Geena Davis names the two greatest roles of her career: “I love them both equally”
She may not be as visible as she used to be, although there are both positive and negative reasons to explain why, but Geena Davis nonetheless remains one of her generation’s defining actors.
Why? Because, for a while, she made a career out of upending and subverting expectations. Her onscreen career couldn’t have gotten off to a better or more fortuitous start, with the statuesque Davis landing her first role with her very first audition, which happened to be for Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie.
Starting off with a ten-time Academy Award-nominated film that became the second-highest-grossing release of 1982 wasn’t a bad way to get started, with Davis’ star continuing to rise after lending support in the certified cult classics Fletch, The Fly, Earth Girls Are Easy, and Beetlejuice.
The hits kept on coming towards the end of the decade, with the star claiming a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for The Accidental Tourist, before continuing to scale the Hollywood heights in the early 1990s with Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise and Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own.
Unfortunately, the second decade of her career couldn’t hold a candle to the first, with the infamous Cutthroat Island torpedoing her above-the-line credentials. There were other factors at play, too, with Davis explaining how everything seemed to change the moment she turned 40, a damning indictment on the industry if ever there was one.
These days, she continues to make sporadic appearances across film and television, while focusing on activism and the Geena Davis Institute, which has played an important part in opening Tinseltown’s eyes to gender discrepancies in entertainment. It’s been a hell of a run, but there are only two characters under consideration when the Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy winner was pressed to name her favourite.
When she was asked that very question by CNN, Davis found herself caught between a rock and a hard place. “I can’t pick between Thelma & Louise and The Long Kiss Goodnight,” she admitted. “I mean, both of those roles were so incredible, and the character changed so much in the course of just a few days. And I love them both equally. I can’t pick which I like better.”
Davis has pointed to Scott’s road-tripping escapade as arguably the most important part she’s ever played in a movie, while the Shane Black-scripted action thriller, in which she plays an amnesiac suburban wife and mother who starts to recall that she was an elite assassin, was the most fun. The latter was a disappointment at the box office, even though it endures 30 years later as an underrated gem.
As far as she’s concerned, nothing has, or ever will, come close to Thelma Dickinson or Samantha Caine, and if that’s been her ironclad opinion since at least 1996, then it’s unlikely that it’ll change.
