ina Torres was born in 1969 at Flower Fifth Ave. Hospital in Manhattan. Her family lived briefly in Washington Heights until moving to The Bronx. Her parents were natives of Cuba. Her father was a typesetter for both La Prensa and then the Daily News. It was near the Grand Concourse, growing up in a mixed but predominantly Latino neighborhood that Gina began to absorb the culture of her world. “I always sang, always danced, sometimes with dad. The music we heard was Jonny Pacheco, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Machito. My Parents were classy beautiful Latin people. They grew up in the 30’s, a time when you looked clean, you were pressed; you looked people in the eye; you were gracious, no matter how much money you had. Those were the values I went into the world with.”
She attended the High School of Music & Art as a vocal major. Her earliest influence came from a percussion teacher who brought jazz to the classroom and opened her mind to a whole new world of music. Upon applying to colleges, even though she had been accepted to all of them, she could not afford to attend. “I figured I was just not going to go. I actually didn’t even want to go. I realized that this was a profession that I should just go and do. I wanted to fly or fall on my own. Then I’d know who I was and if I was good enough.”
She landed an intern level job answering telephones at the Lincoln Center Theater Company then under the direction of Gregory Mosher. They were casting for replacements in the Cole Porter musical “Anything Goes” and the casting director asked Gina, “Do you dance?” to which she replied, “Nope. But I move well.” Which got her an audition for the company. Although she didn’t get the part, it got her an agent who sent her up for a dinner theater production of
Dreamgirls, and she got the part. Her first professional engagement was 12 weekends in downtown Bridgeport, CT “This is the first time I wore high-heels and danced in them. This was my baptism of fire. I had actually been a bit of tom-boy so I think I became comfortable being a woman for the first time: makeup, wigs, shoes, and beaded gowns. It was so hard and so much fun. This is the jumping-of-the-cliff moment I’d set myself up for.”
After this, Gina was cast in a company
Theatre for New Audiences which staged classic plays and toured them to public schools throughout New York City. Here she was able to play roles in plays from “Raisin in the Sun” to “Antigone.” “I wasn’t that far removed in age from the audiences I was performing for. It was like performing for my peers.”
More stage work followed at theaters like Baltimore Center Stage and New York’s Public Theatre where she appeared in a production of Garcia Lorca’s
Blood Wedding in a cast that included Gloria Foster, one of the great African-American stage actresses of the time.
It was at this point that Gina began to audition for TV. She landed a bit part on the daytime drama
One Life to Live. They liked her enough to keep bringing her back over the years, always as a different character. Now more television work followed. A part on
Law & Order and then a BBC mini-series,
Unnatural Pursuits starring Alan Bates.
She got a chance to audition for the Broadway play
Face Value by David Henry Hwang, directed by Jerry Zaks and landed an understudy spot in the company. When the actress she covered left the company: “I was going to rehearsals as an understudy for two weeks watching them audition every black woman in New York. It wasn’t until four days before we opened in Boston that they finally gave me the part.” The show only ran one week of previews on Broadway.
Then came
M.A.N.T.I.S, a high-tech detective TV movie and pilot from Fox network starring Carl Lumley. It was the first time a network had backed a show where all the core principals were African-American. Gina played a coroner with an attitude. Fox was caught completely off-guard by the huge success of the pilot and had to scramble to put together a follow-up series. Unfortunately, the network replaced most of the black actors with whites. Gina and others got lost in the transition and show had lost its unique appeal.
Broadway beckoned once again when Tommy Tune cast Gina in
The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, the sequel to Tune’s previous Broadway blockbuster. “I was in hog heaven. I got my opening night party, my mom got to see it. We didn’t pay much past opening night, but I finally got the full Broadway experience.”
Finding herself on solid ground in her career, many important roles followed: the series
Alias, in which she played a Russo-African intelligence operative; the TV movie
Any Day Now, set in the American south during the civil rights movement; and the sophisticated TV series
The Agency. “Buffy” producer Joss Whedon cast her in his new show
Firefly, and then again in the series
Angel. She also appeared in the blockbuster
The Matrix Reloaded and its sequel,
Matrix: Revolutions.
As 2004 came to a close, Torres enjoyed the regional release of the urban comedy
Hair Show and will enjoy the debut of another independent film, Michael Whaley's romantic comedy
Fair Game, in Spring 2005. Additionally, Gina resumed her role of
Zoe in Joss Whedon's/Universal Pictures' upcoming Sci-Fi Western
Serenity set to open in September, and began filming the political thriller
Five Fingers with husband Laurence Fishburne and Ryan Phillippe. As
Aicha in
Five Fingers Gina plays a highly adept and sly terrorist who works with Fishburne's
Ahmat to "break" Phillippe's Dutch philanthropist. She also began voicing the character of
Vixen on Cartoon Network's
Justice League.
In September of 2002, of course, Gina up and married her Matrix co-star
Laurence Fishburne.
