Gina Gershon’s first starring role at just 18 was going to be in Prince’s classic 1984 film “Purple Rain,” but she turned down the coveted part when she grew nervous about a nude scene, the actress told Page Six. To audition, she spent one magical day with the pop mastermind.
Gershon — who was offered the role ultimately played by Prince protégé Apollonia Kotero — recalled after his shocking death Thursday, “I had never done a movie before. I was 18 or something . . . I was young. At that time, I wanted to be a quote-unquote serious actress.” Looking back, “I don’t know what I was thinking — I was totally stupid, but that was my thought process.”
But before turning down the role, she met Prince in Minneapolis, where he even picked her up in a purple limo. “It was all really surreal, but the most surreal moment was when he played me [the album] ‘Purple Rain,’ ” Gershon recalled. “I kept trying to not let my jaw drop open. It was so beautiful, and then it literally started drizzling through the sky roof, and I thought, ‘How did he make that happen?’ It was a very magical, surreal, incredible experience.”
At Prince’s place, “the outside was purple, but the inside wasn’t. Or maybe it was the opposite?” Gershon said. “It was a long time ago. We went dancing. He watched me dance. And then we played music at the piano for awhile and we laughed and then he handed me the script.”
When Gershon said she had to get back to NYU for a show she was in, “He said, ‘Have an understudy’ . . . I was like, ‘I’m in college, they don’t have understudies.’ So I made him drive me to the airport, and I don’t think he was very happy.”
Apollonia skinny-dips in the movie. “I just thought, ‘Sex scenes aren’t necessarily the way they are written,’ ” Gershon told us when we caught up with her at a MoMA premiere of Tilda Swinton ’s “A Bigger Splash” on Thursday. “When I read [the ‘Purple Rain’ script], I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want that to be my first scene.’ ”
Gershon instead had parts in other ’80s films, including “Pretty in Pink, “Red Heat” and “Cocktail” before breaking out in “Showgirls,” “Bound” and “Face/Off.”