Gina Torres was good and ready to take on Jessica Pearson, the regal legal managing partner she plays on USA’s law-firm drama, Suits. “In terms of where I was in my life, my personal relationships, becoming a mom,” she says, “I wanted to focus more on character, character development… Hmmm.” Torres pauses, then laughs. “I just stumbled upon my network’s catchphrase, ‘Characters Welcome.’ Didn’t mean to do that!”
Revered by fans as “the queen of Pearson Hardman,” Torres likens Pearson to the “queen mum,” keeping law and order among the firm’s brilliant but wildly unconventional band of barristers.
“She’s in charge of a great deal of complicated personalities that she has to nurture so that they can do their best,” Torres says, “which is part of her genius.”
Takes one to know one. Having cornered the market on smart, capable women in roles on 24 and The Shield, fantasy combat goddesses on Cleopatra 2525 and Xena: Warrior Princess and action divas on Alias, Firefly and Serenity, Torres is really sinking her four-inch Christian Louboutins into this part.
“Right now, she’s great fun to play,” Torres says, “and it would be great to go deeper: Where did she come from? What is she like in relationships? A personal romantic relationship is always very revealing.”
Since her first professional acting job at nineteen in a way-off-Broadway production of Dreamgirls, Torres has racked up a succession of TV and film credits, including Chris Rock’s I Think I Love My Wife, Hair Show with Mo’Nique and two Matrix films. In the 2006 feature Five Fingers, she played opposite her husband, Laurence Fishburne, and in NBC’s new Hannibal she plays the wife of Fishburne’s G-man.
But for sci-fi die-hards, seeing the Cuban-American Bronx native on Paradise Island would be the pinnacle. Online blogs have beseeched for years that Torres be cast as Wonder Woman.
“Well, somebody had better get on that,” laughs Torres, who has voiced the superheroine in DC Universe Online’s MMORPG. “I have maybe another two good years to fit in the star-spangled hot pants — or we’ll have to make them out of Spanx.”
