“People would say that I played eccentric characters. But in those circumstances I’m the normal one,” the actor Geena Davis says, in a new interview. “Even in ‘Stuart Little,’ Hugh Laurie and I are very normal about having a mouse as a son.”
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. She’s an elaborate pumpkin carver.
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. 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.”
“Damn” or “hell.” I think it means “devils” if you translate it. That’s what you yell if you smash your thumb or something.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.
I love how it escalated, too. Like, you would put an extension cord down your leg so that people thought you were a machine? 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 thewanted to have cool challenges, too.” I’d love to hear more about how you chose roles.
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 Ibeen 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.
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.”
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.
What kind of response do you remember receiving for “A League of Their Own”? Did you feel any resistance when it came out? 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.
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.
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