The TV show that filled Geena Davis with envy: “Completely jealous”
When you make your big screen debut in a film that gets nominated for ‘Best Picture’, the rest of your career can go one of two ways. You can either ride that momentum all the way to the top or be crushed under the weight of immense pressure. Luckily for Geena Davis, she caught the first option.
Off the back of her appearance in 1982’s Tootsie, the young star cropped up in a number of classic pictures from the decade. She played Jeff Goldblum’s love interest in David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, the object of alien affection in Earth Girls Are Easy, and a deceased woman at the mercy of the chaotic lead character in the original Beetlejuice. In the decades since, she’s starred in everything from the ground-breaking 1991 Thelma & Louise to The Long Kiss Goodnight, A League of Their Own to the Stuart Little franchise. In short, she’s had one hell of a career.
Even though she’s been consistently employed at a high level across four different decades, Davis still feels like she has a lot to give and that she doesn’t always get the opportunity to show what she can do. She expressed this sentiment in Interview Magazine, explaining, “I really want to get some good parts. Now I have so much experience, I probably could be better than ever… I just want them to come along every once in a while. It’s okay if it takes two or three years for something really good to come along, but I don’t want to wait ten years for something great to come along. It’s maddening.”
This interview was conducted in 2016 when Davis had just turned 60. Hollywood has long had a problem with casting older women in meaningful roles. That stigma is changing, but not nearly as rapidly as it needs to. This means that multiple talented performers of a certain age, Davis included, are missing out on a key part of their career. This issue doesn’t exist to the same extent for men, as Davis explained, highlighting one TV show in particular.
“When I started watching Breaking Bad, I binge-watched it,” she revealed. “I thought it was so good that I started to cry. It’s the only time in my life I’ve been completely jealous, the only time I was like, ‘I want to do what Bryan Cranston gets to do. I want a part like that.’ Isn’t that pathetic?”
When Breaking Bad started in 2008, Cranston, who played the lead role of Walter White in the critically acclaimed show, was in his early 50s. By the time it wrapped up in 2013, he was 57. During his time on the show, he got into fights with drug dealers, took part in high-speed car chases, battled neo-Nazis, and got himself into all sorts of exciting and life-threatening scrapes. Davis’ point is that women of this age simply don’t get opportunities to play these sorts of characters. They definitely weren’t being offered them back in the late noughties.
Lots of great work is being done to increase the presence of female characters in film and TV, especially older ones, including by Davis’ own institute. There’s still a long way to go, however. But maybe one day, we’ll see an older woman going face-to-face with the female equivalent of Gus Fring.
