Suits is back on USA, and Gina Torres is still running the most powerful law firm in N.Y. city. Which is great for everyone involved.
Gina Torres is huge. Not just tall–though she is 5’10” in her stocking feet–and not just beautiful, though there’s little doubt of that. Gina Torres—youngest of three children in a close-knit Cuban American family–is just one of those people that fills a room with her presence.
She’s played commanding roles, the person to look at, the one in charge, almost since her first appearances on TV and in the movies in the mid-90’s. After paying her dues on the soaps, her first starring role was as a warrior woman in the syndicated cult sci-fi hit Cleopatra 2525, produced by the same folks who brought us Xena: Warrior Princess (where she had appeared as well). And they knew what they had. Later we’d see her in similarly larger than life roles: a master spy in Alias, an LAPD crisis negotiator in Standoff, and of course the gun-toting not-to-be-messed with co-pilot of the Serenity in the cult hit Firefly with Morena Baccarin, Nathan Fillion, and Alan Tudyk, all of whom have regular roles in series of their own at the moment.
L-r: Gabriel Macht, Gina Torres
and Patrick J. Adams, “Suits”
It’s not surprising she was chosen by the Suits producers to be Jessica Pearson, founding and managing partner of Pearson Hardman, one of the most powerful law firms in New York city–despite her being a woman, and a woman of color no less. No one even questions her intelligence or competence. How could they? Just look at her.
Maybe it’s the voice. Beyond her physical presence, Torres is a gifted mezzo soprano; she was trained in opera and jazz and sang in a gospel choir. And she’s even done a fair amount of work as a voice actor, embodying–you guessed it–superheroines like Vixen of The Justice League, Superwoman and even Wonder Woman herself in a recent video game.
Married to Laurence Fishburne, late of CSI and the Matrix movies, and soon to be seen as Jack Crawford in the new serial-killer series Hannibal (they just celebrated their tenth anniversary), and mother of a five-year-old, Torres somehow manages to continue to project calm command of the situation in almost every episode of Suits, standing up to (and occasionally towering over) the likes of Gabriel Macht and young heartthrob Patrick J. Adams. As the new season begins, there’s a civil war brewing at the firm, and Torres’ character is smack in the middle of it…though we’re not particularly worried about her survival. As Torres herself said in a recent panel about the future of Jessica Pearson, “whether [she’s protecting what’s hers] with a gun or a laser or a stiletto, in my mind, it is the same [place].”
We couldn’t agree more…and we can’t wait to see what happens next. New episodes of Suits are in evidence every Thursday at 10P, beginning January 17.
