Elizabeth Berkley says the backlash to Showgirls left her unable to audition for acting roles for about two years. Her account, given decades after the film’s 1995 release, describes not only hostile press coverage but a painful professional exclusion. Contemporary reporting at the time documented immediate setbacks: Berkley had lost her agent and had not yet secured another acting role.
What Berkley says happened after Showgirls
In a 2025 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, Berkley recalled: “For a good two years, I wasn’t allowed to audition for things.” She described the experience as being shut out of a career she loved: “The hardest part was being literally locked out of something I loved so much.”
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Those are Berkley’s retrospective account of her experience, not evidence of a formal industry-wide ban. The contemporaneous record establishes what was reported in the immediate aftermath; it does not independently verify the full two-year period she later described.
How the press tour felt to her
Berkley recalled that publicists prepared her for interviews by showing her clips of reviews attacking her appearance and acting. She said the treatment was cruel and that “someone could not be pummeled to that degree” now. She also recalled trying to separate the public criticism from her own sense of herself: “I couldn’t understand how people could be so cruel, but I’m tough. I had to separate out what they said from what I believed to be true.” These quotations are attributed to her interview by the Los Angeles Times.
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What was reported in 1995
On October 11, 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported that Berkley had been dropped by her agent and had not yet lined up another acting role. The article said she was paid $100,000 for Showgirls, a figure director Paul Verhoeven confirmed to the newspaper. These reports capture immediate professional consequences, rather than the longer period Berkley later recalled.
Verhoeven, who directed the film, said he felt terrible about the position Berkley had been put in. “If somebody is to blame it’s [screenwriter] Joe [Eszterhas] or me,” he told the Times. “I think she did exactly what we wanted and what we thought would be good. And apparently we failed.” He also said he had not expected the sustained bashing of the film and its star.
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From ridicule to cult reputation
Showgirls, written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Verhoeven, was widely treated as a critical and commercial failure on release. The reviewed sources do not establish a box-office total, so that label should not be mistaken for a specific measured figure here.
A 2025 EL PAÍS retrospective describes the film’s later cult following and critical reassessment, a shift that brought a different context to Berkley’s performance and the film’s reception. That is a change in part of the film’s audience and critical reputation, not universal agreement that its original reception was wrong. The retrospective also reports that an interviewer once opened with “How does it feel to be a failure?”, an anecdote linked to Berkley’s book Ask Elizabeth rather than to her 2025 interview.
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The 1995 reporting shows that Berkley faced concrete career setbacks in the immediate aftermath of the film’s reception. Her later interview adds her own account of how long the exclusion lasted and how humiliating the press experience felt. Verhoeven’s contemporaneous comments placed responsibility on the filmmakers rather than on Berkley. Taken together, these accounts show how the public response to a film could become a personal burden for its lead actor—even as the film’s reputation later changed.
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