The only sequel Geena Davis refused to make: “No one saw it”
Geena Davis made a name for herself by playing lead characters in offbeat movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These days, the word ‘offbeat’ might make you cringe, but let’s just toss around a few titles. The Fly, Earth Girls are Easy, Beetlejuice — even Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own feature characters and storylines that remain just as unusual today as they were then. In the 1980s and ’90s, offbeat movies were the best of the bunch.
Davis turned in some of the most iconic performances of the era and even walked away with an Oscar for her work in the 1988 film The Accidental Tourist. In her memoir, Dying of Politeness, the actor talked about how much she’s loved the characters she’s played and how she has wanted to make sequels to pretty much all of them.
However, there is one major exception. Following the surprise success of David Cronenberg’s The Fly in 1986, the producers approached Davis to see if she would be interested in appearing in the sequel. She turned them down. It wasn’t that she hadn’t enjoyed her experience in the original film. On the contrary, she described it as one of the most creatively fulfilling experiences of her career. But the part she was being offered was, as far as she was concerned, pretty insulting.
In The Fly, Davis plays Ronnie, a science journalist who falls in love with an eccentric scientist named Seth, played by Jeff Goldblum. When one of his experiments goes wrong, he begins turning into a fly. At the end of the film, Seth dies, leaving a pregnant Ronnie with an uncertain future.
Making the movie was a highlight for Davis, both professionally and personally. She and Goldblum had started dating the year before and would get married shortly after The Fly was released. “I couldn’t have asked for a better experience,” she wrote in her memoir, adding, “Cronenberg is a genius, and I got to make a movie with him and with the man I loved, too.”
Considering how much Davis adored making The Fly and the fact that she always wants to play characters more than once, you would think she’d leap at the chance to appear in the sequel, but one quick read of the first two pages of the script changed her mind. “It started with a very gory birth scene (of course,)” she wrote, “Which continued onto page two, where my character… dies. Bleeds out and dies on the delivery table.” She was unimpressed. After starring in the first film and revelling in the character, killing Ronnie off on the second page felt like an insult.
“For that particular sequel, I let someone else in a Geena wig bleed out on the delivery table instead,” she concluded. Not surprisingly, The Fly II was not a hit, and Davis missed zero career opportunities by turning it down. There are countless movies that begin with a woman’s death to give the male hero motivation, but it’s pretty low to expect the star of the original film to fit that thankless role.
Interestingly enough, Davis came up with her own idea for a sequel in which Ronnie gives birth to twins who at first seem normal, but who begin showing buggy signs when they hit puberty. She tries to genetically modify them to make the body of one human boy, and finds herself on trial for murder. She brought the idea to the head of Fox and said that they’d have to pretend The Fly II didn’t exist. “No problem there,” he responded, “No one saw it.”
Ultimately, Davis’s sequel, called Flies, of course, did not go ahead. Decades later, she’s still thinking about it, though. So if there are any producers reading this (or, more likely, reading Davis’s memoir), get that in the pipeline, please.
