Geena Davis carried shame about Bill Murray incident ‘for years’: ‘It had such a profound impact on me’

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Want to see what a woman looks like when a man is making her terribly uncomfortable, but she’s pretending not to be? Check out Geena Davis with Bill Murray on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1990, when the actors were promoting their caper film Quick Change.

They begin the interview with a staged kiss, but then Murray just keeps touching Davis. He strokes her arm, kisses her shoulder, pulls down the strap of her slip dress. Though she laughs, watch her micro-expressions: Her brow wrinkles, her eyes flash with irritation. Most tellingly, she cranes her head so far away from him it’s practically sideways.

Davis describes this appearance in her new memoir, Dying of Politeness. “Watch how I giggle and go along with it … as if the way Murray and Hall are objectifying me is really fun,” she writes. As well, she details Murray’s abusive behaviour before and during Quick Change. At her audition – in a hotel room – Murray pulled her shirt out of her pants and forced her to submit to a massage; on the first day of the shoot, he screamed at her in front of the crew.

Her point is not to shame who she calls “everybody-loves-him Bill Murray,” even though his actions were shameful, carefully calibrated to keep Davis, who had just won the best supporting actress Oscar for The Accidental Tourist, “compliant” and “in her place.” Her point is, “Like so many women in a situation like that, I didn’t know how to avoid being treated that way. I shut up and played along.”

On a video call last week, Davis – who lives in Los Angeles near her three adult children and her pet donkey – talked to me about her “journey to badass-ery.” The Murray incident is one painful step. Others include watching in awe as Susan Sarandon simply said what she thought on the set of Thelma and Louise; training for kick-ass roles (baseball phenom, pirate, assassin, U.S. president); becoming an Olympic-level archer; and founding the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (a non-profit dedicated to closing the gap in women’s representation), which earned her another Oscar and an Emmy.

As the title Dying of Politeness indicates, however, Davis gives nearly everyone in her book the benefit of the doubt. She’s generous about her four ex-spouses, including the actor Jeff Goldblum and the director Renny Harlin. (“I marry people left and right!” Davis exclaimed when I ribbed her about how often she got hitched. “I don’t know what that deal is.”) She’s fair to William Hurt, who was testy on The Accidental Tourist. But beneath her cheery tone, she has information to impart about how being polite and compliant actually harms women, and Murray is a key example.

“I had to include that story, because it had such a profound impact on me,” Davis says. Her voice is as warm and deep as chestnut ink; she wears a flowered dress, and her straight brown hair sweeps to her shoulders. “It was so disheartening. The shame I carried, for years, because I didn’t do anything about it.” She told no one until the memoir – not even her agent or manager, who’d flown to New York that day to support her.

“I hope that women see themselves in my story,” Davis says. “I was able to play characters who were outspoken and brave, but I was constantly giving my power away. Women, generally, are trained to be nice, to not cause a stir. I’m hoping to show women a potential path toward saying what they think. Narrowing the gap between what you feel like doing and what you actually do. And encouraging them to stand up for themselves.”

After starring in two iconic feminist films (Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own, the latter of which was, at the time, the most expensive film ever directed by a woman, Penny Marshall), Davis thought she was figuring the badass thing out. Then she hit 40, and scripts stopped coming.

“From the beginning of my career, I’d known that happens, but I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me,” Davis says. “I became very sad. Very, very sad. Then I realized how important that idea was – that it happens to everyone.” Around the same time, she noticed the paucity of girls in the films and TV shows her two-year-old daughter watched – and in 2004 the Geena Davis Institute was born.

Combing through movies and series, the institute found that women accounted for – at most – 17 per cent of people working off and on screen (in lead, supporting and even non-speaking roles). When Davis presented her findings to studios and producers, they were stunned. “I realized, women have been marginalized for centuries. It’s become unconscious, and we don’t notice it,” she says. “These were smart, well-meaning people, and they would name a movie or series with one female character as absolute proof that gender inequality was over.”

Cut to her most recent study, where children’s TV and family films have achieved gender parity in their lead characters. “My theory of change proved to be correct,” Davis says. “If people with unconscious bias are shown they have it, they will want to get rid of it. The data really did help.” Though, she adds, women directors and crew, as well as other marginalized groups, still lag far behind.

“Of all characters in movies, only 5 per cent are women 50 and over. Whenever I have a meeting at a studio or network, I say, ‘All you have to do is change some names to female, and you can cast a woman. Or you can cast me.’ And they laugh, and I say, ‘Yeah, but seriously. Cast me.’ ” She chuckles. “It’s altruistic of me to try to fix things for women in general, but come on, let’s get specific.”

I ask Davis how she’d handle a Murray-like incident now. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, no no no,’ ” she says confidently. “I once had a director who was a screamer, so unpleasant, and I never said anything to him about it. Now, on minute one, I’d say, ‘Even if you’re this way always, it’s not going to happen on this movie.’ ”

Would she care to name him? She declines. Though she’s no longer dying because of it, Davis remains polite.