Season One of Suits Ends; Season Two on the way
Gina Torres has done about a million different things in front of the camera (and behind a microphone, and on stage) over the last thirty years or so…and it doesn’t matter whether she’s playing the queen, the assassin, the attorney or the outlaw, you can’t stop watching her. There’s just too much good stuff going on there.
This Cuban-American beauty is a close-to-perfect mix of talented, tough, poised, and dangerous, and she’s been proving it in front of the camera and onstage for quite a while now, from the early days in the bizarre and wonderful Cleopatra 2525 to Alias to her still-remembered role on the cult classic Firefly (and its movie-sequel, Serenity), all the way up to and including her current role as the Queen of Lawyers on USA Network’s breakout hit, Suits. And she can sing, too; just not enough of us have heard her yet.
Gina is one of the few actresses, Latina or any other kind, to have a really good official web site and bio, so we’ll steal from it rather liberally here…
Gina was born of native Cubans and raised in the interesting parts of New York, especially the Bronx. Her world was always Latino with a dash of…well, everything else. “I always sang, always danced, because there was always music in the house and in the street,” she said. “We heard Johnny Pacheco, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, and Machito. And when the elders weren’t listening, my ears took in everything from ABBA to Led Zeppelin, Glenn Campbell to Nat King Cole and everything in between.” And the elegance she carries with her, even to her most rough-and-tumble roles, is at least partially genetic. “My parents were classy beautiful Latin people,” she says. “They grew up in the 30’s, a time when you looked clean, you were pressed; you looked people in the eye; you were gracious, no matter how much money you did or didn’t have. Those were the values I went into the world with.”
And they have served her well. Her competence as a beauty, a leader, and a fighter keeps her working a great deal; reading her IMDB entry is like reading a Who’s Who of TV for the last decade or so. She’s even supplied a variety of voices for many of the female superheroes who’ve appeared in the recent adventures of Batman and his friends. Makes you wonder how she found time to even meet Laurence Fishburne, much less marry the man, or have a baby with him. (Happy belated fourth birthday, Delilah! We’re only a few months late!)
And she certainly hasn’t taken the easy road. She could have stuck with the cool-and-beautiful-woman roles she performed by in her daytime drama days, but she didn’t stop there. And once she’d established herself in the action/adventure world on shows like Xena and later Alias, she could have become the next Brigitte Nielsen. But as she says herself in her bio, she likes to mix it up. “There have been many times when I have said, ‘NO! Not another tough chick with a gun!’” she says. “I’m not looking to hang up my holster forever, but I’m always looking to pick up other aspects of our humanity, like the vulnerable and the broken, or the giddy and absurd, and shine a light on it.” That’s exactly what she’s achieved in Suits, where there’s nary a gun in sight–just the sheer force of Gina’s considerable personality. And she’ll be back for more when Suits returns for its second season.
Meanwhile, Season One offers its first-round finale Thursday night at 10P on the USA Network. There are many plots resolved, many threads unraveled for Season Two, and apparently even other actors speaking other lines throughout much of the episode. But we’ll only be watching Gina Torres, no matter who else is talking or what else is going on.
It always happens that way.
