It is one of the (several) aspects of “Friends” that has not aged well, but was a monumental and groundbreaking performance when Kathleen Turner debuted as Chandler’s (Matthew Perry) drag queen father.
Nevertheless, Turner is unabashedly proud of the work she did on the series, which she admitted to Andy Cohen on “Watch What Happens Live” she took on because it was something wholly new for her to explore.
“I thought, okay, a woman playing a man playing a woman. I haven’t done that,” she said of hearing the offer. “So I said yes.”
The famously husky-voiced Turner would go on to play Charles Bing, a gay man and female impersonator, across three episodes, with each one more memorable than the last. And while it was a little odd to have a woman playing a man, Turner did pull it off and for the time the role certainly generated a lot of chatter.
“Of course I wouldn’t do it now because there would be real people able to do it,” Turner said on a show where she shared her unabashed love for “RuPaul’s Drag Race” with fellow guest Ilana Glazer. Perhaps unironically, Kathleen Turner’s name has been used as an exclamation on “Drag Race,” which she finds simply delightful.
Worst On-Screen Kiss
Less delightful, and apparently a huge disappointment for Turner, was her romantic co-star in the film “Switching Channels.” But that’s primarily because they did a switcheroo on her that she wasn’t prepared for. When she signed on to do the film, she was starring opposite Michael Caine — “Good choice, right?” she smiled — only he wound up tied up with a faulty shark on the set of “Jaws 4.”
And so, Turner wound up with her worst on-screen kiss after Caine was swapped out for Burt Reynolds. When asked who her worst was, Turner said Reynolds with no hesitation.
In fact, at the end of the segment, she didn’t even dignify her co-star with his full name, calling him Burt Whatsisname.
Apparently, the problem was that Turner was pregnant while filming, which gave her a hard “stop date.” She says they filmed everything they could in hopes of getting Caine, but it finally became impossible if they wanted to get the film out on time.
For his part, Reynolds returned the disdain, telling Cohen in March 2018 that she was perhaps the most overrated actress of the 1970s and ’80s, admitting that he didn’t get along with her, this wasn’t a good picture and he’d remove it from his resume altogether if he could.
Turning Down $5 Million
Apparently Turner has reached a point in her life and career where she isn’t at all concerned about just putting it out there. It’s not necessarily shade if it’s just objectively true, right?
That seemed to be the case when she talked about the $5 million film role that she let get away because the script “was terrible.” But this wasn’t a story about regretting a role she’d turned down; Turner doesn’t have any of those.
The film even starred her first celebrity crush, Richard Chamberlain, but it didn’t matter. When her agent called her about it, she jokingly told him, “Just tell them I want $5 million,” in an attempt to walk away gracefully.
“There was this pause and he went, ‘Well they started there,'” Turner laughed. So she had no choice but to just tell them no. Apparently, her fiance at the time was stunned, asking if he’d just overheard her turning down $5 million.
“Yeah, but the film sucks,” she told him. “And I was right,” she added to Cohen.
That film was “King Solomon’s Mine,” a 1985 “Indiana Jones” pastiche that currently sits at 8 percent with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for two Razzies.
Of course Andy loved all the shade, laughing that he would have to look up who that role eventually went to. But Turner saved him the search, quickly saying, “Sharon Stone.”
Another caller asked her about her favorite memory of working with Nicolas Cage on “Peggy Sue Got Married,” but Turner has already talked at length about how she doesn’t really have great memories of that shoot.
In her memoir, she alleged that Cage was arrested twice for drunk driving, but she lost a defamation lawsuit filed by her former co-star, later confessing that those claims were false. Nevertheless, she maintains it was not a pleasant shoot and says that Cage apologized for years afterward for his role in that.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that he favorite memory was the final day of filming when she purports that Cage dropped to his knees after arriving on set with a bottle of tequila and apologized. “I said, ‘I’ve got one more scene. Come on,'” Turner recalled.
She very diplomatically described Cage as “devastatingly difficult” to work with.
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