Why Geena Davis Disappeared From Hollywood

Static Media

In the long lineage of badass super-smart feminist women in cinema, Geena Davis is one of the greatest. She's weathered a long career in Hollywood, which can be hazardous for women (especially as they age), and has still come out on top. With her recent appearance as Stacy in Zoë Kravitz's ferocious directorial debut "Blink Twice," Davis has reminded us all that she's one of the best to ever do it, bringing some unnerving levity to the film's deeply claustrophobic tone. She can tell an entire story just with her eyes and is an incredible performer, but for many years she was all but absent from the silver screen. So, what happened? How did one of Hollywood's biggest stars just sort of disappear from the limelight for nearly two decades, only appearing in the occasional small movie role or on an ill-fated television series? 

There were a number of factors that contributed to Davis stepping back from the moviemaking world for a bit, including her starring in a series of stinkers, facing age discrimination, and even taking the time to train as an Olympian archer. The actor's life has honestly been as interesting as any movie she's starred in, so maybe the next Geena Davis movie should be about her instead of starring her. After all, people who grew up with her in "Beetlejuice" might want to know where she went, and fans just discovering her work could be interested in where she came from. Here's a bit more about the impressive life and career of the marvelous Geena Davis, who honestly only gets better with age. 

MGM

Davis began her acting career starring opposite Dustman Hoffman in "Tootsie" in 1982 and quickly rose to meteoric fame by the time the decade was over. She starred in David Cronenberg's cult body horror classic "The Fly" with Jeff Goldblum in 1986 and Tim Burton's brilliant supernatural comedy "Beetlejuice" with Alec Baldwin in 1988, then won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for "The Accidental Tourist" in 1989. It was her role as Thelma in Ridley Scott's "Thelma & Louise" in 1991 that would make her a household name, however, as she shared with AARP in 2022:

"I was occasionally recognized in the supermarket for 'Beetlejuice' or 'The Fly,' and it was all very fun and very short. But all that changed after 'Thelma & Louise.' Then it was mostly women who really wanted to share with me their reactions to the movie and what it meant to them and how it changed their thinking. It's been like that ever since."

This was also the beginning of Davis being recognized as a feminist force in the movies, something that would grow even stronger a year later when she played All-American Girls Professional Baseball League athlete Dottie Hinkle in "A League of Their Own." Despite the film's incredible message about the strength of women, Hollywood didn't seem to get the memo, and David felt that the movie didn't really have the impact she had hoped for. That disappointment wouldn't be the first or last, as she went on to star in a handful of major flops in the next few years. 

MGM

Unfortunately, after "A League of Their Own," Davis starred in a string of box office and critical failures. In 1994, she headlined the romantic dramedies "Angie" and "Speechless," neither of which impressed audiences or critics. She then proceeded to play swashbuckling heroine Morgan Adams in her then-husband Renny Harlin's "Cutthroat Island," a box office bomb that became infamous for only making $18.5 million on a budget of (at least) $92 million and putting Carolco Pictures out of business. While "Cutthroat Island" can be viewed as a "so-bad-it's-good" silly action blockbuster, it nevertheless did a number on the careers of everyone involved, and Davis had a difficult time finding roles that she found satisfying after that.

As Davis entered her early 40s, she found herself being offered fewer and fewer roles in general, which made finding good ones even more challenging. After she starred as a suburban mom with some surprising skill as an assassin in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" in 1996, the only roles she could seem to find were supporting ones — usually as someone's mom.

Warner Bros.

In an interview with The Times in 2022, Geena was characteristically blunt about how her career changed as she got older:

"Comically, at 40. It was like I drove off a cliff. I'd heard about this very early on, this concept that after 40 the roles dry up. It didn't worry me at all because I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Every year at the Oscars, Glenn Close and Jessica Lange and Sally Field were getting all these awards. I thought, 'Well, it's not going to happen to them. Their careers are flourishing.' And, 'It won't happen to them, therefore it won't happen to anybody else after that.' Once I started getting some of these incredible roles I thought, 'Well, certainly it is not going to happen to me.' So when it did..."

She also told Allison Kugel of the Allison Interviews podcast (via Yahoo) that a "certain male actor" said she was too old to be cast as his romantic interest in a film despite the fact that she was 20 years younger than him, though she didn't name names. It's incredibly prevalent for much younger women to star opposite older men, and unfortunately that meant Davis was getting cast less and less because studios felt she was "too old to be a romantic interest." That meant she was mostly stuck playing characters like the mom in "Stuart Little" and its sequels, so she decided to take some time to focus on her family and other interests. 

Columbia Pictures

Davis felt like she was being pushed into a "forced retirement" in her 40s, and when she had children in her late 40s, she told The Times that other people would use that as an excuse for why she was starring in fewer movies. She did get a lot busier with the non-movie parts of her life, however, not only taking on motherhood but also training as an archer for the 2000 Olympics and coming reasonably close to qualifying. This was when she decided to make her feminist filmmaking passions more concrete as well, as she noticed that gender parity statistics were abysmal even in children's programming. In 2004, she launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which advocates for "fairer representations of girls and women" and studies gender equality in the media.

About a decade later, Davis co-founded the Bentonville Film Festival, a non-profit film festival that showcases movies from marginalized creators, along with the Bentonville Film Foundation, which helps provide year-round support to underrepresented filmmakers on the rise. While other actors might have simply rested on their laurels when good roles dried up, Davis used her talents to help make the industry better and raise others up, which is truly admirable.

Fox

Davis didn't disappear from the screen entirely in the 2000s and 2010s, appearing in a handful of smaller roles in independent films and TV movies while also starring in a couple of ill-fated TV shows. First, she starred as President Mackenzie Allen on the ABC drama "Commander in Chief" for only one season, then in 2016 she played Angela Rance (a secretly grown-up Regan MacNeil) for the first season of the Fox TV prequel series "The Exorcist," which itself was cancelled after two seasons.

Then, in 2019, she played Las Vegas casino entertainment director Sandy Devereaux St. Clair on the Netflix women's wrestling series "GLOW," and it felt like she had finally found the right kind of role in television. Unfortunately, "GLOW" was greenlit for a fourth and final season and then quietly canned during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving Davis with yet another cancelled series and unresolved ending. "GLOW" deserved more, and so does Davis, which makes seeing her in "Blink Twice" such a joy. She's clearly relishing the role and hopefully can find more like it where she's able to show off her chops and bite into something meaty. Next up she's set to star in "Stranger Things" creators The Duffer Brothers' new series, "The Boroughs," which will hopefully have better luck than her previous TV shows.

No matter what Davis decides to do next, whether it's tackle a new movie role, continue working as a producer and consultant, hang out with her kids, run her foundations, or just take a well-deserved break, it's guaranteed that she'll give it her all and deliver something excellent. Because even when she's been in mediocre or bad movies or TV shows, Davis has always, always been great.