‘I was drawn to characters who were in charge of their own fate’: Oscar winner Geena Davis on ‘Thelma & Louise,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ ‘The Fly’

She's done action, comedy, drama, sci-fi, thrillers — and won an Oscar along the way (and been nominated for a second). So defining Geena Davis' career in a word or two isn't the simplest of tasks. But that's exactly how she likes it. "I'm very fortunate that I've been able to be in every kind of genre and style of movie," she says. "I've never been typecast, which is just fantastic. I'm so lucky."

So what is it that makes her say yes to a given script?

"I only figured it out after I'd been in the business for a little while, and it was that I wanted to play a character," Davis tells Gold Derby. "I was drawn to characters who were in charge of their own fate, who steered their own life. And I thought at first, 'Oh, I just don't like female characters who don't seem to get to do much, or they're just the girlfriend of the person doing all the interesting things.' But it was more specifically that I wanted something to happen for my character that she could create herself."

Here, she reflects on some of the iconic roles that have defined her career.

The Fly (1986)

Davis was dating Jeff Goldblum when she was cast opposite him in David Cronenberg's sci-fi horror film, which initially made the director and producers hesitant. But she won them over, and now calls it the "best experience." "We just lived and breathed that movie," she says. "All we did was work on it and talk about it and and rehearse it and really make it our own." In fact, she says, their relationship enhanced both of their performances. "I ended up getting really used to lots of weird stuff," she says. "I did another movie with Jeff where he was a blue alien" — referring to Earth Girls Are Easy.

The Accidental Tourist (1988)

Davis says landing the role of the eccentric Muriel Pritchett in The Accidental Tourist — which won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was one of the most significant in her career. The film, which was directed by Lawrence Kasdan and also starred William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, was based on a novel by Anne Tyler.

"I had read the book, and that was the first time I read a book where I thought they're going to make a movie out of this," she says. "I want to be the character, and I'm going to hate whoever gets to play this part. And then it was me, and I couldn't believe it! It was so amazing, because I really was already angry at whoever was to be Muriel."

Davis says she was drawn to the role by Tyler's detailed, evocative writing. "Anne Tyler describes things so beautifully, and it talked about a million different ways about the way she walked and the way she moved," she says. "And so when I was going to play the part, I made lists of all the adjectives like she clicked down the sidewalk, and all the adjectives that she used to describe her. I could just picture her so well that I knew that I wanted to do all those things."

Beetlejuice (1988)

Davis says she didn't have to audition for the role of Barbara Maitland in Tim Burton's original Beetlejuice, opposite Alec Baldwin. In meeting with the director, who she calls a "genius," "I said to him, 'You know, I get this movie, and I really want to be in it,'" she recalls. "And he thought later, 'Wow, you know, I don't feel like I get it. And so it'll be very handy to have someone on set who thinks they'd completely get the movie.' So that's why he picked me."

The fact that their characters were dead was "very charming," she says; nor was she thrown off by the special effects. "I think I'm pretty good at it, I have to say," of the skill of acting opposite nothing — which she would show off later in the Stuart Little films.

Thelma & Louise (1991)

The moment she heard about the script for Thelma & Louise, Davis knew she just had to be in it. But at that point, "every actress in town wanted to be in it, and it was already cast," she recalls. So her agent called Ridley Scott — who was then just signed on to produce the film — every week. Every single week. Eventually, the director fell out, the cast fell out, and Scott decided to direct the film himself, and agreed to meet with the persistent actress.

"I'm pouring out my heart about why I absolutely have to be in this movie and play Louise, and he finally says, 'Right, so, but in other words, you wouldn't play Thelma?'" she says. "And I say, 'You know what's so interesting, as I've been listening to myself talk, I've realized I'm not right for Louise. I should play Thelma, and I just made s--t up about why I absolutely had to be Thelma.' And so I ended up signing a contract that I would play either part."

As history now knows, Susan Sarandon was cast as Louise — and Davis became Thelma. "It was the most magical experience ever," Davis says of working with Sarandon. "This is how narrow my childhood was that I had never met a woman who didn't start everything she said with the words, 'This is probably a stupid idea, maybe we shouldn't,' and then end the comment with a question mark. That's how I was and had always been. At the first meeting with her and Ridley, I was stunned — the first thing she said was, 'Why don't we lose my first line?' And he's like, 'Yeah, you're right. Why do we need that?' I was literally aghast that that could happen and that a woman could behave like that. The entire movie was like that. It was just like taking a bath in a world where women say what they think and don't get any consequences for it, where it's just natural and accepted. I wanted to be like her from the second I met her. We're still each other's ride-or-die."

A League of Their Own (1992)

"It's the highest-grossing baseball movie of all time," Davis says proudly of the hit film, directed by Penny Marshall and starring Tom Hanks, Rosie O'Donnell, Madonna, and Lori Petty, among others.

Davis is still baffled, though, that the press at the time wanted to pigeonhole the film. "I did a lot of interviews for that movie, and every single one said, so, is there a lot of cat fighting, because you're all women. I was like, 'What are you talking about?' It was so weird," she says. "And also, almost everyone said, 'So would you call this movie a feminist movie?' as if they were asking something so naughty. And I always say, 'Yeah, why not? It's women doing stuff that men usually do!' Because it was kind of the time where people would say, 'I'm not a feminist,' so I definitely wanted to counteract that. It's not a dirty word, but there were people were trying to make it into a dirty word at that time."

The film also awakened her own nascent athletic ability. "I think because I was so tall as a kid, I was very self-conscious and very physically shy, I didn't want to try any sports," she says. "I was convinced that I was probably uncoordinated. I didn't know how to do any kind of sport. So then I get cast in this movie, and I have to portray the best baseball player anyone has ever seen. So I trained, and the coaches, very early, started saying, 'You know, you have a lot of untapped athletic ability.' I had to learn a bunch of other skills in sports for other movies, horseback riding and ice skating and Taekwondo and pistol shooting and fencing, and I was kind of good at all of it, which was such a revelation. It really changed my life to think of myself as athletic."

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Davis' action hero phase came in a film directed by her then-husband, Renny Harlin, opposite Samuel L. Jackson, as a small-town schoolteacher who learns she's actually an highly skilled government assassin.

"Renny wanted me to do all my stunts myself, which was insanity," she says. But if you dare me to do something, I will do it." The craziest stunt, which she still recalls vividly, was a scene "where we fall into a hole in the ice in a frozen lake, which supposedly I shot the hole with a machine gun as we were falling toward the lake," she says. "I kept waiting for this scene to be shot, where we would go to where there was a fake ice hole, obviously, and shoot that. But no, they drove us to a lake where they had cut a real hole in the ice. We had wet suits under our clothes, and we had to get in the hole, put our heads under the water and pop up and crawl away. I never asked Sam what it felt like to him, but it felt to me like someone had hit me in the head with a concrete block. I suddenly was blind. I couldn't hear, I couldn't think, like an ice cream headache of your whole body. We ended up having to do it three times because we didn't go deep enough to pop out of the water. That's the hardest thing I've ever done."

Laughs Davis, "People were asking me if he was trying to kill me on that movie — and I was wondering that myself."

Commander-in-Chief (2005)

And though it still has yet to happen in real life, Davis took on a starring role as the first woman president in ABC's short-lived drama series Commander-in-Chief. It was yes at first read.

"I had said, I don't want to do an hourlong [TV show], it's too hard," she says. "And they said, 'Oh, well, you're being offered this hourlong where you are the president of United States — so should we just pass?' I was like, 'Wait, do I have to read it first, or could we just say yes immediately?' Because what's more iconic than the first female president of the United States? So yeah, I loved that show. I loved it, and I wish I had a longer administration. But here's the thing, I'm still not even old enough necessarily to be the president, so 20 years later, I could always come back. That definitely deserved a second season. It feels like it was ahead of its time for sure."