Susie Bright Looks Back On Her Cameo in "Bound"

When the Wachowski brothers were writing their first film Bound, they based the characters and social situations (although not the murders!) on Susie Bright's book, Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World -- so how better to pay the writer back than by offering her a part in the film?

Photo by Jill Posener

"I got a letter from the Wachowskis" offering a cameo, Bright told Current. So she sat down with the script, and took a look at the role offered to her -- a woman who Gina Gershon's character Corky attempts to pick up in a lesbian bar.

Bright, author of the upcoming book Big Sex, Little Death, liked that she knew the bar they would be shooting in, but she also knew that since the film was shooting in Los Angeles, they wouldn't be getting the types of extras they would need. "If you go to the casting agency, you're going to get the closeted LA crowd/ L Word vibe, where everyone must be femme," she said. So Bright suggested they stock the bar with "the dykes we need," ones who represented a mix of butch and femme, and recruited friends from San Francisco.  For instance, the woman in the next booth over to Bright's was her ex-girlfriend, photographer Honey Lee Cottrell.

"She gives Corky a dirty look," Bright said. "Corky's just come back from prison and she's not very well-liked, so everyone's in a 'you again? we all hate you' mode. And when she shot her that look, the Wachowskis were like, 'That's great! Can you do that again?' They called it giving the mustard. 'Yeah, give us more mustard.'"

In addition to providing additional extras, Bright also supplied her own wardrobe -- a custom-made outfit made by a friend, Kathy Andrews, who did erotic leather tailoring for fetish wear. "I had that made for me a couple years before," Bright said, "and I knew it looked fantastic. I wore it because they needed me to be a sexpot!"

A sexpot who attracts Gina Gershon, who then walks over and hits on her, only to be interrupted by a cop -- and Bright's character's girlfriend. "She was wonderful," Bright said. "She made me feel like an abused woman who wasn't allowed to speak."

Had she not been in character, Bright said, she would have flirted back -- but Gershon still wouldn't have gotten lucky, since their sexual attraction was all in the acting. "This wasn't about the real me," Bright laughed. "I was just acting like a deer caught in the headlights, a pretty girl for a big tough girlfriend."