145. Geena Davis: How to Thelma & Louise Your Life

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I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

Welcome to

a thrilling episode of We Can Do Hard Things.

With us today is Gina

Davis,

who is a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and has appeared in roles that became cultural landmarks, including Muriel Pritchett in The Accidental Tourist, Thelma in Thelma Louise, and Dottie Henson,

Abby's Edol in a League of Their Own.

She is also a world-class athlete, a member of the genius society Mensa, and is now recognized for her advocacy for women and girls as founder and chair of the Emmy-winning nonprofit Gina Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which engages film and television creators to dramatically increase the percentage of female characters and reduce gender stereotyping in media made for children.

Her memoir, Dying of Politeness, is available now.

Gina Davis, thank you for doing so many hard things.

Thank you,

Wow, I sound good on paper, no doubt.

You do.

You do.

Damn really.

And speaking of sounding, I just have to start with this.

I just think it's so amazing that your mom spelled your name G-E-E-N-A, and you thought that was because she just wanted you to be special and unique.

Tell me why your mother told you she spelled it that way instead of G-I-N-A.

I thought it was because she didn't know how to spell, how you actually spelled Gina and that she thought she was making up the name.

Right.

And oh, so cute that she didn't know how to spell it.

So

when I was visiting one time,

and she had been reading like little interviews or clippings about me.

And she said, people seem to love your name, the way your name is spelled.

I said, I know.

Yeah, I just tell them you didn't know how to spell it.

And she said, oh, no, no, no, no.

I know exactly how to spell it.

I grew up in an Italian neighborhood.

I know very well how you actually spell it.

I said, really?

Then why did you spell it that way?

And she said, well, I didn't want people to think it was gina.

As in the vagina.

So my entire adorable identity is based on fear of the vagina.

It's so good.

It's too perfect.

for word.

I mean, it's this, our feminist icon warrior, her name originates from fear of vaginas.

It's so good.

It's the best.

It's the best.

So can we start by talking about your parents a little bit?

Because we already did.

We already told a really good one, a doozy.

But I love, you say you were raised by New England parents who taught you that being polite was the most important thing in the world.

Perhaps, Gina.

Even more important than life itself, can you tell us the story about being eight years old and driving with your Uncle Jack?

Yes, yes.

So my parents and I were in a car driven by my great Uncle Jack, who was 99 at the time.

And his wife is, my aunt is in the front seat passenger side.

So we're driving home at night from a restaurant.

And it's quite a deserted two-lane street, no room on the sides.

And every once in a while, he just veer into the oncoming lane and veer back again, and then veer back in the oncoming oncoming lane and back but but you know there hadn't been any cars coming but you know it was alarming um

and uh my parents didn't say anything they didn't say anything i think it was my mom i was right behind uncle jack and she picked me up and put me in the middle between them because maybe I would die less when we had a head on collision

with someone.

Not realizing, of course, that I would now have a street shot through the windshield.

But

so we're continuing like that.

And now he veers into the oncoming lane, you know, straddling the yellow line.

But now there's a car coming and there's nowhere for either side to pull over.

It's like a little narrow street.

And nobody, my parents don't say anything.

And

it's going to happen.

We're going to have a head-on collision with this car.

Oh, my God.

In seconds, they don't say anything.

And finally, at the last instant,

Aunt Marion says, a little to the right, Jack.

And he just veers a little bit.

And the car streaks past us so close that I could very easily see the faces, the horrified faces of the people in the other car.

And it really wasn't until much later that I realized my parents were willing to die or and including including kill their child

or allow their child to die rather than

be impolite.

And they could have done what Aunt Marion said.

They could have said, oh, Jack,

please turn a little to turn to the right, please.

Perhaps a normal person would have said, holy gods, pull over, Jack.

You're going to kill us all.

Yeah, pull over and get out of the car.

I'm driving the rest of you.

Yes.

And then

they say, I'm going to drive now, but that didn't happen.

But I was literally only spared because of,

not because my parents spoke up, but that's for sure.

So interesting.

One of the things that you talk about so much in the first part of your book is all of these feelings you had, which we hear from our own brains and women all the time about feeling too much.

You say you felt too tall to hide.

You once asked a pastor how to make boys like you.

And he said, why don't you try being more quiet, not so big sometime?

Fuck you.

And you said,

you said, my dream going up was to take up less space in the world.

I just felt like I was taking up too much space.

What does that do to us?

Because it's almost like not being polite.

Like if you're a girl who's taking up too much space,

did you always feel like you were impolite because you were existing?

Because you were existing.

It's true.

It's true.

I didn't want to

over exist.

I didn't want to push my existence on anybody.

Yeah, it was really true.

Overexist.

That's good.

What is that about?

Is it needs?

Because when you think about what is the like crux of that sin of saying something, like, is it, I have a need that is outside of what you're providing right now, and I should just wait and be provided.

You say that you grew up, even if someone had a cup of ice water in their hands and was about to hand it to you, you were taught to say, no, no, thank you.

I'm not thirsty, even if you were thirsty and even if they were giving it to you.

Right.

Right, exactly.

It was having needs.

That was the embarrassing thing, or the thing that must be avoided at all times is.

having a need because that would be impolite to need anything from anybody.

But on the other hand, their philosophy, my parents' philosophy was give, give, give, give, give.

My parents would do anything for anybody.

My dad fixed everybody's furnace and broken pipes and cars or whatever,

but not to take anything for yourself.

So then you are a kid, you get a paper route

and you are abused by one of the men on your paper route.

And in the wake of that, you come home and you tell your mom.

And your mom goes to talk to him, but never talks to you about it and never presses charges or anything.

So you say, when it comes to not

talking about things, we New Englanders are gold medalists.

We'll not talk about anything.

So, how did the not talking about the abuse affect you?

And what do you wish that they had done differently?

Well,

first of all,

at 10, I had no idea

that there was anything between my legs besides that's where you pee.

Like I never heard the term, you're privates,

nothing, nothing, nothing like that.

So first it started, he just wanted to give me a big hug when I delivered the paper.

He'd give me like

tweakies or something, you know, every time I came in.

And then it got long hugs.

And then finally he started reaching down with his fingers and touching me.

And

I didn't feel shame.

I didn't feel shock.

I just didn't know what it meant.

It just seemed strange that that was happening.

And so it went on for a while until one day I finally said to my mom, you know what's so weird?

I don't understand what this is, why he touches me like this.

And I did it to her because I had no idea that it would mean anything to her either.

And she

flew through the ceiling like a rocket.

she just went crazy but then strode up the middle of the street and disappeared you know into his house and uh

and everything and i was like what

what is this about what what what

and it came back and said you are never to go in his house again you have to leave you leave the paper at the

let alone he's you're not delivering his paper anymore, but you're still delivering it, but leave it at the bottom of the stairs.

And didn't didn't say anything about

this is what it was about or even

you know he shouldn't have done there was no explanation whatsoever about what happened and so i i felt like i did something so horrific

that she can't even tell me what it is it's just so

embarrassing.

I've made such a horrible mistake that I don't know what it is.

I loved that she

acted on it immediately.

You know, she wasn't polite about storming up the street and telling him, you are not, she will never touch her again and blah, blah, blah.

But

she didn't follow through with teaching me how to avoid something like that in the in the future.

Thank you for sharing that.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Kind of like, it's so interesting as parents, like your cat died.

right?

Yeah.

And then

you were, they didn't talk to you about it.

And I just relate to this as a parent so much.

Like, they didn't talk to you about your cat dying so that they wouldn't traumatize you.

Yeah.

But then you just felt traumatized.

Like, where the hell did my cat go?

Oh my God.

Yeah.

The cat got hit by a car.

And we were quite young, right?

We were quite little.

And we asked, you know, where's Sonny?

We didn't see him.

Oh, he ran away, but he's living with another family now, we're sure.

And he's fine.

And

we were like,

what?

What?

He, what?

We're not going to look for him.

Why did somebody else get our cat?

I don't understand any of that.

And on and on and on.

And so began

years

of my brother and I trying to find out.

where Sonny is.

And

we could be in another state driving along.

And if we saw a yellow cat on the side of the road, we're gonna stop the car it could be sunny and

it just went on and on and on and they must have thought jesus god we made the wrong choice

because it didn't spare us no whatsoever from feeling pain

and it certainly tortured them and i would imagine that it gives you some kind of kids some kind of shame too it's like when you don't explain it right whether it's the abuse or the leaving of the cat, the kid is left like, what did I do?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

How am I supposed to process this?

It made no, it made no sense.

My parents loved animals.

They were obsessed with pets and animals.

And that they would say, oh, you know, he's totally fine.

He's run away, but he's, I'm sure he's found a very nice family.

Aren't we nice?

We're the nicest.

Nobody's nicer than us.

Oh, nobody.

In fact, you're right.

Nobody is nicer than us.

That's how you knew it was Eli Gina.

There's no nicer family out there.

So then you're 12.

You're 12.

And you read an article called Why Feminists Are Ruining the World.

Right.

And you thought, I will never be one of those terrible people.

Yeah.

Right.

Because God is my witness.

God is my witness.

I'd never heard the word.

Nobody had ever, ever, ever talked about it.

And I was learning.

It was a sort of political article, though, how horrible feminism was.

And I thought, wow, this is something horrible that only women can be.

And I am so now, at least I know now, you know, what this thing is, you know, what it's called.

And I will never be that.

So it's so hilarious that there she is.

Pretty much the opposite happened.

So you try to figure out how you're never going to catch feminism.

And then,

and then I love this.

second wave feminism comes in, and there's all these shows.

And this is so cool the way you talk about this.

That Bewitched came to the screen, and I dream of Genie.

And reading this, I'm like, Yeah, those are like cool shows about women having superpowers.

But then you say, Actually,

they were largely about being told to sit on their magical talents by the men in their lives.

Right.

And then you say, This happened in like several of my marriages.

At which point I put down the book to laugh out loud.

Well, you know,

it's not necessarily true, but

what is this about?

That's a good lie.

What did you mean by that?

Staying small to make men feel comfortable, I imagine.

How has this happened in your life?

Yes.

And I'm not saying.

that I was forced to do that.

It was just how I operated, you know.

I used to be incredibly shy when I first met men.

And I've only later come to realize that I think I felt like I didn't know how they wanted me to be.

And if I could be shy for a little while and figure out what they seemed to like or want,

then I could be that.

But I'm going to just hold my cards close to the best until I figure out what's appealing to them.

Did that work out well?

That works out so good.

Then a little while in, you're like, what the fuck am I doing?

Yeah.

That sounds right.

That tracks for me.

You turn yourself into a little bit of a pretzel.

Yeah.

That's the kick in the shorts of life because needs are needs.

And you can just put those bad boys in a bottle like a genie for as long as you can, but they're going to come out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

Yeah.

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So when you decide to go into acting, Gina,

I don't know how to ask you this, but like...

You talk about when you're backstage, okay, and you're getting ready to do your acting.

I don't even know if there's a backstage in front of you.

Whatever, whatever, sister.

Just, I don't know about acting.

All right, you're you're preparing,

I'm offset.

There's okay, offset, whatever, in her in her trailer, okay.

And you're supposed to, instead of manufacturing emotions, you're supposed to work with what you have,

you say.

So, there's this scene where this character is supposed to be enraged and broken down.

So, you say you have to really prepare using your sense memory stuff.

What the holy hell does does that mean?

What do you, how, what?

So yeah, I mean,

the way I was approaching acting, I don't know what you would label this, but

was if you have to find

in yourself a time when you were sad or just, you know, bring up the emotion so that you can then act with that, you know, having that emotion.

And so that's how I always

did things.

But after I majored in acting in college, once I was in in New York, I had an acting teacher who was very big on using what you're already feeling.

He'd have somebody perform a monologue and then he'd say, what happened to you

before this, earlier today?

What happened on the way here?

Well, I missed the fucking bus and I, you know,

I couldn't believe it.

I haven't paid my rent, whatever it was.

And he'd say, do it again, but keep that feeling.

And you realize that no matter what

you think the character should be feeling, you can add how you are actually feeling.

It sounds like it's complicated, but it's actually very simple.

But it's another layer, even if it's let's say you're doing a comedy, a funny scene,

but you cat just died or whatever.

I mean, just put that as a

subtext layer in there.

and that will help because any kind of emotion is energetic, you know, it's powerful.

So anyway, so I

thought I understood this and learned it, but then I had a screen test for the accidental tourist, this movie, The Accidental Tourist.

This little movie.

This little movie.

Look at all the people watching.

So I had a screen test and I never had done that before.

And I was very, very nervous.

And

so I was going to actually be on camera with William Hurt.

And I knew there were three other women that were having a screen test too.

It was very, very, very nerve-wracking.

And one of the scenes was very emotional.

I had to be very, very emotional.

So they're getting ready, they're setting up, and I'm, I'm behind the, you know, whatever and backstage

and

preparing.

And I'm thinking about dead cats and, you know, whatever.

I'm getting very, very emotional.

And I'm all ready.

And then suddenly they say,

they say,

Gina, sorry, we broke a light.

It's going to be about 10 minutes.

It's like,

no, no.

Oh, no.

I'll never, I'll never get that back again.

What the fuck?

They just ruined my life.

They just, everything is ruined because now I won't be able to.

Actually, yes, they ruined my life.

It's terrible.

Everything is ruined.

I won't get the part.

And

so then

I'm like, I'm ready.

I'm ready again.

And they say, okay, Gina, we're ready.

It's about 30 seconds.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm so angry and I'm so upset.

And the hairdresser comes over to just like touch up my hair right before I go out.

And she accidentally, you know, those combs to have a point on them.

It's sticky.

And she pokes me in the eye with a stick accidentally.

Oh, my God.

And I'm like, you just ruined my life.

Oh, my God.

You just, I was going to go out there and be upset.

And I'm still upset.

Thank you very much.

Here I am.

So it's like misery inception.

It's like layers and layers.

Oh, it's so good.

I feel like I'll use that light.

That was such a lesson.

You know, in real time, I experienced an incredible lesson.

Yeah.

I love it.

So is acting just tremendously terrible then?

Because you're always conjuring.

I mean, you're conjuring up your most like.

traumatic or upsetting emotional moments to be

engaged have to think about dead cats

no no no and most scenes and most

that's rare you know it's not you know i'm worried about

who are miserable 95 of the time uh

uh but no no no that but but you know you have to get yourself in different kinds of feeling you have to get yourself happy sometimes like in uh

Them of the Ways, there was a scene where Susan and I are driving along

and it says, Thelma starts laughing uncontrollably.

And I was like, oh, fuck, how do you,

how do you laugh?

First of all, how do you make yourself laugh?

Out of nowhere, she hasn't done something funny.

I just start laughing uncontrollably.

I have to control myself enough to laugh uncontrollably.

I have to be and have it real, not that I'm ha, ha, ha, ha, you know, faking it.

And so I'm like, fuck, how am I going to do that?

And

so this time I had a completely different idea.

I decided I was going to try getting drunk

because, you know, you're much more likely to laugh on control than you're doing, right?

So I go to the props, guys will do anything you want.

So I said, I need a little alcohol in my trailer.

So they bring a six pack and a bottle of vodka and put it in my refrigerator.

And so I sneak back there.

And

I like pound a couple of beers and do a shot of vodka.

And nobody knows what I'm doing.

I go out there and I get in the car and then I see Susan sitting next to me and she doesn't know and I'm going to tell her that's what I did.

And I start laughing uncontrollably.

And I'm like, oh, this is such a great idea.

And so

I just would say, take after take, I laugh uncontrollably because it's, I have the secret.

And so it was like, that scene went great.

And I said, yeah, no, I have to go lay down.

That's my favorite part.

You got to take a nap.

It was done for the day after that, right?

I couldn't work the rest of the day, but he was like, who cares?

It's hard.

You're fine, you know, whatever.

I love this.

Can we talk a little bit about Thelma and Louise?

Yeah.

Because

for the rest of our lives.

For the rest of our lives, yeah.

So clearly

women have feelings about Thelma and Louise.

One of the things I think is so cool is that in your filming of Thelma and Louise, you talk a lot about how Susan Sarandon kind of Thelma and Louise you, like helped you learn how to stop dying for politeness.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

She Louised me in real life.

Yeah.

I mean, she's the sort of dominant aspect of the friendship.

She's a more assertive person.

And I had thought before

either of us was cast that I could probably play Louise.

I could play either part.

You know, I'd be a good Louise also.

And then the second I met Susan Sarandon, I was like, what was i think uh

because she's so as you can imagine in person she's so poised and confident and knows what she thinks and and uh

i was like oh my god and it's so strange to think about but i had never

met or been in the presence or at least the extended presence of a woman who

didn't start everything she says with, I don't know what you'll think.

This is probably a stupid idea.

So ignore me if it's no good.

But could we possibly, you know, whatever.

And I never said anything without putting, you know, a thousand qualifiers in front of it.

And she was profoundly not like that.

The first day I met her, we were going through the script with Ridley just to see if we had any little ideas or whatever.

And

on the first page, she said, you know what?

I think we should just cut my first line.

We don't need that.

I was like,

one?

And Ridley just said, yeah, yeah, no, that's right.

And I was like, what am I witnessing here?

You know, that she just said that

and that he just completely behaved like that was, you know, normal.

And I just couldn't believe it.

And it seemed so silly, though, that I had such an extreme view of how much I could

say

in life

that I had to be very, very careful to make sure that people liked me, that it would go away in an instant if I said or did something that people didn't like.

So yeah, I took a bath in

watching somebody move through the world in a very comfortable fashion.

It's amazing that what the movie did for us

is the same thing it was doing for you

in real life.

It wasn't immediately

embraced as much as it is now, right?

Didn't it take some time?

Like many movies or people that are trailblazers, did it take some time for people to catch on to?

No, it exploded.

It was 31 years ago.

It absolutely exploded, which we didn't expect at all.

Nobody making it thought, you know, whoa, wait till people get a load of this.

We just hoped anybody would go and see it because maybe they won't like that we drive off the cliff at the end.

Oh, I gave the ending away.

But

damn it.

But we were like on the cover of Time magazine pretty much instantly.

And

there were editorials everywhere up and down about how this is a great thing.

And this is the worst thing that's ever happened.

It's saying that women have to have guns and it's ruining everything.

It's ruining the world.

So

there were these extremes, but people were very, very opinionated about it.

The sort of title on Time Magazine cover said, Why Thema Louise Strikes a Nerve.

And that's how people perceived it, it, that it either struck a nerve in a good way for you, or it was ruining society.

Yeah.

Like feminists.

We were really feminists.

It was like society.

Once again, they strike again.

Once again,

which is actually what likely needs to happen.

I keep thinking about it this week so much.

I think one thing was to be able to see that, yes, the world does feel that dangerous to women in a way that we're all gaslit into thinking like whether it's abuse, whether it's cat calling, whether it's not being believed, whether it's being dismissed on the street with all the things that we got to see Thelma and Louise go through

were

so validating because

we were just supposed to live that privately without anybody calling it out.

Yeah, right.

Like you all did.

Do you hear that often?

Yes, I think that is what happened.

I thought a lot about,

okay,

this is is a movie where the lead characters kill themselves at the very end

and women come out cheering.

So how do you explain that?

You know,

what's it about?

And then, of course, have come to realize I've had plenty of time to think about it,

that

it's because

we retain control.

of our lives

to the bitter end.

You know, we will not relinquish control because any other ending.

People, people are saying, I love that movie so much, but it didn't have to end that

because we couldn't give up control of our lives again.

Bents are too, you know, too free to ever do that again.

So it's the Alamo for women.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the no surrender.

Like we are not.

Yeah.

And it's the ultimate bodily autonomy moment, right?

It's like,

it's like this

empowering, beautiful, but horrific thing that in this world, the way it is, if a woman does want to have full control over her life and herself, she cannot exist here.

Yeah.

Right.

It's we get away.

We're getting away.

We fly away.

It's a metaphor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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So one of the things I think is so interesting is that one of the reactions to Thelma Louise was, there's too many guns, there's too many, there's too much violence, these violent women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then there was a chart, of course, that you actually put in your book that showed, what was the movie that was out then, Lethal Weapon or something?

Lethal Weapon.

Oh my god.

It was Entertainment Weekly.

They evidently thought it was so funny that people were saying, this is the most violent movie.

It's so violent.

And so they made a chart comparing like number of bullets fired, number of deaths,

number of kickboxing fights,

which Lethal Weapon did have, and we didn't.

For deaths, it was three.

including the two lead characters and included themselves.

And the Lethal weapon was like you know 100 whatever and the bullets uh i think it was like seven or something like that in in in film and louise and they said well it's about three or four hundred but it's hard to count individual machine gun bullets so this has to be an approximation i thought that was a hilarious way to make the point that what are you talking about you know yeah and i wonder if that at all was planted a seed for your future work with the foundation seeing that chart because

years later you're watching cartoons with your now 22 year old daughter and you notice

20 okay 20.

oh we have an almost 20 year old too so you're watching cartoons with her and so you notice something which kicks off your whole next

feminist thelma louise situation so can you tell us what you were what you noticed

well yes so she was a little toddler and i thought oh this will be fun we'll watch a preschool show uh for the first time this will be great and i have her on my lap and turn on, but I think it's going to be a great show.

And within five minutes, maybe 10, I'm thinking,

how many female characters are there on this show?

And I'm Googling it while she's watching.

And

there was one female character and lots of male characters.

And I was like, wait a minute.

I was shocked.

And then we watched some videos and we watched some animated movies and things like that.

And I saw it everywhere.

It was in everything.

And I didn't intend like, now I'm going to make this my life's mission.

I'm going to, you know, take this to the Olympics or something.

But I couldn't find one other person who noticed what I noticed.

Not my feminist friends who have daughters.

And then nobody in the industry, because I have meetings all the time, I'd always ask people, have you ever noticed how few female characters

appear in what's made for kids?

And they all said, no, no, no, no, that's not true anymore.

and uh a lot of times they would say there's been bell

um uh as proof that gender inequality i have a disney princess friend that's the equivalent of

disney's doing a great job better than anybody else as far as that goes especially in recent years but who are the other female characters in that in that movie you know and plus she has stockholm syndrome let's face it so now i thought okay nobody sees what i'm seeing and therefore it's completely unconscious.

They do not know.

In fact, they think quite the opposite of like, I'm not doing that.

They think they are absolutely doing right by girls.

And so I thought, all right, now I think if I could get the data,

I could go directly to the creators because I probably can't get meetings with people and share it with them in a private way.

I don't have to educate the public

to convince them, you know, like a shaming version of it.

I get it this very positive version.

I go there and say, hey, you know, I'm your friend.

I want to to keep working with you.

Hire me, please.

And also, what do you think about this?

Let me share this data with you.

And the first meeting we had was like every other meeting we've ever had, except for people that have heard of what we do,

which is their jaws are on the ground.

They had no idea.

they were leaving out that many female characters.

And it was so profoundly unequal.

So I had the advantage that it's unconscious, so data will help.

The people making kids entertainments do it because they love kids and so this could very well have an impact and turns out it did and the numbers have changed so we're very excited about and what you noticed was what we were seeing on screen was not even representative of the world it's not like you were saying put more girls in than boys because you were just saying let it reflect the actual world

yeah right exactly and i think gina about like you as a kid feeling like i always think the the best leadership or use of a life always is like, what did I need then when I was younger that I didn't have?

And then creating it.

And it's so interesting when you think kids are watching TV and they're not seeing girls take up any space.

The rooms they're seeing, the classrooms, the cartoons, they are literally seeing spaces where boys are taking up all the space and there's two little girls in the corner.

Don't you think that could be tied to all of us girls feeling like we can't even exist in rooms that just even our barely being there is taking up too much space because we're not reflected in these media spaces oh yeah yeah no we we were trained to have unconscious bias uh you know women and men we all have it now

we actually have changed the numbers we know the great thing about what we're doing is you can measure whether it's working or not and so we have now reached uh parity in the lead characters in kids tv and kids movies we still have have a little work to do on

In the Worlds and also other

profoundly underrepresented segments of society, but we are, it is going in the right direction.

So that's great.

Congratulations on that.

When you started this work, it was 11%.

And just last year, it's 50-50 parody.

China Davis.

China Davis.

China Davis.

Can you tell us about the CSI effect?

CSI effect.

Yes.

Yes.

So

we studied the occupations of female characters on television, on all television.

And there was one occupation that was, this is what, you know, closer to when we started, it was very well represented.

I would never have to lobby people to add more.

uh female forensic scientists because there were all those csi shows and bones and all that stuff it turned out in real life that women were

studying forensic science in college to an extraordinary degree.

Suddenly, you know, it went up to like 63% of people.

They had to add courses in forensic science because there was such a high demand from women because they saw it on TV.

Wait a minute, I can be a forensic scientist.

How amazing.

I am going to be that.

So our motto is if she can see it, she can be it.

So it actually works.

And didn't didn't you find that 58%

of women who were currently in STEM

studies at the time of your research, they named Dana Scully from X-Files specifically as the reason that they were inspired to go into STEM?

That's right.

That's right.

I can't remember if it was 58% or 63%, but That's one character from one show.

And 58% of the women in STEM name that, I mean, imagine if there were more.

We could change everything if we just showed that, made it normalized, if we normalize

that women and men, you know,

everybody can do whatever that is.

And that's so important, I feel like that piece, because you're saying, please let this pretend scenario that you're putting up on screen.

through TV intentionally reflect reality.

You're not saying

us something that isn't even true yet, so we can aspire to it.

You're saying you are actually

working in a retroactive way on our society's progress because you're not even showing us as we currently exist in the world.

Right, right.

I mean, what we're asking for is in which profoundly not controversial.

It's just simply, you know, reflect the world.

The most shocking statistics are about occupations, because let's say for um

judges and lawyers in the real world it's something like 25 percent of our women and on screen it's in movies it's something like 15 to one

and so however abysmal the numbers are in real life it's far worse in fiction where you make it up

anything you want but they don't even reflect the sad reality

So it's kind of shocking.

That's amazing.

But then if they did want to be a little more

hopeful that life would imitate art if we put progressive situations on the screen, you also proved with Commander in Chief when you proved so much.

And by the way, I have been saying this fact in.

in meetings for like five years.

I heard you say this a long time ago, but

the show Commander in chief, where you played a woman president.

Tell us about the poll that was done

between Democrats and Republicans after watching the show, just watching the show, the fake show about a woman president.

Yeah, for one season, by the way, one seasonally, a group called Kaplan Thaler did a survey and found that, again, something like 60%

of

Democrats and Republicans said they were more likely likely to vote for a female candidate for president because of watching that show.

So if only I had had two terms.

Exactly.

My administration was so short.

World changing, though.

World changing.

We might not have to wait to put women presidents on TV until we have a woman president.

We might have to put women presidents on TV so we can have a woman president.

Exactly.

Right?

Exactly.

Bring my show back.

yes come on come on people actually

you know i was thinking if i'm i mean i'm a good age still to be president i'm a perfect age you're a good age for anything that's

so let's say let's assume i didn't get elected and time has gone by and i realize I got to come back in.

They need me.

And then the show goes back on the air.

Yes.

Let's go.

How do we make that happen?

Well, and

speaking speaking of

characters on TV that allow you to become what you eventually will be, please tell Gina about your Dottie obsession.

Well, you know, when A League of Their Own was released, I went and saw it and it's been the kind of movie that I play over and over again and I never get sick of it.

There's like five in my life.

And I was just telling Amanda and Glennon and this before we got on, that movie had such an impact on my life because the way that Dottie was, Gina, you and I are both big, tall women, right?

And I totally relate to all of the stuff you were saying earlier.

And I don't want to be the singled out one in the class.

I kind of want to fit in because I've always been, you know, the grass is always greener.

So when I saw this Dottie Hinson

be not only badass, but also humble.

Right.

That to me, I was so afraid of being big because of this idea that I'd be cocky seeming.

And I was always one of the best ones on my team.

And so I just told them that I kind of dictated a lot of the

leadership style that I had and much of what I saw Dottie bring to the Georgia Peaches.

Yeah.

She was in your book.

I ran your book over to Abby Womanbuck and said, you made it in Gina Davis.

I was so excited.

I was so excited.

I'm not going to lie.

I know.

I should have asked you if that was okay.

Of course, it is.

It was such a harder.

I was, I mean, listen, like, to have played for so many years for our country,

having you as this inspiration that always kind of lived inside of me, that to me is like one of the most special things.

Oh, Abby, thank you.

Thank you.

That's incredible.

And you're also a badass athlete of your own in your own right.

Oh, well, oh, well.

Well,

because you know,

I mean, at what were you 38 when you started taking up archery?

41, yeah.

41.

Okay, this is, I was actually just said this before to Glenn and I said, I wonder what Olympic sport I could try out for now.

And she said, none, you can't.

No, no, no, no.

Well, archery is profoundly

not age-dependent.

Profoundly not.

Okay, anybody, any age can do it.

And I took it up at 41.

And my coach said right in the beginning that it could actually be an advantage to never have done it because

most archers have shot, you know, their whole childhood and whatever.

And you learned bad habits, you didn't have good technique, and you have to change that.

So then when you're nervous, you might slip back into your old habits.

And he said, but you're not going to have any bad habits to slip back into because you didn't never shoot before.

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Speaking of that coach and teaching you, you talk about a time where you were taking, is it called a shot?

Taking a shot?

What do you call it?

When you're

arching

a shot, she was backstage.

You were backstage taking a shot and it wasn't a good one.

And your your coach said, what were you just thinking when you took that shot?

And you realized for the first time that you were thinking terrible things about yourself.

Like, I suck.

I'm horrible at this.

And you only realized that that was like a constant loop in your head when he pointed that out.

Was that true?

in other aspects of your life with that kind of negative self-talk?

Was it specific to that?

Or did that pervade everywhere?

Oh, no, it was, it was a running model.

I mean, every every minute was negative, negative, negative.

Self-talk about everything.

But I didn't realize, I just kind of wasn't aware of it.

And so, but once I became aware of it when I was shooting, then I'd go back to my normal life and realize, oh, I'm doing it in this situation too.

I'm doing it on the set.

I'm saying,

people are going to find out I'm a fake actress.

I don't know what I'm doing.

They're all laughing and

whatever it is.

And so I started paying attention to that.

And he probably helped me with this technique, but if I heard myself say something like, you're an embarrassment, you suck, or you did something wrong.

I'd say, nope, I didn't do anything wrong.

I'm doing the best I can.

I'm doing the best I can.

That was, you know what?

That was fine.

I'm just doing the best I can.

And

so a lot of that has gone away now a lot.

I love that.

My therapist is teaching me those are just neural pathways.

You can change them.

If you just stop the thought and then you say a new one, you're just digging a new tunnel for your brain to start.

You'll just, it'll, your brain goes to the least resistance.

So if you've been saying you suck, you suck, you suck your whole life, that's where it'll go.

But if you work hard to arrest it, say nope, doing my best, eventually you'll start going there.

I also want to just say for clarity, you were able to become the 13th.

best archer in our country trying to make an Olympic team.

I just want to be clear.

That's what positive self-talk will do when you're 41 years old.

You started a sport and became a top 13 sporter,

a top top 13 archer.

That's just out of my mindset.

After two years, she's like, How about I'll try this?

Well, wasn't it your second lesson?

Wasn't it her second lesson?

Her first lesson where she turned to the teacher and said, What do I have to do to become an Olympian?

No, no, I said,

How old is too old to go to the Olympics?

I mean, he says I asked it at the first lesson.

I can't imagine that I really did.

I must have waited till the second lesson.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was an outrageous question.

Because I hadn't touched a bow, meanwhile.

I hadn't touched it yet, let alone knew that I might be good at it.

Oh, my God.

I have a Dottie question.

Can we go back to Dottie for a second?

I was rethinking about Dottie when I was reading your book.

And it's, so she, obviously, everyone knows she has has this husband she adores.

She's the best ball player on the field.

She becomes the face of the league.

And she, it's just very good things happen to her

seemingly easily.

And then

you,

Gina Davis, your first ever audition lands you in a role in an Oscar-winning film.

And then

you

41, damn near make the Olympic team.

You are literally a genius.

And I'm just wondering

to the

outside world,

it might look like you, like Dottie,

make a lot of hard things look easy.

And I'm just wondering, what is hard for you?

What

has come hard

and not

come easy?

Where is the struggle in a world full of kits, want to know, Gina?

Well, I'm struggling hard to figure out what that would be.

So that's a struggle.

Use it.

Use it.

Use it.

I mean, so much.

But actually, it's sort of

the journey that I talk about in the book, which is, I've narrowed down what my mission in life is, which is to close the gap between when something happens and when I react authentically after it.

Because there's such a huge, huge, huge gap.

Usually I think a few days later, I think of what I could have said.

And then, but slowly

until, you know, actually

a certain percentage of time now, I will say the right thing.

at the right time.

I would say exactly.

And that's the goal, I mean, but it's still very out of reach in some ways.

It feels to me like one of the themes of this podcast is always that

we learn these rules when we're little that keep us safe in our family.

You learned, you don't say the thing.

You are polite.

And you, even if you're going to die, you don't say the thing.

And then as an adult, in order to be free, we have to break those rules like specifically again and again.

So what you're saying is your life goal.

is to break the rule you learned as a kid, which is to say the thing

in the moment that you need to say to have integrity to have your insides match your outside.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right.

I never thought about it that way, but that's exactly right.

That's exactly right.

Giving myself permission or finding a way to, I think it's better the way you say it is, break that and

change that dynamic.

Yeah, for sure.

Because you said something about the spirit of the staircase.

I love that.

So I never heard of that before.

Tell us what the spirit of the staircase is.

Well, I only learned that phrase recently.

Lesprit, I can't do a French accent, lesprit descalier

is

literally

having regret on the staircase.

So you've left the whatever it was, party or whatever, and only when you're leaving do you realize what you could have said or should have said.

So

yeah, that's that's

what I lived.

My spirit of the shower.

When I am in the shower, I am so freaking amazing, Gina.

I say all the things.

I just, but it's only in retrospect.

So this idea, we call it like smushing the gap between the knowing and the doing.

Like when you

swishing, like squishing the gap.

Squishing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You said there was a moment, and I just love this example so much.

There was a man who hugged you.

And he said,

great to feel up, Gina Davis.

Oh, God.

Oh, yeah.

He was on this project that everybody hugged.

Good morning.

It was completely normal.

And I was hugging this person.

And he said, oh, my favorite part of the day when i get to feel up to see the day and he wasn't feeling me we were just hugging

but i instantly said oops that's inappropriate and uh in a rather huborous way but you know very specific and he was horrified oh my god no no what are you talking about no oh no it wasn't i'm i'm a feminist no no no no no i have so much respect and i would never i would never and all day he kept coming back to it about

how i took it completely wrong and and whether I was like, hey, no,

no big deal.

I just, you know, it's no big deal.

I just said what I think and it's all cool.

I'm not mad or anything.

It's just, you know, a fact.

But that's the power of the unspoken thing.

Everyone has agreed that no one's going to speak it.

And

your offense was saying the thing out loud that everybody knew it was wildly inappropriate.

But if you don't say it, it's not real.

Right, right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

and it it's a moment that really stood out in my mind because it was

one of the signal moments or one of the one of the first moments where i literally said what i wanted to say right on top of when it happened and uh i was like i want to feel this this is so awesome yeah it is so awesome what does it feel like amazing how does it feel in your body it just feels i was so happy and proud of myself i i was like oh man well, because I had achieved my goal, you know, and one, one, uh, one instance at a time is, is, is what I'm trying to do.

It seems like you guys know what I'm talking about.

It's so awful to only think later what you could have said or done, you know.

And it's usually just you let yourself be uncomfortable so that somebody else could maintain some level of comfort that they never should have had in the first place.

That's right.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, I think we have our next right thing, pod squatters.

I think we're going to, well, let's see.

This is how Gina says it.

I've come to believe that the whole point of my life is to close the gap between when something happens to me and when I react authentically to it.

Right.

So beautiful.

And if that's too hard, we're just going to stop telling ourselves we suck.

And instead, we're going to say, nope, I'm doing my best.

That's right.

I'm doing my best.

Don't invest in it.

I love the oops strategy too.

It's really disarming for like someone like me who that feels like very Herculean to do what you're saying.

Oops.

Like we can all agree, you just made a boo-hoo.

Oops.

Oopsie Daisy.

That's inappropriate.

Oops.

Oopsie Daisy.

You're an asshole.

That's inappropriate.

That's like it's better for me, right?

Then motherfucker, back off.

I'm going to start with oops.

That was sort of

affectionate and cheerful.

Yeah.

You made a mistake.

Gina, if you do decide to run for actual president, yes,

we will be on your campaign.

That's right.

Okay.

We are grateful for you and who you are in the world, and we're behind you.

Thank you for

leading the way.

Totally.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

No, thank you.

Thank you very much.

That's very kind of you.

COD Squad, we will see you back here next time.

Bye.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire,

I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination

we lack.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a heartbeat.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes

things fall apart.

And I continue

to believe

the best

people are free,

and it took some time.

But I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination

we lack.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a hard pain.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

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