That’s The Haunting of Hill House star as Chica, the daughter of forgetful international jet-setters who blows out the candles on a lasagna cake when Phyllis and Rosa whip together a birthday celebration for her.
Gugino has been working ever since, with movie highlights including Son In Law, the Spy Kids movies, Sin City and 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein, as well as an endless stream of TV work including The Girls on the Bus, The Fall of the House of Usher and Manhunt. She can also be heard narrating Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor and that’s her as the Kyptonian ship A.I. in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, aka “the Snyder Cut.”
She’s been in a relationship since the 1990s with filmmaker Sebastian Gutierrez, who created Jett, in which she played a top-notch thief who, fresh out of prison, gets pulled back into that life.
“He wrote nine hours on spec, for free,” Gugino said on Today in 2019, describing the four-year labor of love that Jett, which landed on Cinemax, was for both of them. “…And we waited a long time to make it the way we wanted to make it, not knowing we were going to get to make it.”
“I don’t think there’s any magic bullet [to work well with your partner],” she added, “but I’ll just say, with us, what’s great is that we are good at different things and therefore makes it a good balance…And you do have trust. I think that’s great for creativity.”