Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon—the matchup wasn’t as improbable as everyone thought. Geena, gangly, goofy, a skyscraper next to most leading men, was extraordinary to behold, no one’s image of the girl next door, but always eager to please. Susan, smaller in stature, more than made up for it with her no-bullshit manner. Geena conveyed an innocent quality and was unafraid to stand out. Susan Sarandon was a paragon of mature sexuality, her commonsense style lending a lived-in ease to the women she played. They never saw themselves as the chicks in the background. They played the leads in their own lives.
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GEENA, WHO RARELY SAW GENDER as a drawback in the early days of her career, can’t remember being exposed to the idea of a woman as mere appendage until her senior year in high school, when she overheard her uncle counsel her mother, “You don’t send girls to college—it’s a waste of money. They’re just going to get married anyway.” It shocked her, because her father, a civil engineer, and her mother, a teacher’s assistant, treated Geena and her older brother as equals when she was growing up in Wareham, Massachusetts, a small, working-class town on the road approaching Cape Cod.
Her drive switched on early. She didn’t merely deliver newspapers as a kid, she knocked herself out by handing over each one personally at the customer’s door. Geena didn’t merely study piano, she took up flute, too, and played the organ at the Congregational Protestant Church for the early-morning youth service. “Youth,” she notes drily, “love to get up early.” She bounded over high jumps and hurdles for the track team. She made the honor society and later joined Mensa, the organization for people with lofty IQs.
She and her best friend, Lucyann, acted out their own versions of television shows like The Rifleman in the backyard. “It never occurred to us that there were no female characters we wanted to perform,” Geena says. “There was Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, where the women had superpowers, but every episode was about them having to sit on their powers so the man in their life wouldn’t get upset or feel emasculated.”
Up until tenth grade, she was the tallest student, boy or girl, in every class, where kids could be cruel. Rather than stoop over and withdraw, Geena presented herself as a bit of a kook, making her own clothes in crazy patterns and colors. Her dating roster numbered a grand total of one until senior year, which she spent as an exchange student among the blessedly colossal citizens of Sweden.
In New York after graduating from Boston University, Geena signed on with a modeling agency, hoping it would lead to acting roles. In the meantime, her only performances took place at the Ann Taylor boutique on Fifty-seventh Street, where, working as a sales clerk, she hopped into the window one day and froze while onlookers gathered to figure out whether she was a mannequin or real. Later, willing herself not to blink, she wore a cheesy wig or ran an electrical cord from her foot to look like a robot. She took pleasure in freaking out the ever-shifting audience, waiting until the perfect moment to move, just when she was about to lose them, and then delighting in their gasps. Geena worked her way up: Bendel’s hired her for its Christmas window.
After one of her first auditions, she could blink all she wanted. The casting people had liked her reading, but it was her body that landed the job. They forgot to ask for the typical strip-down-turn-around to see the bikini she’d worn underneath her outfit, so they perused photos she’d taken for the Victoria’s Secret catalog before making an offer. Member of Mensa or not, she was now in a profession where looks went a long way toward making a career. The small role in Tootsie, the 1982 Sydney Pollack movie, became her very first credit. She hijacked the screen, bending and stretching in a teeny underwire bra and panties while a discombobulated Dustin Hoffman in drag wriggled into the room. The setup treated her cartoony presence as a visual joke.
She began to develop comic timing, as when she warned Hoffman’s character about a lecherous cast member at the soap opera where they worked. Doctor Brewster kisses all the women on the show, she said with uninhibited cheer. We call him The Tongue. She let the word coil out of her mouth like a snake and got a solid laugh.
A major part followed in the short-lived sitcom Buffalo Bill, as did roles as a secondary character in Fletch with Chevy Chase and a sultry vampire in Transylvania 6-5000. Watching dailies on that film, she attracted the attention of Jeff Goldblum, whom she married in 1987 after they costarred in The Fly.
Geena’s was not a classic movie-star face. Her jaw was wide and strong, her eyes rather small, but she had cheekbones out to there, luscious lips and a smile that could light up a billboard. The parts she landed benefited from her uninhibited willingness to appear absurd. Even though none of the films would be mistaken for Masterpiece Theater, she did her best to invest the most wackadoo circumstances in supernatural movies like The Fly and Beetlejuice with straight-ahead feeling. When she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Accidental Tourist in 1989, it was considered a come-from-behind surprise.
Quirky and kooky—“I got a little tired of seeing those words all the time,” she sighs, “but I don’t think they limited what I was offered.” There was a clear upside. The labels steered her to an arcane subcategory of roles that kept Geena from having to consider the female characters who stood by while others had the adventures, what she called the “Good luck, honey!” parts. “I didn’t know how to be interesting if I wasn’t doing something unusual,” she says. If directors approached her with boring parts in hopes she would give them that special Geena Davis eccentricity, she balked. “Somebody has to write it that way,” she explained, “and then I do it. I can’t make something out of nothing.”
The actress knew good roles were scarce, but by setting herself apart with unusual selections, she worked, if not frenetically, at least steadily. The only danger seemed to be of sliding from costar to the lesser slot of red-haired, funny sidekick. Geena was keen for a distinctive lead. Thelma & Louise couldn’t have come at a better time.
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SUSAN SARANDON LEFT HER CAREER more to chance, which is not the same thing as not taking it seriously. She took parts as they came along, but she turned them down, too, if they didn’t satisfy her exacting standards. She declined the female lead in Clint Eastwood’s 1984 Tightrope, for example, because it dressed up the murders of women to make them seem like glamorous turn-ons—the victims were raped and strangled in beds or Jacuzzis. She chose parts with substance over those that positioned her on bankable lists. “Not that I was the go-to gal for those anyway,” she says with a half-proud, half-resentful shrug. “I was never offered The Godfather or any of the big, iconic films.” At times, she was jilted for honors that critics felt she deserved, and she engaged in political activism regardless of its impact on her career.
Her upbringing instilled in Susan Sarandon a strong moral center, if not the one intended by her parochial school education. The eldest of nine in a devout Catholic family, she grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, where her parents needed any help she could spare looking after all those younger siblings. She was responsible, sheltered and serious.
Acting came to her almost by accident. She studied theater at Catholic University, but in a literary more than a practical way. After she entered a twelve-year marriage with a fellow student, the aspiring actor Chris Sarandon, she went along on an audition and landed an agent herself. Five days later, she won her first role, in the 1970 movie Joe, as a hippie whose father murdered her druggie boyfriend. Susan rewrote her lines and took charge of her own costumes and makeup. “I didn’t know actresses weren’t supposed to do that,” she told an interviewer. It established a pattern: Susan Sarandon, troublemaker or a fully committed collaborator, depending on how much her input was welcome.
For ten years, she took haphazard roles, mostly just to learn and earn. Like Geena Davis, she found her appearance had much to do with her winning parts—Susan had those wide Bette Davis eyes, a good figure and a natural presence. The job itself seemed silly to her. “Acting is a profession where mediocrity is constantly rewarded,” she says. “Anybody can act. It’s surviving as an actor that takes more talent.”
Among her contemporaries, ingenue after ingenue eventually disappeared, while Susan persevered by holding out for more-intriguing options. The Rocky Horror Picture Show granted her midnight-movie camp immortality as the naive Janet, who got seduced by a transvestite alien from outer space. Working with director Louis Malle as a prostitute in Pretty Baby in 1978 and as a waitress in Atlantic City in 1980, she staked claim to the persona of a sensual but forthright sex symbol, but hardly a pliant one. With the rise of sexual explicitness on film, Susan, like every actress, had to take a stance. She struck a balance. She was perfectly willing to be provocative but insisted on rooting scenes within the bounds of the story and character, so her work wouldn’t edge toward exploitation. Susan Sarandon’s characters never just got screwed.
The approach worked in one of her most iconic scenes, in Atlantic City, when Susan’s clam-bar worker massaged her breasts with the juice of fresh-squeezed lemons. Keeping a straight face should have been challenge enough—“Anyone who would rub lemons on her chest is completely insane,” she says now. But she rescued what could have been trashy by keeping it matter-of-fact. She told Malle, “This scene should be shown as ordinary. It should be done only because she wants to get the smell of fish off her body.” It was the kind of pragmatic thinking that boosted her racy renown without entangling her in the meaningless sex scenes that dumbed down so many other eighties movies.
Viewers had no difficulty finding the scene erotic. For years, fans sent her lemons in the mail, and Playboy named hers the “Celebrity Breasts of the Summer” for 1981. When the columnist George Will named her as one of the things he’d like to take on a long space voyage, Susan said, “I am very stunned and flattered and glad to learn that the rest of Mr. Will’s body is not as conservative as his brain.”
Like many actresses whose job was to seduce on-screen, Susan found that people could make the wrong assumptions in reality. A director once dismissed the crew from a costume fitting in a motel room so he could proposition her. “I said something dumb like ‘I really have to get back to my room,’” she says. “The rest of the shoot, he made sure I was very uncomfortable.”
But for the most part, she devised a way of carrying herself that set boundaries and kept the work on track. Lucinda Jenney, who played a waitress in Thelma & Louise, studied Sarandon’s ability to walk that line. “She’s the kind of person who can laugh about these things,” Jenney says. “She’s got a twinkle in her eye and a lightness to her spirit in the way she handles that stuff, which is liquid gold.”
“I don’t think I had many problems necessarily because I was a woman,” Susan says. “Maybe there were instances where problems could have been solved more easily if I’d had more clout, which male stars seem to have. Directors are conditioned to see male stars as the power source.” Men were more often invited to watch dailies, consulted on what was coming up next and included in the overall process, man-to-man, while she cooled her heels in her trailer.
Probably her most infuriating experience was on 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick. She was cast above the title with Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the producers kowtowed to Jack Nicholson while lumping the women together as one interchangeable supporting character. At the eleventh hour, Cher got swapped into Susan’s part, which gave her only three days to learn to play a cello. Throughout the tense shoot, the women were referred to as “girls,” which was hardly unusual. Even as feminism made inroads into what to call women in society at large, most movie sets clung to the “girl” moniker, even for the most established stars.
Sarandon pined for better parts and greater meaning in her work. In 1991, she told a magazine, “I’m just trying to find roles to hold on to that are frightening because you’re not sure you’ll do them justice, rather than frightening because they’re so empty you have to fill them up.”
Motherhood gave her satisfaction that was lacking in her career after a daughter was born in 1985. Later, she and the actor Tim Robbins had two sons, in 1989 and 1992. Meanwhile, she doubled down on her commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, nuclear disarmament and opposition to arming the Nicaraguan Contras, priding herself on doing everything wrong in terms of courting the industry. “The thing about having a career in this business is that you might as well live the way you want,” she says, “because there are no tried-and-true rules that actually work.”
One of her best roles came her way when she broke the rules. All the actresses ahead of her refused to read opposite Kevin Costner for Ron Shelton, the writer-director of Bull Durham, but the part of a brainy baseball fan who was every bit the equal of her lover was so well written that Susan paid her own airfare from Italy to land the role. She appreciated that the character was sexually free and wasn’t punished for it. Shelton included her in planning and brainstorming as much as he did Costner.
Her peers snubbed her for an Oscar nomination, but the role was the kind of mainstream-avoidant portrayal that endeared her to Ridley Scott. “She’s always had a very strong selection of material,” he said. “It nearly always has some kind of strong subtext to it, so it’s not necessarily overtly commercial. Which means she’s a ballsy lady, really.”
If he didn’t understand that before he chose her, he didn’t have long to wait.
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SUSAN SARANDON AND GEENA DAVIS came face-to-face for the first time in a conference room in the spring of 1990. Ridley had summoned the stars to the production’s temporary offices on the second floor of an undistinguished building on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, where the action was picking up in hopes of shooting starting in June. The meeting was called a rehearsal, but it wasn’t like a rehearsal in the theater, with chalk lines on the floor to block out the action. This was more of an in-depth discussion of what felt right and what didn’t in the script.
Geena bound into the room thoroughly prepared to play the flaky Thelma but still thinking she could have been right for Louise. She thought the script was so first rate that there were only a few adjustments she wanted to suggest, a slight rewording of a sentence here or there, and she had a game plan in her notes for presenting each of them indirectly, so as not to offend. One she decided to postpone and bring up later on the set. Another she would toss off as a kind of throwaway joke. “I had all these girly ways,” she says. “I would disguise each one and make it as nonthreatening as possible.”
Susan blew Geena’s approach out of the water. The New York actress strode into the meeting, sat down at the conference table, opened her copy of the script and said, “On page one, I don’t think I would do that.” Boom . . . no nonsense, just like that. And “Maybe we could take out this line or move it to a later scene.” Pleasantly, but with authority, Susan dissected the entire script and made pointed suggestions while Ridley listened agreeably.
Geena’s jaw was on the ground. She would never forget the way her first female costar handled herself. People can be like her? Geena gaped. God, what a way to be. “There is nothing calculated about the way Susan is in the world,” Geena says now. “She just . . . is. She’s not going to equivocate or be coy. She just says what she wants, and people go . . . oh, okay.”
“Yeah, I have a problem with being very direct, which isn’t necessarily the best way,” Susan admits. “But there’s not much time to resolve these things.” She felt responsible for making sure each scene served a purpose, either in telling the story or developing the characters. If not, she wanted it changed or cut.
The romantic scene between Louise and her feckless boyfriend, Jimmy, for example, still grated. It called for Jimmy to offer Louise an engagement ring at a motel where the couple would perform a mock wedding ceremony while Thelma, in another room, got it on with the hitchhiker they’d picked up. The next morning Louise would lose it when she discovered that the hitchhiker had stolen her life savings. The first draft of the script didn’t explicitly call for a sex scene for Louise and Jimmy, but it did say: “Louise has an engagement ring on her finger. It’s really beautiful. Louise is practically in tears, she’s so happy. They are in bed, having just made love.”
Susan explained why the sequence didn’t fly with her. “Here’s a woman who had a memory of something that led her to pulling a trigger and killing someone,” she explained to Ridley and Geena. “I don’t mind having a sex scene, but I think after everything that’s happened, Louise would come unraveled. She couldn’t surrender to orgasm without falling apart. Which I’m happy to do, but then the problem becomes that she has to unravel again in the morning.”
“I see your point,” Ridley agreed, “but we can’t eliminate this completely. I need something to cut to from Geena’s scene.”
Susan considered for a moment. “It’d be an interesting sex scene to have an orgasm that turned into hysteria or something. It would be different,” she said with just a hint of a playful smile. “If you want, I can give it a try.”
Ridley was on the money about Susan being ballsy. They put off a decision on whether to push the limits of cinema with an orgasm-slash-breakdown scene, but the rehearsal did settle one point.
It hit Geena like the beam of a klieg light from the moment she and Susan met: Are you kidding that I could play Louise? Susan was so self-possessed, so mature and centered. She was Louise and then some.