Geena Davis Is Ready for the Geenaissance

[TMC]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/th...e-geenaissance

The actor discusses her new memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” and her life as a feminist icon, data geek, world-class archer, and more.

By Michael Schulman

October 16, 2022

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.

[Chocolate Moose]

How cute!