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AK: We already talked about working with Susan Sarandon, but generally speaking, what did doing the film Thelma & Louise, and its subsequent success, do for you, both as an actor and as a woman? GD: I had read the script for Thelma & Louise after it had already been cast. I thought, “Oh my God! This is the best script I’ve ever read. I wish I could be in it.” I ended up having a year-long pursuit for the role, because Ridley Scott was only the producer at that time, and different directors and different pairings of ‘Thelmas’ and ‘Louises’ were coming together and falling apart, and so for a year my agent called at least once a week to say, “Just so you know, Geena is still available. She’s still interested.” Then when [Ridley Scott] decided he was going to direct it, he immediately said, “Yes. Okay sure, I’ll meet with her,” and I convinced him somehow or another (laugh). AK: Way to play hard to get Geena (laugh). GD: (Laughs) AK: Let’s talk about male and female pairings in film. Normally, it’s very common to have a 50-year-old or even a 60-year-old leading man opposite a 30-year-old leading lady. That’s just kind of been the norm, although there are a few exceptions, and that is what our eyes are used to seeing. I know that kind of sucks, but how do you feel when an older woman is cast opposite a younger man? Do you see that as a win for more mature actresses? GD: Let’s see… in Thelma & Louise they cast Brad Pitt to be my sort of…. love interest, and it wasn’t actually because he was younger. They didn’t purposely try to cast someone younger than me. He just gave the best audition and he was the best choice. But I thought that was pretty cool. He’s only, like, seven years younger than me, but I thought that was quite cool that they did that. AK: We are all a bit societally conditioned to look at it sideways if the man and woman on screen are exactly the same age. If you put a leading man who is 50 with a leading woman who is 50 or even 45, I feel like that would almost look odd to us, the audience, because we are so brainwashed. GD: It’s very strange and so prevalent. A certain male actor that was making a movie said that I was too old to be his romantic interest, and I was 20 years younger than him. You know what it is? Women peak in their 20s and 30s, and men peak in their 40s and 50s as far as actors go. So the male stars of the movies want to appear to be younger than they are, or they want to appeal to younger people, so they always want a co-star who is really young. I guess it’s to make them seem whatever, but that is why that happens and that is why women don’t get cast very much after 40 and 50. It is because they are felt to be too old to be a romantic interest. AK: Tell me what inspired you to create the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media. Was it one thing or many things? GD: It was one very specific thing. I had my awareness raised about how women are represented in Hollywood in Thelma & Louise, and seeing the reaction. It was so extreme if people recognized us on the street, or wherever, and it made me realize that we really give woman so few opportunities to feel like this after watching a movie, to identify with the female character or characters and live vicariously through them. I decided I was going to pay attention to this and try to choose roles that make women feel good. So I had a very heightened awareness of all of this, and then when my daughter was two, I sat down and watched pre-school shows and G-rated videos with her, and from the first thing I watched I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female characters in a pre-school show. I thought, “Wait a minute, this is the 21st Century. How could we be showing kids an imbalanced world?” I saw it everywhere, in movies, on TV. I didn’t intend at that moment to launch an institute about it, but I found that no one else in Hollywood seemed to recognize what I saw. I talked to lots and lots of creators who said, “No, no, no. That’s not a problem anymore. It’s been fixed.” That’s when I decided I’m