With Carla Gugino, it’s not a matter of asking yourself what TV show or movie you remember her from. It’s asking, what don’t you remember her from?
Because Gugino is one of those actors who it seems has been in nearly everything you and your friends have been obsessed with. From her memorable turn as Hollywood agent Amanda Daniels in Entourage to recent starring roles in buzzy Netflix dramas The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunting of Hill House, Gugino has built a formidable career, and the 52-year-old says she’s right where she wants to be.
“I never looked like an ingénue,” she tells Glamour. “I never sounded like one. I never felt like one inside. And so I sort of always knew that some of my best roles would come later in life.”
Now, Gugino is moving from the ghosts of Hill House and scheming of Usher to the only slightly-less-horror-and-scheme-filled world of political journalism (I kid, I kid), with a starring role in Max’s new drama The Girls on the Bus, which premieres on Thursday. The show is based on the memoir Chasing Hillary by journalist Amy Chozick, who covered Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail through both her unsuccessful bids to become the first female US president. The show follows four women journalists as they race to cover a modern-day presidential race, with Gugino playing Grace, a veteran reporter known as the “Queen of the Scoops.”
Ahead of the show’s premiere, Gugino chatted with Glamour about starring in a show about politics during an actual election year, what she learned about being a journalist, and her advice for building a career that lasts.
Glamour: This is kind of meta, because you’re talking to me as a journalist about playing a journalist! What’s one thing that you learned about the media industry that you didn’t know before playing Grace?
Carla Gugino: It is interesting. What I didn’t understand was how…you need to be incredibly accurate, source [your information] well, and also get your story out in record time. I don’t think I quite understood that race. Obviously we see the flip side of it where we get news that comes out that is actually inaccurate, and then it has to be rescinded and commented on. But it ultimately does end up being kind of a judgment call of, do we have enough information to feel like we can publish this story or not? And that’s a debatable issue. One of my favorite things about acting is that it allows me to see into worlds that I didn’t know.
The book was written about the 2008 and 2016 campaigns—which were a different political time—but the show is set in the present day, and people are so negative about the state of politics right now. I thought it was interesting that the show, I feel, had an almost hopeful tone. Was that intentional?
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