Elizabeth Berkley barely survived ‘Showgirls’: “It was not fun for a little while”
Showgirls caused a very, very big stir when it came out in 1995. The tabloids went absolutely mental over it, half of them calling it obscene and the other half calling it the worst film ever made. Even before it was released, there were people calling for the director to face some kind of punishment, and the same for the lead actor, Elizabeth Berkley.
It was hysterical nonsense, of course, but these were the days when the red top newspapers informed most of the country, not that it was much different in the USA, where the religious right had a field day with it.
It wasn’t that people were shocked that the director was Paul Verhoeven, who had huge success with the Sharon Stone erotic thriller Basic Instinct a few years previously, but they were not having it that sex work could possibly be an actual thing that women did; the same Republican lawmakers who went to lapdancing clubs every week definitely didn’t want a film being released about it.
When it finally hit cinemas with the most restrictive rating possible, the problems with Showgirls arose almost instantly. Not that the film was particularly bad, because it wasn’t, and the levels of nudity weren’t off the scale, it was that critics focused on things like a particularly thrashy sex scene in a swimming pool and described it as laughable, with Twin Peaks’ Kyle MacLachlan barely surviving Berkley hopping up and down on him like a very wet demon.
Berkley herself got the lion’s share of the abuse, however. The puritanical Americans didn’t like the fact that her most recent gig, and her claim to fame, was in the teen high school sitcom Saved by the Bell, and the transition from kooky cheerleader ‘Jessie’ to hard-up stripper-cum-showgirl Nomi Malone was not one that went down well, so to speak.
Berkeley was undeterred, however, saying: “When I saw they needed a girl who could dance, who could act, who could play a showgirl and ‘Oh, my God,’ Paul Verhoeven, who had just made Sharon Stone the biggest star in the world, was directing it?! I stopped at nothing to go after this role.”
And so when Verhoeven’s movie hit cinemas after all the hype, it was a huge box office failure, barely breaking even, probably because wives didn’t want their husbands going to see it, and adolescent males couldn’t even get in to see it.
Some 30 years after the film’s release, Berkeley spoke to fans at an anniversary screening of the film, which has now become something of a cult classic and has been reappraised by some critics.
She said of her experience after the film’s release: “I took a beating, guys. It was not fun for a little while. I’m not going to lie. It was painful. I was isolated. I felt abandoned by the very people I collaborated with.”
Berkeley was shunned by fellow actors and industry professionals after the film came out, essentially being locked out of Hollywood for some time. She did eventually start to find work, however, and appeared in a Saved by the Bell reboot as well as other TV and movie work.
Unfortunately for her, lightning can indeed strike twice, and her most recent role has been in Kim Kardashian’s roundly panned TV series All’s Fair, directed by Ryan Murphy, which is being described as a “$100m hate watch”, despite the presence of actors like Glenn Close and Sarah Paulson.
