While we sit here and rewatch Beetlejuice for the billionth time (and wishing for a sequel), we have one question. Where has Geena Davis been? Has she retired?
Davis didn't quite fall into the realm of sandworms from Tim Burton's cult classic. She just has way better things to dedicate her time to, like fighting for gender equality.
While Barbara from Beetlejuice was hardly her last great role (she starred in Thelma & Louise, The Fly, A League of Their Own), she hasn't really been in anything groundbreaking or memorable for a while, unfortunately.
But, no, she's not retired. She just won an Oscar, actually. Not for a role, though. For her work in the industry.
Her Flops, Age, And Selectiveness Have Accumulatively Stalled Her Career
Davis might have begun her career in scanty underwear in Tootsie, but she soon turned into one of the most credible actresses of her generation. So how did she go from an Academy Award-winning actress to Stuart Little's mom?
Her career started to have a downward turn around 1995, when she starred in two consecutive flops, Cutthroat Island, which flopped so hard it was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest box office loss in the history of film and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
After these films, she took three years off, divorced her cheating husband, Renny Harlin, and contemplated her career. During her hiatus, she realized she wanted to pursue more complex roles. Films that were female-driven or at least had strong female characters who weren't like the character she played in Tootsie.
When she came back to Hollywood, though, her age hindered her. It wasn't so much that she wasn't getting offers, she was just not getting the offers she wanted.
"Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s," she told Vulture in 2016. "If you look at IMDB, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little. I was getting offers, but for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s. I'd been completely ruined and spoiled."
She said a similar thing to The Guardian. Once she had "a four in front of my age, I fell off the cliff. I really did. In the early stages of my career, I was blithely going along thinking, ‘Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, and Sally Field, they’re all making these great female-centric movies. And I’m getting these great roles, really tippy-top roles, so things must be getting better for women.’ But suddenly, the great roles were incredibly scarce. It was a big difference."
After three Stuart Little films, Davis had her first promising role as the first female president on Commander in Chief, but unfortunately, it was short-lived after being canceled.
Davis then took another big break between 2009 and 2012, and returned with appearances on various television shows like The Exorcist, Grey's Anatomy, and more recently GLOW, where she played the character Sandy Devereaux St. Clair.
She just starred in Ava and is set to star in Cowgirl's Last Ride. Besides "falling off a cliff," because of her age and her understandable selectiveness, her career also stalled because she focused most of her time on raising her three children, sports (she's an accomplished archer), and activism.
She Wants To Change The World
Nowadays, Davis doesn't care so much about changing Hollywood by taking on great female roles anymore. She's more concerned with changing things in the industry from behind the scenes. In fact, she is more involved in the industry now than she's ever been.
In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, when she realized female characters were severely underrepresented in her children's favorite films and shows.
The organization is research-heavy and "endeavors to focus on improving the representation of women and girls in children’s entertainment", but they haven't just studied women. They study race as well.
"Oh, we want to change the world!" she told The Guardian. "Our goal is very simple: the storytellers and people on screen should reflect the population, which is half female and incredibly diverse. It’s not like: ‘Wow, what a far-fetched idea!’ It just makes total sense.
"I had this realization that this problem we’re all trying to fix, gender inequality, well, a good way would be to stop teaching two-year-olds to have a gender bias."
When she would talk to people in the industry they would tell her that the problem was fixed, but it wasn't. So she started from the ground up, breaking barriers one by one.
The most important part of the organization was the data, which she collected for two years. Then when it was all done she showed the children's entertainment industry and they were appalled and set to work to fix it.
All of her work with the organization earned her an honorary Oscar last year, the coveted Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, recognizing her contributions in her acting career as well as her decades-long humanitarian work.
She also produced and starred in The Changes Everything, a documentary about the misrepresentation of women in film, and went on to organize this past summer's Bentonville film festival, which she co-founded in 2015 to help promote women and minorities in film.
So you can say that Davis has been very busy over the years, making massive changes in the entertainment industry, even though she's not being featured as much on our screens. It kinda sucks that we have to sacrifice seeing her in new roles for women's equality in entertainment. Can we have Davis back while the executives fix their own mistakes?