In Thelma and Louise, the timid Thelma is always a few steps behind Louise, who is all fearless. Until there is no turning back. Off camera, things weren’t much different. Geena Davis viewed Susan Sarandon as the “Alien Queen” from another planet and she admired how she was able to speak her mind, stand up to the director, Ridley Scott, and speak bluntly. “She never used expressions like ‘I don’t know what people are going to think’ or ‘Maybe what I’m about to say is a stupid idea.’ That’s what I did all the time”, explains the actress in a memoir that has just been published in the United States and is titled Dying of politenesssomething like Die of good education.
She appears on the cover, in sky-high red heels and a puff-sleeved dress that her character could wear in Bitelchus, inviting a giant bear to tea with good china. Because if a bear came to attack her, she would first offer him a tea. The engine of the book is that, to explain how much it has cost her to free herself from the layer of excessive moral neatness that her parents, an engineer and a teacher from Vermont, passed on to her. “I was conditioned to believe that I shouldn’t ask for anything, so trained to be insanely educated that I learned not to have needs,” she writes. And she gives some examples of how that dynamic worked in her family. On one occasion, they were all in a car with an elderly relative who could barely drive anymore and was weaving in and out of her lane, but her parents didn’t say anything. “The lesson was: although your children may die, do not say anything that could in any way be interpreted as rude.” At the age of ten, she explains, too, she began delivering newspapers around the neighborhood following the classic route seen in so many American movies. One of her neighbors began to invite her in, offered her gifts, caressed her and groped her, until she told her mother and she forbade her to return to the house. “But we didn’t go to the police to report a case of sexual abuse by a dirty old man, of course not. We were New England people: we kept our things inside and kept them hidden. I had no idea that I had been abused.”
Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis at the ‘Thelma and Louise’ 30th Anniversary Party. Photo: Getty
At that time, Davis was already the tallest person in his class, counting boys and girls – he is 1.83 – and his height caused him some shame and prevented him from hiding as much as he would have liked, but eventually his appearance, a body in tune with the Amazonian superwomen that were beginning to become fashionable in the industry and a face like that of the pretty girl in an old comic book, helped her leave Vermont and start her career as a model.
The question to be asked with Geena Davis is obvious: why an actress who was everywhere in the nineties and who had an Oscar (for the accidental tourist) suddenly disappeared. And the answer is depressingly predictable. She turned 40 years old. Asked about that in a recent interview on The New Yorker, the actress said: “When I started, I heard these stories that at 40 they stop calling you. But right then I was having giant papers coming in, so I thought, well, obviously this isn’t going to happen to me. So it was shocking to realize that it was. She surprised me and broke my heart. It felt like a forced retirement. Normally, I took a year between movies, give or take. But then two years passed, and then three. It was unbelievable. So they offered me Stuart Littleand then Stuart Little 2, but apart from that saga, all the work disappeared. It was incredibly painful.” Her hiatus coincided with the two films she made with her then-husband, Renny Harlin, lethal memory and The Island of Severed Heads, which did not have the expected success, especially the latter.
Genna Davis in 1989 after winning the Oscar for ‘The Occasional Tourist’. Photo: Getty
That’s when Davis turned to what has kept her busy in the second half of her career, what she calls her period of “nerd of the data”. One day she took her daughter, who was then two years old (the actress had a daughter, Alizeh, at 46, and twins, Kaiis and Kian, at 48) to a children’s play and noticed that they appeared more male and female characters. She began asking everyone about it, in the questioning style she had learned from her friend Susan Sarandon though still with the New England “excuse me” and “please.” “I realized that we were teaching children from minute one to have a gender bias if they see the boys doing all the interesting and important things and the girls on the side cheering them on or accompanying them,” she says in the same interview. She began to tell about it in Hollywood and, apparently, everyone told her: no, but that’s already fixed. So she funded a far-reaching report on gender roles in children’s TV shows and movies, and her data proved her right. For every 16 male characters on children’s products, one female character appeared, and only 29% of speaking characters identify as female. This is how she began to take shape Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which is dedicated solely to research and is now a primary data source in gender studies. In their next big report they counted that only 8% of directors are women, 19% of producers and 13.6% of screenwriters, although the numbers have been slowly improving. They have also financed specific studies on representation in comedy or in professions related to science and technology. In 2020 they repeated the original analysis again, on children’s cinema and discovered that, at least in terms of the main characters, something similar to parity had been achieved, after two decades impregnated with Frozen, Brave, Inside Out Y Peppa Pig –but with only one dog in the starting kit of paw patrol–. This same year, the actress received an honorary Emmy for her contribution to the entertainment industry in that field.
In her memoirs, Davis also talks about her beginnings, about her modeling career, which she downplays (she says that the only cover she ever starred in was that of New Jersey Monthly and you couldn’t even see her face), though she did walk the runway in Paris and was a Victoria’s Secret Angel before the brand turned its shows into a high-voltage misogynist extravaganza. She got her first role as an actress, in Tootsie, thanks to that, because they needed a model who could say a few lines and she showed up to the casting as they told her, with a bikini under her clothes. On that shoot, Dustin Hoffman, who isn’t exactly known for being an easy presence on a set (because he practices his particular version of The Method, which can involve being a jerk to his peers if the role demands it), took her in under his wing and gave him some tips for getting around Hollywood, including never hooking up with his co-stars. If they did, Hoffman advised, he should say no “because it would ruin the sexual tension of the characters” (apparently saying no if she didn’t feel like it wasn’t enough for Hoffman). When she applied her teachings to Jack Nicholson, he said, “Wow, who taught you that?”
Despite Hoffman’s advice, Davis met her second husband, Jeff Goldblum, on the set of the horror movie Transylania 6-5000 and together they shot two more films, The flyby David Cronenberg and Earth girls are easy. When they met, both had just separated. She from her first marriage, with the hotelier Richard Emmolo and he with the actress Patricia Gaul. “Our relationship was full of joy. That was a magical period of my life,” she writes in the book. Both were married in Las Vegas in 1989 and separated a year later, without clarifying the reasons, although later it has been speculated that the main reason could be that she wanted to have children and he did not. A comparative look at her subsequent careers also serves to realize how limited options were for an actress until relatively recently. Goldblum continued to combine the blockbusters What jurassic-park with the auteur projects and cultivated an image of an eccentric with an eye for fashion that everyone likes and fits just as well in a small genre film festival as in a Prada show.
Geena Davis, winner of two Oscars. Photo: Getty
She, who also has an eccentric streak – she once decorated a bathroom with fifty cuckoo clocks – and unpredictable hobbies – she is so good at archery that she became an Olympic semi-finalist representing the United States – is not it allowed her to age on screen as Goldblum, as an attractive and peculiar person, a tall and strange girl with good gifts for comedy. The only thing they could think of to do with her was make her talk to a mouse.
Although Davis had a leading role in the series Commander in Chief, playing a female president of the United States, and later appeared in three seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, Davis has not finished finding in the series the second chance that other actresses of her generation have had. In the promotional interviews that she has given for the book, she assures that she now has a juicy role in mind for which she is looking for financing and that she is ready for it. birth.
Genny Davis and Matthew Modine in ‘The Island of Severed Heads’. Photo: Getty
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The Geena Davis theorem: how she got rid of all the Hollywood ‘heavyweights’ to protect the sexual tension of her characters