Actress Kathleen Turner describes Donald Trump’s ‘gross’ secret handshake for women
‘He’s trying to do some kind of seductive intimacy move. You pull your hand away and go yuck’
The veteran actress Kathleen Turner has revealed details about Donald Trump’s “gross” handshake technique in an interview in which she also criticised the sexism in Hollywood that made her a “sexual target” at the beginning of her career.
Speaking to New York magazine, Turner described how Trump greeted her. “He goes to shake your hand and, with his index finger, kind of rubs the inside of your wrist,” she said. “He’s trying to do some kind of seductive intimacy move. You pull your hand away and go yuck.”
She also disclosed how she became the subject of prurient interest from some of Hollywood’s best-known actors in the early 1980s, after her career-making performance in the 1981 erotic neo-noir Body Heat.
Describing herself as “f***ing angry”, Turner also condemned difficult and disruptive behaviour by male actors, which she claimed they got away with because of sexist double standards in the industry.
She said Burt Reynolds was “terrible” on the set of the 1988 comedy Switching Channels: “He said something about not taking second place to a woman. His behaviour was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal. I left the room sobbing.”
Nicolas Cage was “very difficult” to work with on the Francis Ford Coppola film Peggy Sue Got Married, Turner said, adding that an unnamed male actor bit her during a stage production.
“Someone like him could show up on set and be drunk or misbehave in some way, but he would still get hired because producers figured they could control that kind of behaviour,” she said. “But if you say, ‘I have a mysterious illness and I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk tomorrow’ – you’re not getting hired.”
As for her reputation for being difficult, Turner said: “The ‘difficult’ thing was pure gender crap. If a man comes on set and says, ‘Here’s how I see this being done’, people go, ‘He’s decisive.’ If a woman does it, they say, ‘Oh, f***. There she goes.’”
