{"id":2511063,"date":"2026-07-21T15:29:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T15:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2511063"},"modified":"2026-07-21T15:29:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T15:29:15","slug":"geena-davis-70-says-she-once-rejected-older-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/geena-davis-70-says-she-once-rejected-older-roles\/","title":{"rendered":"Geena Davis, 70, Says She Once Rejected Older Roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Watching children\u2019s entertainment with Alizeh also sharpened Davis\u2019 awareness of how rarely girls appeared as central characters. That observation led her to commission research on gender representation and establish the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen my daughter was 2, we watched her first preschool show together, and I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female ones. Then I saw it in G-rated videos and other shows, and I was horrified. I knew there was gender inequality in general, but I had no idea it would show up in entertainment for the littlest kids. That kind of imbalance trains kids to have an unconscious bias from minute one,\u201d she told AARP<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

By the time Davis won an Oscar for The Accidental Tourist<\/i> in 1989, she had already started building a career playing women who were funny, difficult, unpredictable and fully alive. She made her film debut\u00a0as April Page in Tootsie<\/i>\u00a0in 1982 and broke through as journalist Veronica Quaife\u00a0in The Fly<\/i>\u00a0in 1986. In Beetlejuice<\/i> in 1988, she played Barbara Maitland,\u00a0a newly dead homeowner trying to reclaim her house from both the living and Michael Keaton\u2019s chaos. In 1991, Thelma & Louise<\/i>\u00a0pushed that further. As Thelma Dickinson, a sheltered Arkansas homemaker who goes on the run with her friend Louise (Susan Sarandon), Davis played a woman discovering her nerve in real time.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n\"susan<\/p>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n

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(From left) Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are seen in a scene from the 1991 film \u201cThelma & Louise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a9MGM\/courtesy Everett \/ Everett Collection<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

During an early script session, Davis watched Sarandon question one of her lines with director Ridley Scott and get an easy yes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had never been in the presence of a woman who doesn\u2019t apologize for existing ever and advocates for herself without any fear for herself, and everybody loved her,\u201d Davis said on the podcast. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t like she was, like, fighting, but she just knows what she wants and says what she wants.\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie also sharpened Davis\u2019 awareness of what women were allowed to do on-screen. The film became a hit, and Davis and Sarandon both received Oscar nominations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s because of Thelma & Louise<\/i>, and it really heightened my awareness of how women are portrayed,\u201d she said. \u201cWomen had so few opportunities to come out of a movie feeling like empowered by the female characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this day, the two are tight: \u201cShe changed my life more than anybody. We\u2019re still, you know, ride or die,\u201d Davis said on the podcast.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aarp.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching children\u2019s entertainment with Alizeh also sharpened Davis\u2019 awareness of how rarely girls appeared as central characters. That observation led her to commission research on gender representation and establish the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. \u201cWhen my daughter was 2, we watched her first preschool show together, and I immediately noticed there were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2511064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[349165,495308,495307,495312,495311,495310,495309,347564],"class_list":["post-2511063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-geena-davis","tag-geena-davis-age","tag-geena-davis-career","tag-geena-davis-interview","tag-geena-davis-movies","tag-geena-davis-roles","tag-how-old-is-geena-davis","tag-thelma-and-louise"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Geena-Davis-70-Says-She-Once-Rejected-Older-Roles.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2511063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2511065,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511063\/revisions\/2511065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2511064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2511063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2511063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2511063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}