The audition Geena Davis wishes she’d walked out of: “I could have avoided that treatment”
There are many, many great actors who don’t get the time of day they deserve, but spare a special thought for Geena Davis. If you grew up in the late 1980s or early 1990s, chances are you saw a great movie with her in it. She helped make Tim Burton’s name with the first Beetlejuice, won an Oscar for The Accidental Tourist, and became one of the faces of feminist cinema alongside Susan Sarandon through Thelma & Louise. Yet, she is a relative footnote in modern Hollywood; a crime to say the least.
Davis hasn’t done too badly for herself recently. She appeared in Zoë Kravitz’s debut feature, Blink Twice, and has made quite the splash in the realm of television, appearing in Grey’s Anatomy, GLOW, and The Exorcist, to name but a few. Unfortunately, you can’t help but shift the fact that her progress has been held back somewhat because of her gender, something Davis herself has spoken about.
Back in her prime, Davis was subjected to some pretty rotten behaviour from her male contemporaries. The industry is far from perfect nowadays, but it was even worse back then, when erratic and downright unacceptable actions weren’t just protected, but encouraged. In an interview with The Times, Davis revealed that she had a very unpleasant run-in with Bill Murray when they were making the 1990 crime comedy Quick Change.
According to the star of The Fly, the first time she met Murray, he introduced her to a massage machine he called ‘The Thumper’. Against her wishes, he proceeded to use the device on her. Then, when they were actually working on the movie, he yelled at her in front of the other cast and crew members for ‘being late’, even though she was just waiting for her wardrobe to be ready.
“That was bad,” Davis admitted. “The way he behaved at the first meeting… I should have walked out of that or profoundly defended myself, in which case I wouldn’t have got the part. I could have avoided that treatment if I’d known how to react or what to do during the audition. But, you know, I was so non-confrontational that I just didn’t.” When the interviewer pointed out that she was blaming herself for somebody else’s actions, David laughed. “Point taken,” she said. “There’s no point in regretting things and here I was regretting. And yes, exactly, it wasn’t my fault.”
Sadly, Davis isn’t the only big name to have called Murray out for his behaviour over the years. The list of enemies the former Ghostbuster has accrued in his time is long and worrying, as disturbing patterns of behaviour have emerged over the years. A cynical take would be that the comedian has cultivated a quirky and unpredictable persona as a defence mechanism against accusations of this nature. Or he’s just a rotter. Either way, the way he treated Davis is not and should never have been acceptable, in Hollywood or any other industry.
Possibly informed by her experiences on 80s and 90s film sets, Davis set up the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. This non-profit organisation promotes more female inclusion in the film industry and helped produce the 2018 documentary This Changes Everything, which explored historical sexism within the movie business.
