The “Special Skills” section of Geena Davis’s résumé would be a doozy. Aside from being an Oscar-winning movie star, she speaks Swedish, which she picked up during a high-school exchange program. As a young woman, she once posed as a mannequin in a store window and learned that she had a talent for staying motionless. She has an idiosyncratic interior-design flair. (A house that she shared with her second husband, Jeff Goldblum, had a “Weddingland” bathroom, complete with fake flowers, cake toppers, and a picket fence. She later filled a guest bathroom with fifty working cuckoo clocks.) She’s an elaborate pumpkin carver. Oh, and she’s a world-class archer who was a semifinalist for the Olympic trials in 1999.
Then, there’s her second career as what she calls a “middle-aged data geek.” In the early two-thousands, sidelined from Hollywood in her forties, she began wondering why the kids’ shows that she watched with her two-year-old daughter had so few female characters. Instead of taking her observations to the press, she sponsored an extensive research project that grew into the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, an organization that uses statistics to advocate for greater onscreen diversity and gender parity, and for which Davis has collected an honorary Oscar and, last month, an honorary Emmy.
In short, if your perception of Geena Davis boils down to “Beetlejuice” and “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own,” you’ve been missing a much quirkier, more eclectic, more persistent person. And yet, to hear Davis tell it, she’s spent a lifetime trying to build up inner conviction. “I kicked ass onscreen way before I did so in real life,” she writes in her new memoir, “Dying of Politeness.” “The roles I’ve played have taken me down paths I never could have imagined when I dreamed of becoming an actor. They have helped transform me, slowly, in fits and starts, into someone of power.”
Recently, Davis, sixty-six, spoke to me from her home in Los Angeles about her “journey to badassery,” her iconic roles of the eighties and nineties, and the Hollywood double standard that she is battling with numbers. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Your memoir is called “Dying of Politeness.” How did you learn politeness, and why is it so deadly?
I learned politeness from minute one. That was my family: my parents were very old-fashioned New Englanders, both from Vermont. It wasn’t so much being kind. It was not making anyone go out of their way for you. Never ask for anything, never need anything. But, on the other side, offer everything. Like, my dad fixed everybody’s plumbing or their furnace or their car or whatever.
When did you realize that there was a downside to politeness?
It was painful sometimes to say, “No.” If we went to visit friends’ houses and they offered me candy, I had to say no. My best friend’s mom was an incredible cook, and she made this chicken with garlic—it was incredible—and I’d be smelling that and go, “Oh, it’s time for me to go home for dinner.” And she’d say, “Geena, do you want to stay?” “No, thank you.” And then she’d call my mom and just say, “Lucille, Geena’s staying for dinner.” She would rescue me from my own politeness.
You’ve always been very tall. How did that compound your self-effacement growing up?
I was tall from a baby. I was always the tallest kid in class, male or female, right up until senior year. And I found it very stressful to stand out so much, because the last thing I wanted to do was stand out. It’s not like kids teased me—I just felt it. I didn’t fit in. But everybody has their thing in high school, their personal torture.
I’ve heard this from other tall people: you want to take up less space. Which is oxymoronic, because a lot of people think of tall people as naturally confident.
Well, my mom knew from early on that I was going to be extremely tall, and she was on me from the beginning to not slouch my shoulders. Before I even would have thought of slouching my shoulders, she was, like, “You have to stand up straight.” And so I would find ways to curve my hips out, which would maybe make me a little shorter, or perch on things. But I really wanted to be small.
In your later life, you’ve become a significant critic of gender representation in media, which we’ll get to later. But I’m curious about the pop culture that you grew up with. What kinds of things stuck with you as you figured out what it meant to be a woman in the world?
We watched “Bonanza” and “The Big Valley,” and my favorite show was “The Rifleman.” That’s what my friend Lucyann and I played after school. We would go in her back yard and pretend to be characters from “The Rifleman.” Because I was taller, I was the father, Lucas, and she would be my son, Mark. We just loved playing these tough guys. There were female characters then—there was “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” and all that—but we never wanted to pretend to be them. I was also kind of obsessed with Ginger on “Gilligan’s Island.” Maybe that’s where I got some of my ideas about what a movie star would be like.
You write that you had a sort of Ginger–Mary Ann dichotomy going on as a child, because you “mixed serious self-effacement with strange explosions of attention-grabbing behavior.”
Exactly. If I thought I wasn’t being paid attention to, I could be very extroverted, like on my paper route. There was a section of it where there weren’t houses on either side, and when I hit that patch I would start to sing at the top of my lungs. And then the people in the next section would come out of their houses and peek down the hill and say, “What is taking so long? My papers should be here by now!”—and see me down there just bellowing songs. It was very embarrassing when I knew they knew.
As a teen-ager, you spent a year on an exchange program in Sweden, which is definitely not something I knew about you. Have you retained your Swedish?
For some reason, it went in my hard drive, and I can still carry on a conversation in Swedish. I mean, I forgot a lot of words that I haven’t heard lately. Hugh Laurie wrote a book that—I’m not sure what it’s called in English. Can you hang on one second? I have it right here. [She leaves and returns with a book.] It’s called “Skottpengar.”
You’re reading the Swedish translation of Hugh Laurie’s book?
Yeah, because he knew I could speak Swedish, so he got me this copy. It helps me remember stuff.
Can you tell me something in Swedish?
Here, I’ll read you a phrase. “Föreställ er att man är tvungen att bryta armen på någon.” That says, “Understand, people sometimes need to break an arm here and there.” [The actual translation, from “The Gun Seller,” by Hugh Laurie, is, “Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.”]
Do they have good curse words in Swedish?
Oh, yeah. I know them all. This is common: jävlar!
Which means?
“Damn” or “hell.” I think it means “devils” if you translate it. That’s what you yell if you smash your thumb or something.
Let’s talk about your earlier career. You moved to New York in 1978. What was the plan?
I had a very clear plan in mind, because I knew I wanted to be in movies rather than plays. Most of my college classmates wanted to be in theatre, and so almost en masse we moved to New York. Nobody told me that if you want to be in movies, you should probably go to L.A. So my plan was: I would become a model, and then people would just offer me movies, because at that time Lauren Hutton was showing up in a couple of movies. I thought, O.K., so I just need to become famous as a model to get in movies—because it’s so much easier to become a supermodel than an actor!
In fairness, it worked. You got your first role in “Tootsie” through modelling.
Absolutely. I didn’t ever become famous as a model. My one magazine cover was New Jersey Monthly, and you couldn’t see my face—I had a huge hat on. But that didn’t matter, because, when they were casting “Tootsie,” the role that I ended up playing needed to be in her underwear in a couple of scenes, and they thought, Well, let’s just check if there are any models who can act. And my agents said, “Yes, we have one!” So I go to audition, and they said, “Wear a bathing suit under your clothes. In case you read well, they’re going to want to see you in a bathing suit.” And so I read with, like, an assistant casting director and a video camera, and she said, “O.K., thank you.” And I left. I was, like, Well, that’s fine. I didn’t do well enough. Plus, it was my first audition ever—what are the odds I’m going to get in a movie with Dustin Hoffman?
So then I went to Paris to do runway shows, and Sydney Pollack saw my audition tape and said, “Hey, wait a minute! I like this girl. Where’s her bathing-suit stuff?” They said, “Oh, we forgot.” “Get her back.” “We can’t! She’s in Paris!” “Do they have any photos of her in a bathing suit?” And, to my great happiness, I had been in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. So, as opposed to being in midtown Manhattan in some dingy office building, I had perfectly lit, airbrushed photos of me in underwear already. I guess that clinched it.
Before this happened, you worked at Ann Taylor on Fifth Avenue and—this is not something that a self-effacing person would do, necessarily—put on your own version of street theatre.
Yeah. One weekend, the window display in the front was a couple of mannequins sitting at a café table, and they had plastic food as if they were having lunch. But there was one empty chair between them. I said to one of my friends, “Dare me to go in the window and pretend to be a mannequin.” And she was, like, “Yeah, do it!” So I made sure the manager wasn’t watching, and I sneaked in the window. I sat down and remained motionless. A couple of people had been looking in the window and saw me do this, and they were, like, “What’s she gonna do? What is this?” I hadn’t known before that that I’m very good at motionlessness, and I can go long periods without blinking. So, anyway, other people would come up and say, “What are you looking at?” And those people said, “Just wait.” And then I finally moved, and they were, like, “Ahh!” and clapped. And then I was still again. Now a big crowd is there. So they started hiring me to do that on Saturdays, to do five hours in the window. I got a ten-minute break every hour.
I love how it escalated, too. Like, you would put an extension cord down your leg so that people thought you were a machine?
An animatronic. I could hear everything they said, and I heard one of them say, “It’s not a mannequin. It has hair on its arms.” So that was the last time I had hair on my arms. And then I tied little strings around my wrist to make it look like my hands were attached. But then I heard somebody say, “It’s not real. It would have to be plugged in if it was real.” So I got a very small, discreet cord and trailed it down and away from the window. They’d be watching, and somebody would say, “It’s plugged in! It is a mannequin!”
What was motivating you—just to have fun?
Just for kicks. To see if I could get away with it. I didn’t intend to make a thing out of it. But I realized that I was kind of good at the unique skills you need to be a mannequin—like, I learned to breathe without having my chest move. Everything was Zen.
Staying motionless, speaking Swedish—reading the book, I was, like, Wow, Geena Davis can do a lot of stuff.
It’s probably because my dad was an engineer, and he even invented some surveying equipment. He was Mr. Tinker and could fix anything. So I must have got the gene from him.
As you got into the nineteen-eighties, you were doing movies such as “The Fly” and “Beetlejuice.” You write in the book, “I wasn’t conventionally pretty enough to be cast as eye candy, and I didn’t want to be just the girlfriend of the guy who goes off to do something cool, I wanted to have cool challenges, too.” I’d love to hear more about how you chose roles.
The first movies I picked were unusual and offbeat, because I’d read the script and say, “Oh, I want to do that! That sounds fun!” And then, when I became more known, I started being offered some very boring parts. I was, like, Why do I keep getting this stuff? I figured out that it was because they knew it was a boring part but thought, Let’s get Geena, because she makes stuff interesting—without realizing that it was the writing that made it an interesting character, not me just acting kooky.
You also had this Marilyn Munster quality—you would be in movies that were fantastical and bizarre, but you would be the relatable, ordinary one for the audience to latch onto.
Right. Sometimes, especially back then, people would say that I played eccentric characters. But in those circumstances I’m the normal one. In “Beetlejuice,” I’m very matter-of-fact about being dead. And in “The Fly,” I’m not the one turning into a fly. I’m the one dealing with it and observing it. Even in “Stuart Little,” Hugh Laurie and I are very normal about having a mouse as a son.
I imagine a lot of that skill is in reacting. Everyone says that “acting is reacting,” but, when your boyfriend’s turning into a fly, you’re the person who has to help the audience imagine how they would react in that situation and realize, Oh, you actually might stay in love with this person.
I think you’re absolutely right. Rob Minkoff, the director of “Stuart Little,” said, “People will believe in Stuart to the extent that you do.” That was a very good thing to say, but I think that’s what I had been doing. I had made people believe that my boyfriend was turning into a fly. I think those experiences perhaps led them to want to cast me in “Stuart Little,” because I had so much interspecies experience.
Another special skill for your résumé. So much of the arc of the book is about how you learned boldness and bravery from your characters before feeling like they were qualities you possessed in life. What was an early example of that?
“The Accidental Tourist” was one. She was very confrontational and said what she thought the moment she thought it, very tenacious. That was the first time that I had to really step outside myself.
This is your Oscar-winning role as Muriel Pritchett, the dog trainer, opposite William Hurt. You write about reading the novel, by Anne Tyler, and immediately wanting to option it. What was it about that character? Was it that sense of wanting to be like her?
Definitely. As I was reading it, she was so colorful and eccentric, and Anne Tyler has such incredible descriptive language—I could just picture her. Dustin Hoffman had given me that advice when I was on “Tootsie.” He said, “Read a lot of books. And, if you see something you like, try to get the rights.” I was, like, “O.K.!” And they were, like, “Oh, no, honey. It was sold months ago.”
Dustin Hoffman seems to have had a lot of advice for you. He also told you not to sleep with your co-stars, and if they want to—what was the line?
Say, “Well, you’re very attractive. I would love to, but it would ruin the sexual tension between us.” And I saved that advice away. After “Tootsie,” my modelling agent took me and a couple of other actor-slash-models to Hollywood to meet casting directors. He happened to know Jack Nicholson, and every single night Jack Nicholson had dinner with us. Then one day there was a note under the door that said, “Please call Jack Nicholson at this number.” I was, like, I can’t believe it! So I said, “Hello, Mr. Nicholson. This is Geena the model. You called me?” He said, “Hey, Geena. When is it gonna happen?” I was, like, Oh, no—why didn’t I realize this is what it was going to be about? But it immediately came into my head what to say: “Uh, Jack, I would love to. You’re very attractive. But I have a feeling we’re going to work together at some point in the future, and I would hate to have ruined the sexual tension between us.” He was, like, “Oh, man, where’d you get that?” So it worked.
Getting back to “The Accidental Tourist,” how did that character rub off on you?
I became much more able to be assertive, more than I was, which was profoundly unassertive. I was able to withstand the pressure that I took upon myself to cave in, or do what somebody else wanted.
It seems like that helped with William Hurt, who was kind of surly the entire time.
I don’t know if he was surly. I think he was living in a dark place. And my instinct would have been to go, “I must have done something, and it’s my job to cheer him up.” But I hired an acting coach for the first time, Roy London, and he’d heard that Bill Hurt could be coming from a dark place sometimes. So he said, “Be like Muriel. You have to completely live in your own world and brush that stuff off.” I realized later that, man, if I hadn’t received that advice, I would have been a mess the whole time, wondering, What is it about me? But getting permission to have it not be my problem was just incredible. And I got to practice being the character off camera, too.
That seems like a bit of what happened with “Thelma & Louise,” which is that the offscreen dynamic between you and Susan Sarandon mirrored the way that Louise emboldens Thelma.
Absolutely. When I first read the script a year before I got cast, my coach had said, “I think you should go for Louise, because you’re in your thirties now. I think you’re ready to play that kind of part.” But then I got cast as Thelma, and the first instant I met Susan Sarandon I was, like, What was I thinking that I could have played Louise? And I very much became like Thelma around her, where she was the dominant friend. I was so in awe, and admired her so much. Nobody gave a shit if she said what she thought. She never used qualifiers, like, “I don’t know what people would think” or “This is probably a stupid idea.” And that was my life—a string of qualifiers. The whole shoot was an education for me in how to very calmly and capably say what you want.
Was there a moment when you tried out being more Louise-ish on set?
No, I was still completely wimpy out of character. But I changed a lot during that movie. And Susan and I became really good friends, which we still are. It just gave me an insight into a whole new way to live. And, of course, at one point in the movie I take on the leader role, when we run out of money and I hold up a liquor store. We’re reversing roles, because I need to take charge to help her out. It was fabulous.
You were in two iconic feminist movies back-to-back in the early nineties: “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own.” As you point out in the book, that period was not exactly a high point in American feminism. There were the Anita Hill hearings and Susan Faludi’s book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.” In Hollywood, it was the era of “Basic Instinct” and “Pretty Woman,” which are arguably not the most rah-rah feminist movies. And Dan Quayle was criticizing Murphy Brown for being a single mother. How did these two unapologetically feminist movies emerge from that time?
It was Ridley [Scott] who made [“Thelma & Louise”] happen. He optioned the script from Callie Khouri. He was going to just produce it and was trying to find a director, and couldn’t find anyone who saw it the way he saw it. Somebody turned it down saying, “What? This is just two bitches in a car.” So then he decided, I’m just going to direct it myself. And thank God for that. I read that script, and I was, like, I must be in this movie. It took a year to finally get cast in it. But it must have spoken to me in a way that nothing else had up until then.
That movie is so beloved, but I imagine that there was a lot of backlash or provocation that we’ve forgotten over time.
“Thelma & Louise” exploded onto the scene. Susan and I were on the cover of Time magazine, and the headline was “WHY THELMA & LOUISE STRIKES A NERVE.” Not “WHY IS THELMA & LOUISE SO GREAT.” And there were two editorial-type commentaries in there that were negative, like, “This is the wrong message. Women should have guns? Women should kill people? It’s a total male-bashing fest.” Which it is not. We perhaps, understandably, have a grievance with the rapist, but there are lots of supporting parts of all different flavors. Anyway, we were not prepared that it would, well, strike a nerve the way it did.
What kind of response do you remember receiving for “A League of Their Own”? Did you feel any resistance when it came out?
Oh, no, people loved the movie. But what I noticed was, before it came out, a lot of people came to the set to interview us. And during these interviews almost every single person, male or female, said, “So would you say this is a feminist movie?” Kind of in this wink-wink tone: “I mean, you’re obviously not going to go that far.” It’s probably hard for people to imagine how toxic it was to say the word “feminist.” Nobody wanted to say it. So they’d ask me that, and I’d say, “Uh, yeah, it is.” They’d be, like, “Are you saying you are a feminist?” And I’d say, “Yeah, sure. Yeah, I am.” And they would be, like, “It’s O.K. if I put that in the article?” They couldn’t believe I would say that out loud, but that’s how strong the backlash was at that time.
Right. This was before third-wave feminism had really caught on, this moment in popular culture which was quite conservative about gender. So it’s incredible that these two movies came out back to back and that you were in both of them.
The public perception when “A League Their Own” came was not, “Hey, this might be feminist stuff that we don’t like.” Maybe because it’s not really confrontational. But, yeah, I always think, How did I get those two roles back to back? They are both movies that became touchstones.
You were extremely visible in popular culture in the early half of the nineties, and then, starting in 1996—the year you turned forty—for about a decade you were almost gone, except for the “Stuart Little” movies. Of course, we always hear about women in Hollywood turning forty and suddenly not getting roles, but I’d like to hear about what happened from your perspective. Do you turn forty, and the phone just stops ringing?
When I started out, I’d hear that after forty you stop getting roles. But I was getting these giant roles, and I thought, Well, obviously that’s not going to happen to me. And so it was stunning to realize that it did. It was absolutely stunning and heartbreaking. It felt like forced retirement. I’d usually taken a year in between movies, more or less. But then two years, and then three years, was, like, unbelievable. I got “Stuart Little” and then “Stuart Little 2,” but other than that the work just dried up. It was incredibly painful.
In 1995, you had been in “Cutthroat Island,” directed by your husband at the time, Renny Harlin, where you played a pirate. This movie was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest box-office bomb of all time, and it essentially shut down the studio that made “Rambo” and “Basic Instinct,” Carolco Pictures. What went wrong?
First, I want to clear up that it did not bring down Carolco, because it was already facing bankruptcy before we even started making the movie. The company was pretty much finished. This was its last production. We were doomed from the beginning, unfortunately. When the film came out, there was no money to promote it, so it was guaranteed that it wasn’t going to be successful. Somehow people got fixated on how much it cost. And then Renny and I made “The Long Kiss Goodnight” for New Line. I love that movie. My character might be my favorite role—it’s a close call between Thelma and that one. Anyway, that movie came out great and got some good reception, but it didn’t soar to heights, let’s say, perhaps as we wanted it to. I don’t know how much that impacted my career.
It’s a little bit of the “What have you done for us lately?” syndrome. You’re in three hits, but then, if you’re in a big bomb, you’re the face of that.
I was rocked by this turn of events. I don’t think it was completely that, because, like I said, the age thing. But if that was all that caused the work to fall off so precipitously, then, wow, that’s pretty unfair. But they were really courting me to take the role in “Stuart Little.” And then around 2000 I was the star of a TV show on ABC called “The Geena Davis Show.” So I don’t know.
I bring this up because I always think about these incredibly talented, big stars who go through periods where they’re just not in the culture: Kim Basinger; Jessica Lange, before she came back in “American Horror Story”; Meg Ryan. It’s, of course, often women in their forties or fifties.
I think about that, too. It really is mostly women. Like Anjelica Huston I think of sometimes. She’s a genius. Where is she in movies? Michelle Pfeiffer, too. She’s been in some good things [recently], but it’s always seemed just tragic to me. I have a theory about why it happens. I think many male screenwriters put a female character in if they need to—a girlfriend or a daughter or whatever—and then, when they’re casting all the other roles in their minds, the go-to is always male. And so the really cool parts for people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, whatever, always go to men. It’s not fair, because they get to soldier on and have ever-younger co-stars. I always say, “Go through and figure out who could be female, or who could be a person of color, and change the first name.” I said at one point to my agent, “Can we find out what Liam Neeson is turning down and go for those parts?”
It’s true. Liam Neeson doesn’t have to hit forty and disappear.
No, his career is booming!
But it seems that period where you were not working as much was fruitful in other ways, because you discovered other interests. One of them was archery, amazingly. Can you describe how you took that up?
I had to learn how to play baseball for “A League of Their Own,” and I was really worried about it, because I’d never been athletic. But I had to rise to the occasion, because I’m playing the best baseball player anyone’s ever seen. So I trained with the coaches that they had, and they said, “You have some real untapped athletic ability.” I was, like, Wow! I do! It just took until I was thirty-six to find that out. Then for “Cutthroat Island” I had to learn horseback riding and sword fighting. For “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” I learned Tae Kwon Do and pistol shooting and ice skating. I was kind of good at all of them, and I thought, Wow, I’m just somebody who can pick up stuff, even if it’s physical. So then I was determined. I wanted to take up a sport in a real way, not the movie version of it. So I picked archery because I saw it on TV during the [1996 Summer] Olympics in Atlanta. It was so beautiful, and I had been kind of good at pistol shooting, so I thought, Well, it’s a weapon also. Maybe I would be good at that. I found an expert coach, at forty-one. And then total immersion—“my life is now archery”—and I was a semifinalist for the Olympic trials two years later.
You write in your book, about the appeal of archery, “There’s nothing subjective about it—unlike my day job, which is utterly subjective.” How did it feel to be that good at something like that?
I won a couple of tournaments here and there, and it was incredible. It really changed my body image and the idea of how much space I could take up in the world, to realize that I don’t have to be ashamed of how tall I am and ashamed of my body, because I could do cool things. It was transformative.
I think we need more movie stars who are good at obscure sports. I would like to hear that Meg Ryan is incredibly good at javelin throwing. I want Michael Douglas to take up shot-putting.
Exactly. Or Channing Tatum to take up pole vaulting. I bet he could do it.
And then the other thing bubbling up during that decade was the media criticism that turned into the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Can you talk about how that began?
When my daughter was two, I wanted to show her a preschool show. She was on my lap, and within ten minutes I was, like, Wait, how many female characters are on this show? I was stunned. I just assumed, of course, in the twenty-first century they’re showing boys and girls sharing the sandbox equally, but they were profoundly not. And then I saw it everywhere. I think because I had been in “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own,” I had a very strong reaction to how women are portrayed in Hollywood, or not. I didn’t think I was going to make it my life’s mission or anything. But I realized that we are training kids from minute one to have unconscious gender bias if they see the boys doing all the interesting and important things and the girls are sidelined or cheering them on.
I started mentioning it whenever I had a meeting in Hollywood: “Have you ever noticed how few female characters there are in movies made for kids?” I asked dozens of people, and every single one said, “That’s not true anymore. That’s been fixed.” So then I thought, This is completely unconscious. They do not know they’re doing it. Maybe data will convince them. So that’s when I sponsored a massive study on gender depictions in children’s entertainment, and the results were what I had observed. I started having meetings with different studios and networks and guilds and production companies, and when they heard the data they were horrified. They were stunned that they were leaving out that many female characters. People create children’s content because they care about kids. Ergo, they will want to change. And that’s exactly what happened.
Was this the ultimate evolution away from “dying of politeness”—walking into executives’ offices with data, trying to create systematic change?
Interestingly, it was polite. I said, “I know you don’t know this. Do whatever you want with it.” Always reassuring them that I’m never going to bust you publicly. I’m never going to name a movie or studio. This is just private between us. My goal was not to educate the public and then they will demand better. It was the opposite, so it wasn’t confrontational at all. Everybody was so grateful for the data. We have a significant presence in the industry now.
Lately, it seems like there have been so many kids’ movies with strong female heroes, such as “Brave” and “Frozen” and “Moana.” That’s how it feels, but does your data back that up?
Yes, actually. Those are all Disney movies, by the way, and they’re doing a great job. We did a study in 2019 of family-rated films and found that, unlike when we started, in 2004, lead characters were fifty-fifty male and female. And then the next year, 2020, we looked at kids’ TV shows, and we’ve also reached parity in the lead characters on those. The latest is that we’ve reached parity in all the characters. So things actually really changed.
The Independent Spirit Awards just announced that they’re doing away with gendered acting categories. This has come up with awards shows, to account for trans or nonbinary actors. But, at the same time, people say that if you do away with all-female categories, it could be dominated by men. I’m curious if you have any opinion on that.
I hadn’t heard that. So is there just going to be one Best Actor award instead of two?
Yeah, there’s a lead-actor and a supporting-actor category, with ten nominees each.
Well, right there, you’re losing half of the awards, which might not be desirable. In a perfect world where male and female actors got an equal number of roles, and equally interesting and complicated roles, then I could see doing that, but it’s stacked against us from the beginning. I feel like that’s a little too soon. I haven’t really thought about it that much, but it’ll be interesting to see if an equal number of times a woman wins as a man.
But then it’s complicated, because some people don’t fit in gender categories at all.
Right, not everybody identifies as either female or male. By the way, the SAG Awards say “Best Female Actor” and “Best Male Actor,” as opposed to “Actress” and “Actor.” The “-ess” on the end—I’m just against that altogether. “Poetess.” I hate when the real thing is male, but if you add a little something extra it can be female.
I know you didn’t start the institute to give yourself opportunities, but I’d like to think that, since you’ve been in the public eye more lately, winning the honorary Emmy Award and having this book come out, you are going to be more present in our lives. Is there a really juicy role that’s come your way, or something you’re looking for?
There is a very juicy role. We just haven’t got the financing yet. I have an idea for a series that I want to do on a streaming service, because it’s very violent. And I have a lot of ideas for stuff that I want to do. That would be my wish: the Geenaissance, the Renaissance of Geena! Oh, God, I just coined a horrible term.
Sorry, it’s out of Pandora’s box. The Geenaissance is happening. It’s great to talk to you.
You, too, Michael. I’m sorry I wasn’t very articulate. I don’t know why.
You’re still dying of politeness. No apologies!
Oh, my God. I just apologized for this entire interview! You see, I still might die of politeness. It’s still possible. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
