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Geena Davis, 70, Says She Once Refused Grandmother Roles
The actor explains why playing her age suddenly made sense to her
Geena Davis, 70, seen here in Los Angeles on May 18, 2026, once resisted roles that cast her as a mother or grandmother. She now says she has changed her mind about playing women her own age.
Alberto Rodriguez/Variety/Getty Images
Key takeaways
- Geena Davis said she once rejected roles that would portray her as an older adult.
- The actor accepted a part in a Netflix series about retirees because the characters were active, capable and central to the story.
- She shares what she learned from shooting Thelma & Louise, with Susan Sarandon.
Geena Davis used to have a firm answer when Hollywood offered her a grandmother role: No.
The actor, 70, said on the July 20 episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that she turned down “any number of roles” because the characters had grown children or grandchildren.
“I was like, ‘No, cast a 40-year-old,’ ” Davis said. “No time on Earth am I gonna play a grandmother.”
Even the suggestion that her character could have teenagers bothered her, she said.
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Davis said the change came with The Boroughs, Netflix’s supernatural drama about residents of a luxury retirement community.
“This made sense,” she said.
In the series, Davis plays Renee Joyce, a former music tour manager who lives in the community after caring for her mother and losing her money. Netflix canceled the series after one season.
“Something I really like about this show is we’re all very able,” she said. “We can battle, you know, dangerous things.”
Davis has three children with her former husband, Reza Jarrahy: daughter Alizeh, 24, and twin sons Kaiis and Kian, 22. Davis was 46 when Alizeh was born and 48 when she had the twins.
“I always was grateful that it was later, and I felt like it was important that I had a stronger sense of self, who I was,” she told Shepard of becoming a mother in her 40s.
Watching children’s entertainment with Alizeh also sharpened Davis’ awareness of how rarely girls appeared as central characters. That observation led her to commission research on gender representation and establish the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
“When my daughter was 2, we watched her first preschool show together, and I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female ones. Then I saw it in G-rated videos and other shows, and I was horrified. I knew there was gender inequality in general, but I had no idea it would show up in entertainment for the littlest kids. That kind of imbalance trains kids to have an unconscious bias from minute one,” she told AARP in 2023.
By the time Davis won an Oscar for The Accidental Tourist in 1989, she had already started building a career playing women who were funny, difficult, unpredictable and fully alive. She made her film debut as April Page in Tootsie in 1982 and broke through as journalist Veronica Quaife in The Fly in 1986. In Beetlejuice in 1988, she played Barbara Maitland, a newly dead homeowner trying to reclaim her house from both the living and Michael Keaton’s chaos. In 1991, Thelma & Louise pushed that further. As Thelma Dickinson, a sheltered Arkansas homemaker who goes on the run with her friend Louise (Susan Sarandon), Davis played a woman discovering her nerve in real time.
(From left) Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are seen in a scene from the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise.”
©MGM/courtesy Everett / Everett Collection
During an early script session, Davis watched Sarandon question one of her lines with director Ridley Scott and get an easy yes.
“I had never been in the presence of a woman who doesn’t apologize for existing ever and advocates for herself without any fear for herself, and everybody loved her,” Davis said on the podcast. “It wasn’t like she was, like, fighting, but she just knows what she wants and says what she wants.”
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The movie also sharpened Davis’ awareness of what women were allowed to do on-screen. The film became a hit, and Davis and Sarandon both received Oscar nominations.
“I think it’s because of Thelma & Louise, and it really heightened my awareness of how women are portrayed,” she said. “Women had so few opportunities to come out of a movie feeling like empowered by the female characters.”
To this day, the two are tight: “She changed my life more than anybody. We’re still, you know, ride or die,” Davis said on the podcast.
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