Gina Gershon says she nearly broke Tom Cruise’s nose while filming Cocktail

Actor says Cruise remained ‘protective’ of her despite accident

Gina Gershon has revealed that she nearly broke Tom Cruise’s nose while shooting the first sex scene of her career, yet the Top Gun star remained a “gentleman”.

The actors starred together in Cocktail in 1988 and Gershon recalled Cruise being “protective” of her, even after she had “kneed him right in the nose”.

“He was a gentleman,” Gerson told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live.

“It starts off under the covers and I told him I was very ticklish. I was like, ‘No, no, don’t ever do that,’” she said, recounting the filming of the sex scene. “In one take I think he wanted a reaction and he grabbed my stomach and I kneed him right in the nose. I was like, ‘Oh my god! I just broke Tom Cruise’s nose.’ He was like, ‘No, you told me. It’s my fault.’ He was so protective over me. He was great.”

Asked if Cruise took care of her, she said, “Totally”.

In Cocktail, Cruise played Brian Flanagan, a business student who takes up bartending to make ends meet. The film also starred Elisabeth Shue as his love interest, and Gina Gershon played a photographer who Cruise has a short relationship with.

The film made $171.5m worldwide but received negative reviews from critics and even got two Razzie Awards for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay.

In the same interview, Gershon recalled being warned by former agents that if she played a lesbian, she would “never work again”.

She had received a script for the 1996 sapphic thriller Bound, co-directed by sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski, and ended up taking the lead role of Corky opposite Jennifer Tilly’s Violet.

“I just said, ‘Oh, well, I guess if you can’t represent me, I’ll go somewhere else.’ You know? No hard feelings,” she said, adding that she believed in the script.

Gershon will next be seen in sci-fi film Borderlands, which also stars Cate Blanchett, Edgar Ramírez, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt and Kevin Hart.

Borderlands, an adaption of a popular video game of the same name, follows bounty hunter Lilith as she teams up with a ragtag group of misfits to find a missing girl on her home planet.

Some early reviews of the film, directed by Eli Roth, say it doesn’t have much promise, with The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey calling it “a total disaster”.

“Wildly miscast actors and an impenetrable script make this long-delayed actioner alienating to fans of the game and incomprehensible to the casual viewer,” she writes, warning gamers that it “may strike terror into your heart”.

Borderlands releases in theatres on 9 August.