Carla Gugino on Her Seductive, Kickass Female James Bond: ‘Sexuality Is Part and Parcel With Who We Are’

Whether as a sultry parole officer in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, a golden-age superhero in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, or as a globetrotting espionage agent in the Spy Kids trilogy, Carla Gugino has proven herself an expert at playing tough, sexy badasses. Yet in her illustrious career she’s never seen, much less embodied, anyone quite like Daisy “Jett” Kowalski, the professional thief at the center of her new Cinemax crime series Jett.

“There are great women’s roles in TV, specifically right now,” admits Gugino before Jett’s June 14 premiere. “But the female anti-hero is still a bit of a double standard. There’s still this thing where a man can behave in an unusual way, or a way that might not fit societal norms, and you just go, well, that’s just how it is. But with a woman, you’re like, was she abused as a child? We need to fill this in. Or does she have some social condition? We need to give her an excuse to behave in what we consider an atypical manner.”

Not so in Jett, which positions its lead as your typical accomplished crook—the difference being that she’s a take-no-shit woman, and uses every tool at her disposal to get the job done. “We were really interested in this being that she’s just really good at what she does. She’s a master thief. She’s pragmatic. She’s not particularly introspective. She’s not Robin Hood. And she has her own moral compass. That’s really fun to play.”

Created by Gugino’s long-time partner and collaborator, Sebastian Gutierrez (Elektra Luxx), who energizes his material with bold colors, plentiful flashbacks, and witty and profane pulp dialogue, Jett picks up with its protagonist after she’s walked out of prison and right back into one last job for Charlie Baudelaire (Giancarlo Esposito), a kingpin desperate for Jett—with whom he’s carrying on a passionate, if somewhat one-sided, affair—to retrieve a diamond ring from Eastern European gangster Miljan Bestic (Greg Bryk). As is often the case, that final assignment goes sideways, thus jeopardizing the stable life Jett has crafted for herself and her young daughter Alice (Violet McGraw), as well as the terminally ill friend Maria (Elena Anaya) who resides with them. Before long, she’s caught between multiple warring forces, and juggling allegiances in order to protect her neck.

Fortunately for Jett, she has a bevy of skills at her disposal—including sex, which she employs with a matter-of-factness that’s usually reserved for the likes of James Bond. Asked if Jett’s success in this arena is the result of her male adversaries being at the mercy of their libidos, Gugino laughs, conceding, “What I think is interesting is that the women are definitely more practical and the men are more romantic, which is unusual, because normally the tables are turned. I think Jett looks at things in a very practical way. How can I solve this problem? How can I get this information? In some of those cases, with some of the men, the quickest way is that way. But it’s not like I think she even thinks a lot about her using her wily ways, so to speak, so much as it’s just the solution to solve this problem. I love that.”

Gugino’s chameleon-like adaptability has long been one of her hallmarks, as evidenced by her varied résumé: on stage doing Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; in film starring in Night at the Museum and San Andreas; and on TV in the Elmore Leonard-based Karen Sisco and Mike Flanagan’s Netflix efforts Gerald’s Game and The Haunting of Hill House. Another facet of her work, as in Jett, is the sight of the actress performing in various states of undress. Her comfort with being naked on-screen, she surmises, stems in part from her unconventional childhood. “Maybe it has to do with living in a teepee with my mom when I was five years old, just running around naked in the river with a bunch of hippies. I’m sure that has some influence on it,” she chuckles.

Gugino’s nonchalant approach to revealing herself, however, mostly comes from her rational approach to her characters. “I think sexuality is part and parcel with who we are. It really is. And for some people, it’s more expressed than others. I guess I don’t separate it from the rest of the character. For me, it’s not that I go, ‘I’m so excited to do a nude scene!’ It’s not that I look forward to those moments so much as I find that we have a society where you can see an arm shot off but you can’t see a woman or a man, after a sex scene, get up from bed and walk to the bathroom to pee naked. We have to wrap a towel around ourselves. And then you’re like, wait, did they have bad sex?!”

Gutierrez credits his own upbringing for Jett’s straightforward approach to sexuality, which is most potently felt in pre- and post-coital exchanges. “I was born and raised in Venezuela, and even before Venezuela became what it is now—the most dangerous place in the world—in South America, and the third world, life is cheap.” He explains that making sexual energy a positive, rather than dark, force “permeates the world of Jett. These people are really physical people. You have to mean what you say and say what you mean, even if you’re lying.”

Decked out in a collection of stylishly wild outfits (including, most strikingly, candy-colored and leopard-printed trench coats), Gugino is a cunning, sensual force to be reckoned with in Jett. For Gutierrez, who wrote and directed every episode of the first season, she was the natural choice for Jett, precisely because Jett is the sort of character Gugino has yet to play. “Carla is extremely versatile, and I’m not the one to say it, because everyone writes about it, but she is underused at every turn,” he asserts.

“From a technical standpoint, Carla is so good at so many things that she isn’t asked to do that it’s really fun for her to do a character like Jett—which seems to be at least superficially the opposite of her essence,” he continues. “Carla is all empathy, she’s all emotion, she’s sensual, curvy, warm, very Italian. And then suddenly she has to play a character where, if Jett was male, the character would have been Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin. Suddenly having that tension between not giving anything away, but knowing that it’s bubbling right beneath the surface, becomes what the character actually is.”

Having been together since 1996 and partnering on eight films, Gugino and Gutierrez are an established creative fit. Pondering the key to their fruitful professional bond, Gugino confesses, “I think that, like with any good relationship of any kind, work or personal, the analysis of it almost kills it on some level.” Nonetheless, she grants that “the fact that we are in a relationship together means we have built a lot of trust over the years, and that absolutely translates to set. The nice thing is that we allow each other enough space to do what we’re both good at. I guess that comes from respect and trust. I’m thankful we can work together and we really enjoy it, because I know so many super-talented couples that that’s not the case.”

Gutierrez agrees, stating about the origin of the series—and Gugino’s role in it—“I don’t think I ever sit down and say I’m going to do something for her. It’s just I write her into almost everything that I write because she’s my favorite actress. I’m like, Carla would be really good in this role!”

Despite having participated in numerous genre efforts (including, aside from the aforementioned titles, the likes of Snake Eyes, Sucker Punch, American Gangster and Race to Witch Mountain), Gugino reveals that she was never much of a horror or comic book aficionado growing up. Nonetheless, her work in those fields has given her a newfound respect for their capacity to dig into fertile social and emotional issues. “Genre is oddly the place right now where I think we can tell the truth almost more than we can through naturalism. For example, The Haunting of Hill House is really a story about grief and trauma, and how that’s ultimately potentially repaired. So I guess I have become more of a devotee than I was, just by being in it.”

That’s also true of Jett, which for all its flashy time-hopping thrills about an expert thief navigating a perilous underworld, is also the saga of independent females banding together to succeed—a notion that speaks directly to Gugino’s own experiences: “The secret story of this show is that there is a family of women being created. And it’s what women do with each other in life. For me, it feels very reflective of my life. I have friends and collaborators who are women who will be with me until the end of time, and vice versa. I think it’s cool if there’s a moment right now where people are more receptive to that.”