Geena Davis Thinking Quotations

I had a pretty poor self-image for a long time. I broke into acting as a model in New York. I was never anything like a "supermodel," but I made a living at it for a couple years. The thing was, I was convinced that I was tricking everyone into thinking I was attractive.

My theory of everything is that we are training kids to have gender bias against girls, therefore when you are an adult, you don't see it. We think it's normal.

It's partly because our culture so hyper-sexualizes females that if you don't measure up to whatever we're forced to think is the standard, then you feel inadequate.

I think if you're doing a play, you're rehearsing enough that you get to a point where it's freeing again. But in a movie, if you rehearse too much, now you've just shown everybody what you're going to do. And any element of surprise or impulsiveness is taken away.

I once read a quote that I think was Michelle Pfeiffer in an article, who said that she thought people went into acting because maybe if you could convince millions of people to like you, you will finally like yourself, approve of yourself. I don't know if that may have been a part of it.

I think I always had joie de vivre. But I had pretty bad self-esteem growing up and much of my adult life.

After a couple of rehearsals and a couple of takes, Sydney Pollack says, "Come here. Why are you not nervous?" And I [say], "Do you think it would be better if I was nervous?" And he says, "No, it's just I can't understand it - how you would be first time on a set, you're acting, when he flubs his line you make up a new line. It's very interesting." It's not that I think I'm great; that's what I knew I wanted to do.

I don't think male characters are as one-dimensional as female characters.

I'm very competitive, I think.

An eye-opening moment in my life, a very defining moment, was the first time I met Susan Sarandon [before shooting Thelma & Louise]. We were going to meet, just Ridley [Scott] and Susan and I, to go through the script and see if we had any thoughts or ideas. I was reading the script, and in the most girly way possible, meaning that if it was a line that could change or something different I'd like to see, I would think about each one and say, "Well, this one can wait till the set because I don't want to bring up too many things."

People think of me in the same breath as Robert Redford and Robert De Niro.

When I started out, maybe because I did Thelma & Louise early on - but people were always asking, "Are things better for women now?" I would say, "Yeah, I think so. It seems like it." Then a few years in, I started saying, "I think so. I'm getting a lot of good parts, but I don't know." Then eventually, I was like, "Google it. I don't know, but it doesn't seem great."

I realized that in all the sectors of society where there's a huge gender disparity, the one place that can be fixed overnight is onscreen. You think about getting half of Congress, or the presidency ... It's going to take a while no matter how hard we work on it. But half of the board members and half of the CEOs can be women in the next movie somebody makes; it can be absolutely half.

Even though I was 34 or 35 or something. I was like, "People can do that? Women can actually just say what they think?" It was an extraordinary experience to do that movie [Thelma & Louise] with [Susan Sarandon] because every day was a lesson in how to just be yourself.

I meet Susan [Saradon], and she was amazing. We sit down to go through the script [Thelma & Louise]. I swear, I think it was page one - she says, "So my first line, I don't think we need that line. Or we could put it on page two. Cut this ..." And I was just like ... My jaw was to the ground.

So many other countries have had female leaders, in fact the U.S. ranks 61st in female representation in government and I think it is startling and sign of a change that needs to be made.

The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.

Look at the number of cop shows and lawyer shows and forensics shows... I think there could be room for two quite different examinations of the same political office.