The
Champion
W
hen Geena Davis walks into a Santa
Monica restaurant in a striped sweater,
jeans, and Givenchy motorcycle boots,
the sun reflecting off the Pacific
through the massive windows behind
her, one is tempted to check for desert dust or a trace of her
famed character Thelma Dickinson still lingering 28 years
later. Since 1991, when she and Susan Sarandon clasped
hands in the front seat of a vintage Ford Thunderbird con-
vertible for the final scene of Thelma & Louise and immortal-
ized their characters as badass feminist antiheroes, she has
led the conversation on gender pa r it y in Hol ly wood.
“The press was saying, ‘This will change everything [for
women],’” says Davis, 63, whose lithe 6-foot frame is decid-
edly dust-free. As soon as the Ridley Scott–directed movie
was released, it was clear it was destined to become a clas-
sic—make that the classic—female road-trip movie. But the
expectation was that it would be the first of many.
“The next film I made,” Davis adds, “was A League of
Their Own, and everyone said the same thing.” As Dottie
Hinson, the fictional star of the World War II–era profes-
sional baseball league, she sparked even more cultural dia-
logue on girls and sports, speaking to young women who
were raised as Title IX athletes.
“I was just sitting back waiting for more, thinking, ‘Let’s
go! I’m ready!’ [But] it didn’t change things for women. I got
sucked into the idea that it would, but we’re still not there yet.”
Not one to wait around, Davis founded the Geena Davis
Instit ute on Gender in Med ia in 2004 to speed the conver-
sation along a bit. And since then, the institute’s studies
have con fi r med the shock ing gender inequa lities that have
plagued Hollywood for years, both on television and in film.
“Google gave us this really big grant to develop software
to do the research,” she says. “It uses the latest in voice and
face recog n ition to tel l us st u ff that we cou ld n’t perceive
with the human eye, like, the exact screen time and speak-
ing time of characters.” One of the latest studies found that
overall there are far fewer female characters onscreen
these days, and the actresses who do appear have fewer
lines. “When there’s a female lead, she’s onscreen and
speaks about a third of the time that a male lead does, which
is astounding,” Davis adds.
Another, more promising, study showed that for the past
few years, films starring a woman actually ended up making
more money at the box office than films starring a man. “In
2017 they made 38 percent more,” she says of the year’s female-
led blockbusters, which included Wonder Woma n , B eaut y a nd
the Beast, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “That’s a lot.”
Still, in a montage of badass women in film throughout
h istor y, when for midable fema les stopped t a k ing sh it f rom
incompetent men, Davis would dominate. The Wareham,
Mass., native, Boston University theater major, and mother of
three teenagers (daughter Alizeh, 16, and twin sons Kaiis
and Kian, 14; their dad is Davis’s ex, surgeon Reza Jarrahy)
has brought to life countless characters who are permanently
etched in the consciousness of generations of women. She
earned a best supporting actress Oscar for The Accidental
Tourist in 1989 and a Golden Globe for her portrayal as the
first female president in the short-lived series Commander
in Chief in 2006. And her big-screen début was alongside
Dustin Hoffman in 1982’s Tootsie, a role she landed, in part,
because as a young model living in New York, she had no
qualms about walking around in her undies. “They knew that
a model wouldn’t care,” she says. “It
126 InSTYLE FEBRUARY 2019
After nearly four decades of challenging gender norms onscreen,
GEENA DAVIS is fighting to level the playing field for all women in Holly wood
by CHRISTINE LENNON photographed by BE AU GRE ALY styled by SUE CHOI
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 136)