Geena Davis is speaking her truth.
The “A League of Their Own” star, 65, claimed that filmmakers started to treat her negatively following her Oscar win.
Davis won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on March 29, 1989, for her work in the drama “The Accidental Tourist.”
“I didn’t ever think, ‘This is my magic ticket to doing everything I want to do,’ or, like, now I was at the top of the A-list or anything like that,” she said on an episode of the “Allison Interviews” podcast.
Davis continued, “I didn’t think of it that way, but I did unexpectedly feel a tremendous feeling of having accomplished something. I thought, ‘Well, I got that out of the way. I never have to wonder if I’m going to get one of these things.'”
But the activist recalled at least two directors, whom she did not name, changing their tunes after her Oscar triumph.
“I had two directors, after I won the Oscar, who I had a rocky start with, because they assumed that I was going to think I was ‘all that,’ and they wanted to make sure that I didn’t feel like I was ‘all that,'” she said.
“Without having met me or having spent any time with me or anything, they just assumed I was going to be like, ‘Well, now no one is going to tell me what to do!’” Davis said. “I think maybe because I was a woman, the directors felt that way. And maybe it was even unconscious bias that they would maybe do it to a woman and not a man. But they didn’t want a woman to potentially cause them any problems.”
Davis stated, “They wanted to make sure I knew my place, and maybe … it probably wouldn’t happen to a man.”
The mother of three would then go on to earn a second Oscar nod for her role in 1991’s “Thelma & Louise.”
In the podcast, Davis also couldn’t help but gush over her co-star in that film, Susan Sarandon. “She had the most impact of any person in my life because I’d never really spent time with a woman who moves through the world the way she does,” she said of Sarandon, 75.
She said, “It sounds crazy to be 33 years old at the time and first experiencing a woman like that, but I really had previously never met a woman who didn’t preface everything with, ‘Well, I don’t know what you will think, and this is probably a stupid idea, but …’”
“She just lived her life and said, ‘This is what I think.’ To have three months of exposure to that was amazing,” Davis raved.