Geena Davis on A League of Their Own’s 30th Anniversary and Why There’s No Cat-Fighting in Baseball

It’s always a challenge to sum up a celebrity in a single interview, and especially so with Geena Davis. After all, her career is (a bit like those cheekbones) unique. Davis’s CV covers everything from classic film roles, to narrowly missing out on a place in the Olympics, to now pushing for gender equality in the media. But the thread that ties it all together is feminism.

While most celebrities are comfortable using the F word these days, back in the early ’90s it could be anxiety-provoking. When the hit baseball comedy A League of Their Own was being made 30 years ago, journalists treated it as a dirty word. “Every one of them would ask, ‘Is this a feminist movie?’,” Davis recalls. “Kind of an, ‘Ooh, I’m actually saying the word feminist, this is so risqué to ask this.’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Obviously.’ And they’d be like: ‘What? It’s okay to print that?’”

It gets worse. “The other question every one of them asked: ‘So… a lot of women on the set, must be a lot of cat fighting?’, with that gleeful demeanor,” Davis remembers. Hardly a question you can imagine being put to the cast of male-led films of that time, like Reservoir Dogs or A Few Good Men. Davis quickly put them straight: “I would say: ‘No, no. There’s none. We’re a team, we support each other.’”

These patronizing questions serve to highlight what a rarity the film was at that time: not only was it about women in sport, it was directed by a woman and had an ensemble cast of mostly women—and showed them collaborating, getting dirty, and being competitive. “[It was] a phenomenon,” Davis agrees. “I don’t think there’d been a movie with that many female characters – especially being athletic and successful. So it did strike me as very strange,” says Davis, who was offered the part of Dottie after playing ball in a miniskirt and high heels at director Penny Marshall’s home. “Actually, Susan Sarandon pointed that out to me, when we did Thelma & Louise, that it was very unusual for there to be a movie where the women aren’t against each other.”

Happily, unimaginative interviews aside, the Indiana set was a fun—if chaotic—place to be. “[It was] August, it was sweltering hot, but the clouds would come and go,” says Davis. “We were constantly battling with the weather. But we had a blast hanging out all together, we all really bonded and so many of us are still friends.” Once a Rockford Peach, always a Rockford Peach.

The film helped to shape Davis’s life in multiple ways. Unexpectedly, it helped unlock previously unnoticed athletic ability. “It was very, very exciting to find out that I was coordinated, even though it was at 36 that I found out!” She would turn 41 before taking up archery. “I watched the Olympics in ’96… and I thought, well, wait a minute. That is a very dramatic and beautiful sport.” Being Geena Davis (she’s a Mensa member, as well as an Oscar-winner), she naturally excelled, going on to win a string of competitions before narrowly missing out on a spot in the U.S. Olympic team for the 2000 Games.

But perhaps more crucially, A League Of Their Own also formed part of what became a deliberate shift for Davis, one that had been prompted the year before by Thelma & Louise. “After that movie came out, people not only recognized me from it, they wanted to talk about the movie with me,” she says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ It was like, ‘Listen, I gotta tell you, you have no idea. This is what it meant to me. This is how it changed my life.’ And it really made me realize something very, very important. Which was how few movies give women an opportunity to come out feeling jazzed and empowered. And I thought, well, I want to make more movies that do that. And then my very next movie was A League of Their Own, which seemed to have the same reaction.” It certainly did—not only was it a box office hit, but its legacy has also gone on to inspire generations of little girls to explore sport. Davis recently met the football superstar Abby Wambach, who told her that it was the reason she first picked up a ball.

However, there was some disappointment for Davis (and the rest of womankind), that the success of A League of Their Own didn’t lead to an abundance of female-centric ensemble films, or films about women’s sports. (A full decade would pass before the release of Bend It Like Beckham.) “It was very interesting to learn that… having a successful movie with women in it didn’t change any opinion about women’s movies in Hollywood,” says Davis. “They were still all of the mind that women will watch movies about men, but men won’t watch movies about women.”

This valid frustration was channeled into the latest stage of Davis’s career: as a researcher and campaigner for gender equality in TV and film. Her work within the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has already been game-changing. “Now, the lead characters in TV shows made for kids are gender-balanced for the lead characters, and also in kid-rated movies we’ve reached parity in the lead characters, which is unheard of,” says Davis. “It’s just astounding for that to happen. When we started, in movies it was only 11 percent with a female lead character, and now it’s 50 percent. So we’re excited.” The organization is also working to improve wider representation when it comes to race and ethnicity, disability, older people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and a greater variety of body types.

There is also more good news for fans of A League Of Their Own, with a series of the same name created by Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham due to air this August. It has Davis’s blessing, although she’s pleased the show will focus on different stories and characters. After all, when someone (literally) knocks a role out of the park like Davis, it would be a big mistake to recast it. “People sometimes say just for fun, ‘Who would you like to see play Thelma and Louise when they do a remake?’ I wouldn’t like to see anybody! Just don’t. Why would you?” There is, after all, only one Geena Davis.