Gina Gershon almost flat turned down the role of Donatella in the new Lifetime TV movie “House of Versace”. It is based on Deborah Ball’s book “House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival”. The movie tells the story of Donatella Versace trying to keep her family and the family business together after her brother, Gianni’s murder in 1997. However, according to an interview she did with Katie Couric, the script won her over.

“I think because I hadn’t read it (the script) yet, and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve been offered Donatella’, and I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m touching that’, just because I think, when we think of Donatella, you think, ‘Oh, she’s so flamboyant, she’s a bit of a caricature’, but then I read the script and I just thought, it’s really a family drama at the end of the day and I found it so compelling, her story, I almost wish it hadn’t been her. I was like, ‘I’ll play this no matter what’, because I love the rise and fall and rise…”

The famous voice of Donatella Versace was not that easy to hone, according to Digital Spy. “They even tried to give me the fake cigarettes because they thought they would be better, but those just killed me. There’s so much oil in them. So I just started smoking a lot before I went into it, so I could work myself up to it. As soon as it was over, I was like, ‘Thank God!’, and then I smoked a little bit when I was doing the looping… but I wasn’t used to it and I got bronchitis.”

The things we do for the work we love…

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