“I was devastated”: the Hollywood betrayal Geena Davis will never forgive
Somewhere along the way, despite being one of Hollywood’s leading names throughout the 1990s, Geena Davis went from a genuine movie star to someone you occasionally spot on one of those dreadful ‘you won’t believe what such and such looks like now’ articles on the sidebar of shame.
But, as the saying goes, better a ‘used to be’ than a ‘never was’, and this year might well see the actor return to the glory days, because if anyone can inject some much needed nitro into the career of a formerly famous actor it’s the Duffer brothers, the creators of Stranger Things and the duo who brought Winona Ryder back, made Terminator’s Linda Hamilton properly badass again, and who were at least 90% responsible for Kate Bush topping the charts with a song originally released 40 years ago.
In May this year, their new project, The Boroughs, will arrive on Netflix, an eight-episode sci-fi in the vein of Stranger Things, but this time with older folk instead of the young upstarts we’re used to, and featuring one Geena Davis as one of the residents of a New Mexico retirement home facing an otherworldly threat. It’s a bit like Thursday Murder Club, only much more exciting and not for people who eat crumpets and chuckle at Radio 4 comedy panel shows.
While the Duffers haven’t specifically created The Boroughs, they are acting as producers on the show, and that should be enough to ensure it becomes a must-watch for most people who have Netflix and propel Davis back into the hearts and minds of sci-fi fans.
So what happened to Davis? How did she go from the global success of 1991’s Thelma and Louise, the baseball hit Major League and starring with Samuel L Jackson on the (vastly underrated) thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight, to seemingly disappearing after a couple of Stuart Little movies at the start of the 2000s?
Well, according to Davis, the truth is that the roles simply dried up as she reached her 40s, with the actor admitting she’d been spoiled by playing almost every type of character she’d hoped to during her most successful period.
She even resorted to putting an advert in a trade paper that said she was an actor in her 40s and open to work. She was handed her own show in 2000, a sitcom creatively titled The Geena Davis Show, but that lasted less than a season before being cancelled, after which she landed the lead in a political drama called Commander in Chief, which unfortunately suffered exactly the same fate.
That didn’t go down well with her at all, as she recalled to Vulture, describing how she felt learning of the show’s cancellation and saying: “I was devastated. I still haven’t gotten over it. I really wanted it to work”.
Adding, “It was on Tuesday nights opposite [Hugh Laurie hit] House, which wasn’t ideal. But we were the best new show that fall. Then, in January, we were opposite American Idol. They said, ‘The ratings are going to suffer, so we should take you off the air for the entire run of Idol, and bring it back in May’. I put a lot of time and effort into getting it on another network, too, but it didn’t work.”
Davis may well have had every right to be angry at the cancellation, especially because her performance in the show earned her a Golden Globe award for ‘Best Actress’, plus the series won a nomination for ‘Best Drama’ and another for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for Don’t Look Now legend Donald Sutherland. Davis would go on to have a quiet 20 years, only sporadically appearing in TV shows like the female wrestling drama Glow and Grey’s Anatomy.
