Carla Gugino: To the 'Brink' and back
NEW YORK — Carla Gugino is running a bit late. By Hollywood standards, that's not even worth noting. But Gugino, slightly breathless, calls to apologize, assuring that she's a few minutes away and acknowledging that tardiness is one of her pet peeves.
Given how many projects she's juggling, Gugino has reason for scheduling challenges. She's been globe-trotting to promote her disaster epic San Andreas, which has, to date, grossed more than $300 million worldwide.
She's at the heart of the creepy, twisty Fox miniseries Wayward Pines (Thursdays, 9 p.m. ET/PT), about an idyllic town from which there's no departing because it's the last bastion of human civilization. And in HBO's The Brink, premiering Sunday (10:30 p.m. ET/PT), she's the lascivious lawyer married to the secretary of State (Tim Robbins), angling for a spot on the Supreme Court.
"This is a very special moment in time," says Gugino,who lives with her longtime boyfriend, filmmaker Sebastian Gutierrez.
"For me, right now it's been a three-year span of just working. I've moved to New York full time. It's interesting that in this moment, all three things I've worked on are coming out and having resonant responses in different ways. I've been doing this long enough, and it's the love of my life."
Gugino was in Vancouver last year wrapping up Wayward Pines, and eight days after that finished, jetted to Australia to shoot San Andreas.
"I came back did some reshoots for Wayward Pines, and then looked at my boyfriend and was like, 'You may have never heard me say this in all the years of our relationship, but I'm ready for a vacation.' That day, I got the offer for The Brink. I read it and thought, what a great group of people," says Gugino.
Executive producer Jerry Weintraub first worked with Gugino on 1989's Troop Beverly Hills, when she lied about her age, saying she was 14 (she was 16), to get the part. Since then, she played Michael J. Fox's love interest on Spin City in 1996, the mom in the Spy Kids trilogy, and an agent in HBO's Entourage. Weintraub cast her in The Brink because she could hold her own against Robbins.
"Tim is cheating on her every five minutes. We needed someone who was hot and sexy and so on. And she's all those things, and a wonderful actress. And she's not dumb. She's very smart. She's never down. She's never depressed. I like that about her," says Weintraub.
As for her character and her complicated marriage to an also-cheating husband "They have this genuine love for each other. They respect each other more than anyone they know. And yet they are having sex with other people. I think they make this open relationship work as well as they can, but that becomes slightly challenging in addition to the fact that Tim's character is so self-centered. The finale is kind of epic."
Gugino, 43, says producers first thought she was too young for the role, given that Robbins is 56 — something you rarely hear in Hollywood. For her, that attitude was "so refreshing," as was the ability to explore her character's sexuality and ambition.
"Women are complicated. I have not gotten jobs very specifically because they were like, 'You know what? You're going to overshadow the man,'" says Gugino.
But she doesn't really let it get to her. "I think it's also my age. I'm less interested in being liked, probably, as a person, than when I was younger. I want to be decent to people."