[This story contains major spoilers from the series finale of 9-1-1: Lone Star, “Homecoming.”]
Gina Torres has made a career out of playing, as she puts it, “overly accomplished, standalone” women. But when her old friend Tim Minear — with whom she had worked on the cult favorite Firefly — called in the early months of the pandemic to offer her the lead role opposite Rob Lowe in 9-1-1: Lone Star, Torres could hardly believe her good fortune. Not only was she getting to play a wife and mother for the first time in her three-decade career, but she was also portraying a woman who decides to go back to work as a paramedic captain to support her family during the pandemic.
“She’s an incredible example of what women can accomplish and the space they can take up in the world,” Torres tells The Hollywood Reporter of her character, Tommy Vega. “So often you’re told, ‘You don’t get to have it all. You can’t have it all. There are always sacrifices to be made,’ and that’s true of anybody. It’s not just being a woman.”
In her four seasons on Fox’s Austin-set procedural 9-1-1: Lone Star, Tommy has weathered just about every personal crisis life has to offer. She’s dealt with mom guilt over not always being there for her twin daughters. Her husband, Charles (Derek Webster), died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. Amid her grief, Tommy had a brief romantic liaison with her brother-in-law, Julius (Nathan Owens), who opened her mind up to finding love again. She later proposed to Trevor (D.B. Woodside), an attractive single father who just happened to be the pastor of her church — only for her to break things off after deciding she couldn’t bear the thought of separating him from his young daughter, who lives part-time in Kansas.
But in the final episodes of Lone Star, Tommy is dealt perhaps the biggest crisis of all: a breast cancer diagnosis that, in the penultimate episode, appeared to claim her life. As she prepares for her death, Tommy receives a notice that an asteroid — yes, an asteroid — is about to hit the city, and she decides to use what little energy she has left to treat those who are injured. In wake of the asteroid’s impact, Lowe’s Owen Strand and his firefighters are able to stop an explosion at a nuclear reactor. And in a flash-forward, Tommy is revealed to have survived what initially appeared to be a terminal cancer diagnosis because her tumors had actually pseudo-progressed. (Go figure?)
Since wrapping the final season last July, Torres says she has “given a lot of thought” to what she will do next. While she was not ready to divulge any new details, she hints that her next act will include a lot more producing — a skill she developed on Pearson, the short-lived spinoff of Suits.
Below, Torres opens up about playing out Tommy’s cancer journey, why she is most proud of portraying the universal struggles of a working mother on Lone Star, the enduring legacy of Jessica Pearson as Suits LA readies to premiere (“I feel personally responsible for entirely too many new attorneys in the world”) and her take on the never-ending battle for authentic onscreen representation.
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You’ve played cancer patients before, but you initially resisted this final arc for Tommy, believing she had already suffered enough. Once you changed your mind and learned what the writers had planned in the back half of this final season, how did you approach playing Tommy’s cancer battle?
The same way I approached Bella Crawford on Hannibal — with as much strength and integrity and honesty as possible. When you take on a role and storyline like this, you are painfully aware that people who are going through the same thing will be watching you, and so you don’t want any of that to ring false for them. [Co-showrunner] Rashad [Raisani] very early on brought me on and we partnered with Stand Up to Cancer. We made sure that the storylines, how we handled it and how it was written were true. As much as we are deep in the fabric of Hollywood storytelling, we wanted to be as factually and as emotionally accurate as possible. So yeah, there’s a lot of crying (laughs). There were a lot of dark moments between action and cut, but I was happy to do it.
Was there any part of you that wondered if Tommy would survive her bleak prognosis? Most of the viewers, prior to the airing of this final episode, still believe Tommy died alone on her couch.
I asked Rashad very early on, and he was very clear. He said, “We’re going to take it all the way to the edge, but I promise there will be a happy ending at the end of the journey.” I said, “OK, alright, then let’s go.”
Rashad told me that one of the reasons he decided to break up Tommy and Trevor this season was because Rashad always believed that Charles was the great love of Tommy’s life, and she never had a chance to say goodbye to him before he died in season two. How did you come to understand the decision to bring Charles back as a ghost to comfort Tommy at the end of her life?
As an actor, I loved playing with Derek again. That was awesome. I love the characters and the relationship that we established inside of that world, so it was great to be that couple onscreen again, as weird and as charged as it was. But even more so for Tommy, or separate from Tommy, what a treat for the audience to come full circle in that way. What I’ve been getting [online] is that when he does appear in [the penultimate] episode, there was this sort of shock and awe like, “Oh! [Breathes a sigh of relief.] Oh.” They knew that he was a soft place for her to land, and that’s what they wanted for her. It was lovely that [co-creator] Tim [Minear] and Rashad were able to do that.
How did you figure out how to play Tommy in the supposed final stages of her life with the ghost of Charles?
If anyone has ever witnessed somebody who is very, very ill who is transitioning, there’s a very specific thing that happens. There’s fight, fear, and then a surrender and peace to the inevitability of it, and you sort of see the fear leave them and a kind of acceptance take over. I wanted to honor all of that.
When you first joined Lone Star in season two, you remarked to me that Tommy Vega was the most fully realized woman you had ever played. Now that you have a little bit of space from playing Tommy, how do you reflect on the legacy of this character? What are you most proud to have accomplished?
It’s a very little bit of space from Tommy. (Laughs) I love Tommy. I loved playing Tommy Vega. I think she’s an incredible woman. She’s an incredible example of what women can accomplish and the space they can take up in the world. So often you’re told, “You don’t get to have it all. You can’t have it all. There are always sacrifices to be made,” and that’s true of anybody. It’s not just being a woman. It always, of course, feels like the brunt of it is falling squarely on our shoulders, because there’s the mother piece, there’s the partnering piece, there’s the work piece. And to try to keep all of that in balance, the answer is … you just can’t keep it all in balance.
But what I love about Tommy and this character is the honesty with which we portrayed that. Life has a fluidity to it, and sometimes things take a bigger priority — like a meteor (Laughs) But you always try to be there for your kids and tuck them in at night and kiss their foreheads and hopefully have a hot meal, and then you go off and maybe kiss a guy, a preacher (laughs). You meet life on life’s terms, and I loved being able to do that with Tommy Vega.
On a recent episode of the Suits watch podcast with your former co-stars Patrick J. Adams and Sarah Rafferty, you said, “I’ve made a really lovely career of playing lethal, badass women. And I’ve always done it with a sense of humor and pride, and also firmly, firmly rooted in my femininity and in the power of my femininity.” So often we are told that female characters cannot be both strong and beautiful, that one essentially has to sacrifice a part of one quality for another. But your characters have refuted that theory. Could you expand on what you meant when you said that?
Well, the short answer is … I’m a woman. (Laughs) I love being a woman. I enjoy being a woman. I have no desire to be anything other than who I am, and I enjoy the body that I’m in, and so I bring that to all of my characters, until there comes a time where my character is not written in that way. So I don’t see my sex, my gender, as a detriment to anything that I can do. It certainly does not disqualify me from being a boss, from being intelligent, from being capable. So, why would I sacrifice any part of that in a part that I’m playing? Too often, we are told historically, as you mentioned, that that can’t happen; that you have to be a man in a man’s world. You have to pull all of that up to be able to compete. I disagree. I think it’s far more powerful and far more interesting to not bow and bend the knee to the masculine in the room. There’s no need to.
At this stage of your career, do you feel like you are able to be more picky with the kinds of stories you want to tell, or do you feel like you are still actively trying to push back against the archetype of the exceedingly capable, standalone characters who have defined your body of work?
I think in line with what I was just talking about, there are so many different ways of being a woman in the world, right? And I’m dedicated to exploring as many of those ways as possible. I’ve often said it’s lovely to be able to play those women who don’t have every answer, who aren’t sure of what comes next, someone who really might let her lesser angels dictate what her next move is going to be. I think that’s great, and I see that in the future for myself. There’s certainly some comedy that comes of that, so we’ll see. I’m so grateful for everything that’s come along.
And, am I choosing to do more varied work? Yes. But if there’s a badass in my future, I’m going to play her! I’m going to play her to the best of my ability, and I will continue to add layers and nuance to whoever she might be. Because none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes and we don’t have all the answers all the time, and so I look forward to that as well.
Suits ended its nine-season run in 2019, but the show became a cultural phenomenon when it landed on Netflix in 2023. What have you made of the resurgence of the show?
I don’t know what to make of it, honestly! It has gotten harder to walk through airports, that much I can tell you, for sure. I think it is indicative of what a great show it was. It taps into a kind of aspirational drive that we all have for ourselves and maybe a future that we see for ourselves. To be that impossibly witty that impossibly well-dressed, and that impossibly good-looking all the time, is impossible. But why the hell not try? Why the hell not? I feel personally responsible for entirely too many new attorneys in the world, but maybe I will get to counterbalance that with more first responders in the world. We’ll see!
On the Suits watch podcast, you said that, for the role of Jessica Pearson, you took inspiration from the late, great Diahann Carroll, who once told producer Aaron Spelling on Dynasty: “Write for a powerful white man. I will take care of the rest.” You understood your character’s place on the show — she was the no-nonsense boss in service of Harvey (Gabriel Macht) and Mike’s (Adams) stories — but you have remarked that she was the least developed lead character on the show. How did you find new layers in Jessica for yourself if it wasn’t necessarily there in the writing?
That’s an actor’s job to do, quite frankly. I think maybe some of my training had to do with that, because I started off in theater. And when you do theater and you’re doing eight shows a week, and it’s the same eight shows every week, then you find the nuance, you dig deeper into the character. Even though you’re saying the same lines, there’s the intentionality of how you perform it and how you say them that shifts as you gain understanding just from being able to play that role. The same can be true in television and film. Even though you are saying different lines, the scenes have changed, and there’s this arc; you still have to dig deeper into this character so that you can feel their growth over however many seasons that you can. That’s an actor’s exercise: How do I keep it fresh? How do I keep it interesting? How do I keep this character growing?
Even though we did not get Jessica’s full backstory until Pearson, during your time on Suits, were there any details you were personally able to develop for the character to better understand where she was coming from?
I remember having a very honest conversation with Jackie Strause Aaron [Korsh] about Jessica in particular. I knew exactly what my job was on that show, and I never asked for more story. I never asked for more screen time. I never asked for any of that, really. But what I did ask for was very, very specific, especially as we got into season three. I said, “I certainly don’t need to be in every scene. But when I do show up, I do need to be the smartest person in the room.” Aside from that, I said, “I need people that I can talk to.”
By and large, my personal relationship on that show was with Harvey. And as interesting as that was for a lot of people, there was only so deep we could go. I was his boss, I was his superior, and so I needed people. And that’s why we got Jeff Malone [also played by D.B. Woodside], and I even got a sister in there somewhere. But it was lonely. Everybody had somebody on that show. Harvey had me, Donna and Mike, and then Mike, of course, had [Meghan Markle’s] Rachel. [Rick Hoffman’s] Louis had his invisible secretary and Sheila. But Jessica really didn’t have anybody. So it was time for her to [have someone]. She never really quite got a soft place to land though, because she and Jeff were always at odds with each other, and then that all went terribly wrong. But those are the two things that I asked for.
It has been nearly six years since you launched Pearson, which, in addition to starring, you helped develop and executive produce. Do you feel like you have accomplished what you set out to do with Jessica, despite the fact that the spinoff only lasted one season?
Yeah. It is something I pitched; it is something I was heavily involved in creating. I’m very proud of it. I’m very proud of what we were able to do. I will say it is the show I wanted to make. I wish we had had more time. I wish we’d had more time to tell more stories, to dive a little bit deeper into that world, because I had often said that whereas Suits was about the top 5 percent, I wanted Pearson to be about everybody else. And I believe that we were able to accomplish that in a really special way.
You are now synonymous with two major TV franchises. What is the likelihood of you popping up in either the upcoming Suits spinoff, Suits LA, or the other iterations of the 9-1-1 universe? [Writer’s note: Another 9-1-1 spinoff is currently in development, while the original series is now in the middle of its eighth season.]
I have no idea. I really can’t speak to Suits: LA at all. I haven’t spoken to anybody. I wish them the best, though. I really do hope they have a great ride and that they enjoy what hopefully is getting ready to happen. The 9-1-1 universe — again, I have no idea. I don’t know what goes on in these guys’ brains!
To be fair, you did a voiceover on the original 9-1-1 this season, albeit in a flashback. I was watching that episode and thought to myself, “Wait, was that Gina’s voice?”
Yeah, well done! You heard that? I was minding my own business. I was at home, I think I was making dinner, and Tim called me. He was in the editing bay, and he said, “We need somebody to do this last call. Can you do it?” I said, “Give me five minutes.” (Laughs) He texted me the copy, and I did it.
You have never hidden your identity as an Afro-Latina, but you made it a point to bring that part of yourself to your last two major TV roles — Jessica Pearson and Tommy Vega. The industry is very much still trying to catch up with this idea of cultural authenticity, but it feels like there has been a backsliding of progres. There still seems to be a limited understanding of race and ethnicity, despite the fact that Hollywood likes to put people in boxes using those criteria.
Yeah, that hasn’t exactly stopped, has it?
No, it hasn’t.
That’s something that persists [after] all this time.
We have so many conversations about what can be done, what should be done, but what do you think is still being lost in this larger conversation about diversity and inclusion?
There’s so much I want to say. I want to bring in that quote from Diahann [about writing for a powerful white man] into this. I want to start it with that, meaning it doesn’t matter what you write. I think people get stuck in [this idea of], “Well, I don’t know how to write for this person. It’s a language that maybe I don’t speak.” And there are two ways to handle that: 1) You can hire writers that are reflective of the world that you are creating. 2) But most importantly, if you hire the actor, they will bring themselves to the role. And if you are collaborative, then you will allow that magic and that synergy to happen with your words and with somebody’s lived experience.
I think too often people get caught up in this mountain of diversity that cannot be climbed, [because] somewhere along the way, we are going to lose the status quo. I’m going to say that as diplomatically as I possibly can. The loss of the status quo is so fearful and so terrifying, and that argument just rings so hollow, especially at a time when there are so many different ways to watch content. There’s so much out there. There’s so much opportunity that we couldn’t possibly watch everything that is out right now in terms of content. So that fear is simply that — it’s just fear. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to lose anything. But you will gain a greater understanding of the world around you and the people around you, and the fact that we all really do want the same things. So, to get caught up in the minutia of the “how?” — just do it. This is the world that we live in. It’s not pretend.
Sixty years ago, the argument was — well, you don’t even have to go back 60 years. You can go back [40 years] to The Cosby Show, where [people thought] there was no way there was a Black couple that was that successful living in a brownstone they owned. You may as well have been talking about dragons and unicorns. They were real. And that served not just the Black community, but it served the country to see this beautifully well-adjusted Black family just living their lives. The same could be said for A Different World, and all the other shows that came after that. So I’m still hopeful.
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All episodes of 9-1-1: Lone Star are now streaming on Fox Now and Hulu. All episodes of Suits are now streaming on Netflix and Peacock.
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