Downright Serious : With ‘Thelma & Louise,’ Geena Davis is forging a new image, closer to her own reality of a woman who takes charge of her life

Don’t even think of equating Geena Davis, the person, with the sum of the zany parts she’s played. So forget flaky, and drop ditzy.

She is a far cry from the fey dog-walker named Muriel who lightened the life of the travel writer in “The Accidental Tourist,” the role that brought Davis an Oscar for best supporting actress for 1988. Or the Valley girl manicurist who falls for the furry blue captain of an alien spaceship, played by her then-husband, Jeff Goldblum, in “Earth Girls Are Easy” (1989).

That is, except when she wants to deflect a reporter’s questions and lapses into sort-of-like imprecise Valley talk, along with a volley of Warren Beattyish ummms and mumbles.

“Well I’ve done some unusual movies,” the lanky actress joshes with a toothy grin. “I mean anybody who’s done two movies with bugs in the title. . . .”

Davis is just as readily identifiable as the science reporter who makes love to an insect in “The Fly” (1986), opposite Goldblum in the title role; the dead wife who haunts her own house in “Beetlejuice” (1988), and the sex-starved vampire in “Transylvania 6-5000” (1985), where she first met Goldblum, who became her husband on Halloween night in 1987. They separated last fall and were quietly divorced earlier this year.

But the real-life Geena Davis, who does for jawbones what Katharine Hepburn did for cheekbones, talks easily about power and “steering the ship of career.” Last year hers became the first actor-based company on the lot at 20th Century Fox under the regime of studio chief Joe Roth. Fox has first crack at any project that Genial Pictures develops. Genial is small--three people including herself--but hers. “I’m finally the boss and arbiter of this whole thing,” she says with pride.

Now with her ninth movie, “Thelma & Louise,” which opens May 24, Davis could well be forging a new image for herself that is closer to her own reality as a woman who begins to take charge of her life.

Roger Birnbaum, Fox’s president of worldwide productions, said: “Joe Roth and I have always been fans of hers. . . . Geena Davis is a very, very talented actress whose future is all before her, and (we) wanted to be part of it.

“You sit in the room (with her), and this is someone who has a head on her shoulders. She’s very, very smart about material (and) a delight to have around. She has got a couple of projects that she’s working on, that she’s developing as a producer, and at the same time because she’s right here on the lot, our relationship is strong, and we get to offer her things we’re developing.”

Director Lawrence Kasdan (“The Big Chill,” “Accidental Tourist”), whose production office is down the corridor from Genial, calls Davis “one of the smartest people I know. She’s incredibly well read. She’s quick and sensitive and sharp and perceptive. She’s very funny, an amazing mimic. . . . You can be having a conversation with her, and five minutes in, she’s taken everything you said the first five minutes and applied it.”

An adventure that is bound to stir controversy, “Thelma & Louise,” co-starring Susan Sarandon, is not only a departure of sorts for Davis but a rather unusual venture itself as a female- buddy movie. Veering from comedy to tragedy at virtually every bend in the road, the movie--directed and co-produced by Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner,” “Alien,” “Black Rain”)--has aspects of “Bonnie and Clyde” (or “Bonnie and Barbie”), “Easy Rider” and “The Accused.”

The movie--distributed by MGM/Pathe, which had to postpone the release date by two months because of the studio’s financial woes--is drawing mixed reviews.

Davis is Thelma--a somewhat wacky small-town Arkansas housewife under the thumb of a chauvinistic husband--who goes off on a weekend vacation trip with her best friend Louise (Sarandon), a strong-willed coffee shop waitress who seemingly has everything under control--except her boyfriend who can’t handle commitment. Theirs turns out to be the kind of trip from which there is no return.

However, in mid-movie, the tables are turned, and Thelma--the kind of woman who owns a gun for “psycho killers, bears and snakes” but never learned how to use it--becomes the woman in charge. “From then on, she’s the one that sort of drives the movie,” Davis says.

If some might see the movie as an anti-male allegory, with the one good male being the sensitive cop (Harvey Keitel) who seems to understand why the women are acting like criminals, Davis decidedly does not.

“There’s a lot of men in the movie and sort of a broad spectrum of men. All the way from the rapist guy to Harvey’s character, who’s a great guy. And, hopefully, I think people watching the movie would be seeing it through his eyes. . . . He’s the guy with heart and depth. I think my husband’s obviously a pretty bad guy (the character, Darryl, is played by Christopher McDonald) , but we (Thelma and Louise) feel the men get what they deserve. And the rapist definitely gets what he deserves.

“(Louise’s) boyfriend Jimmy (Michael Madsen) is a pretty decent guy . . . even the hitchhiker (J. D., played by Brad Pitt) who steals our money, but he gives me like a fabulous gift at the same time too,” says Davis, laughing as she relishes a scene she has in a diner with Louise the morning after she and the hitchhiker spend the night together. It’s a bit reminiscent of Meg Ryan’s tour de force in “When Harry Met Sally . . . . .”

“Frankly, if people thought this was anti-male, that would be like a joke,” Davis says. “Because so many of the big movies are so anti-women. Most of them are about women being murdered, raped and killed. And if not that, the parts that women are playing are just the girlfriend and the side interest, and the real story’s about men’s things and men’s experiences and men’s adventures and stuff. This is a movie about adventures of women, and that’s rare. And that’s really sad that it’s rare, and we can’t think of another movie like this.”

The women, notes Davis, quoting screenwriter Callie Khouri, “are ‘closer to each other than to anybody else.’ I’m much closer to Louise than to my husband.”

Wearing long maroon trousers with wide pin stripes, a black leather jacket and a white sweater that bares her midriff when she leans back, Davis is a picture of contentment with a leg up on her coffee table in her office suite at Fox. She talks easily about the movie, her company and herself. The only hesitancy occurs when she’s asked about what happened to her marriage with Goldblum.

“It’s hard to talk about that actually because it’s pretty recent but ummm . . . but I just feel in general that whatever happens in life is not only for your life good and right and appropriate and a learning experience, but you can use it in your work too.”

Not too long ago she was telling magazine writers that she saw herself and Goldblum like Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn acting together for the next 60 years. Asked what happened, she replies softly: “Well, yeah, who knows? Obviously one hopes for the best and one enters relationships hoping for the best . . . but some things don’t work out.”

It’s obviously a lot easier talking about what attracted her to the role of Thelma. “I just really loved the character and (thought) the huge changes that she goes through in the movie would be challenging to pull off. I’ve never come across a character that had such a giant arc. Thelma had led a very sort of sheltered existence in a small town, she didn’t work . . . and the movie’s sort of her discovery of herself.

“Then when it comes to the point where Louise has sort of a collapse and can’t cope anymore, can’t handle it anymore, that’s when Thelma rises to the occasion and takes over.”

As has Geena Davis with her career.

“I love the movies I’ve gotten to do,” she insists. “This (Genial Pictures) is just sort of to augment that, to have available areas where I can branch out in ways that people might not necessarily perceive. People tend to offer you parts that might be similar to what you’ve done, and they’re not going to necessarily think of you for something that’s far from what you’ve done, and so I’ll handle that aspect of it. . . .

“Everything we’ve developed so far is for me to star in. The prime focus was to get a good base of movies that I could be in.”

Now there’s a finished script called “Bigmalion,” a takeoff on the Pygmalion story awaiting a read by Fox executives. Davis herself initially did some writing on it. Other projects are in development.

Genial is not just a takeoff on her name but “kind of a malapropism for genius,” she says. She recalls using the term about a producer-director who was “very, very smart and people don’t realize it. . . . But we have like a silly logo with a happy face on it; the dot on the ‘i’ is a happy face. Just to be like corny.”

This is a woman, after all, with a playful side. Just look around her office. There is a serious antique armoire in the corner, but her desk and chair are in bright crayon colors. A Tiger baseball player doll from Japan sits on her desk. On a wall is a Spanish poster for “La Mosca” (“The Fly”). Nearby is a sleek 1950s bike she uses to tool around the lot. And her metal ashtray--yes, Davis smokes, but she’s trying to “keep it down to a half a pack” a day--is shaped like a fly. When she gets ready to drop an ash, she flicks open the fly’s back.

For Davis, the early Thelma is like she was--”when I was young. . . . I don’t feel about childhood the way a lot of people do, that it’s like this fabulous wonderful thing, that it’s the best time of your life, like idyllic. I think it’s kind of awful and hard and not idyllic. School and friends and popularity and fitting in . . . it’s a lot of pressure.

“I remember thinking when I was growing up, like, ‘Wow, this is supposed to be the great time in my life, and when you’re an adult that’s worse. . . . It’s going to be hard. If it’s worse than this, it’s not going to be very happy.’ And it’s not at all (like that). It’s much better. Every year that goes by, it gets better. The things that I feared, responsibility and adult concerns, are what I like. I just want more responsibility. I want more control over my life and more strength and power.

“That’s what happens to Thelma. She just finds her power. I think women and people in general tend to give away their power. And I’m trying to get mine back.”

Davis went after the role of Thelma just as she did that of Muriel in “The Accidental Tourist.” She persisted.

During filming of “The Fly,” while Jeff Goldblum was spending hours having makeup applied, Davis would read to him passages from Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist.” “When I first read it, I tried to (option) the book,” she notes. “I didn’t realize people buy them before they even come out. . . . I was actually friends with Larry Kasdan through Jeff and everything. And I heard he was directing, (but) I didn’t want to take advantage of our friendship .”

Kasdan, who first met Davis with Goldblum in 1985 at the Deauville Film Festival in France, said he had to press the issue: “She was very shy about it; I loved that.” With “Thelma & Louise,” Davis says: “I read (the script) quite a while ago, maybe even a year before I did it, and pursued it rather heavily. They didn’t know at first who was going to direct. Ridley (Scott) was planning on producing but probably not directing, and so there were several months of waiting. And different (directors’) names kept coming up. So I just had to follow it week by week by week and keep track of it.”

Other actors’ names cropped up as well. Meryl Streep as Louise, Goldie Hawn as Thelma. Or Michelle Pfeiffer as Thelma, and Jodie Foster as Louise.

David Eidenberg, Davis’ former agent who accompanied Davis to this year’s Academy Awards, noted that “Michelle obviously had read the script and was interested, and Jodie the same thing, but when it came down to it, they did other projects. . . . When it was finally understood we were serious, that we were not just looking to collect offers or to have possibilities, that’s what made the difference.”

“Going on this project, one of the first persons we saw was Geena,” Scott said. “She always kind of stuck in there through thick and thin, and frankly, she hung on for five months until we could come up with the bottom line, yeah or nay.” Scott said that while he was interviewing other top directors for “Thelma & Louise,” he found that “the more I talked about it and the more they talked about it, I thought, ‘Why the hell am I not doing this project myself?’ ”

As for the movie being both comic and tragic, Davis has a simple answer. “It’s like life ; life is both.”

Virginia Elizabeth Davis, named Geena by her older brother, grew up in Wareham, Mass., near Cape Cod (population 19,000), a town whose mainstays are tourism, fishing and cranberry farming. She is the only daughter of a civil engineer and a teacher’s aide, now retired, who have been married for 39 years. Her brother is a geotechnical engineer in Nevada.

Davis, who played the piano, flute and organ, the latter two at church, always wanted to be an actress. “I don’t know (why), frankly, because it wasn’t like we went to the movies a lot; we just didn’t. It was literally like they took us to see each Disney movie that opened. . . . I have a lot of pictures of myself as a child, watching TV, writing and drawing, and I have these sunglasses on. My mother said--I guess I was like 3 or something--I asked for them. (Perhaps) I thought that movie stars wore sunglasses.”

After graduating from Boston University in 1979, she went to New York to model. She thought it would be easier to break into acting that way. Before Davis started acting, there had also been an 18-month marriage.

Just as her modeling agency was forming an entertainment division, there was a call from director Sydney Pollack, who needed a statuesque model for “Tootsie,” so she became Dustin Hoffman’s scantily clad roommate--and got her first movie role.

“In the interview I was very impressed with her and thought she was unusually comfortable in her skin,” Pollack recalled. “Not trying to make an impression and not trying to be somebody she wasn’t. She had a kind of truth about her performance that let us elaborate a little bit.”

The role in “Tootsie” led to TV. Davis was cast in the NBC series “Buffalo Bill,” starring Dabney Coleman. She played Wendy, the ingenuous research assistant. Next came the title role in the much-ballyhooed but ill-fated NBC series “Sara.” Sara was a young, attractive and single lawyer in San Francisco. “I much prefer the way things worked out. I’m much happier doing ‘Thelma & Louise’ than ‘Sara’ for the 10th year or whatever.”

Was there ever a time she thought she wouldn’t make it?

“No,” she says. “I guess I’m stubborn. If I want to do something, I’m going to do it.”