Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Malin Akerman, and Kevin Connolly.
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"What's cool is that all these films really started as an experiment," Gugino will later say. "The idea was that if we have a very solid piece of writing and a very small crew, and people who are all at the top of their games, we could make cool movies that you can't make in Hollywood right now."
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It's this kind of thinking that has been Gugino's blessing and curse: Having carved out a rare niche for herself as a working character actress, she's largely disappeared into her roles, some of which were not very big to begin with. For her star turn in the Elektra Luxx series, for example, the career brunette wears a long blond wig. She looks like ... somebody else.
"I didn't realize the effect it would have until people were becoming confused. It was like, 'Wait, she was a mom in Spy Kids, but a lesbian parole officer in Sin City?' It's a bizarre conundrum for people that I don't always get. We are supposed to be actors, aren't we?" She laughs out loud, but you can see she's not all that amused.
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Next up: The Mighty Macs (out October 21), a biopic about Immaculata College's Hall of Fame basketball coach Cathy Rush, who posted a 91 percent winning percentage on her way to three consecutive national women's AIAW championships in just seven years at the school.
"People are beginning to perceive what I've done over time as a body of work," she says. "For that, I'm very appreciative."
As are we.
Published in the October 2011 issue.
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