Geena Davis: I ended Jack Nicholson’s sexual advances with advice from Dustin Hoffman

Geena Davis stayed away from Jack Nicholson’s post-‘Tootsie’ fame.

Davis, who worked as a model before being cast in a small role in Tootsie opposite Dustin Hoffman, revealed to The New Yorker that Nicholson proposed to her after a dinner with casting directors. As a new actress, Davis channeled the advice her co-star Hoffman had given her about being close with actors.

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“Say, ‘Well, you’re very attractive. I’d love to do it, but it would ruin the sexual tension between us,'” Davis recalled as Hoffman shared with her how to manage a co-star’s lust. “And I saved that advice.”

The Thelma & Louise star continued, “After ‘Tootsie,’ my modeling agent and a few other actor slash models took me to Hollywood to meet casting directors. He happened to know Jack Nicholson, and every night Jack Nicholson ate dinner with us. Then one day there was a note under the door saying, ‘Please call Jack Nicholson on this number.’ I was like, I can’t believe it! So I said, ‘Hello, Mr. Nicholson. This is Geena the model. You’ve called me?’ He said, “Hey, Geena. When will it happen?’”

Davis said, “I was like, oh no — why didn’t I realize it was about that? But I immediately thought of what to say: ‘Uh, Jack, I’d like that. You are very attractive. But I have a feeling we will work together at some point in the future and I would hate to have ruined the sexual tension between us.’ He said, ‘Oh man, where did you get that? the?’ So it worked.”

Davis also detailed a toxic workplace experience with co-star Bill Murray in the 1999 film Quick Change in her memoir Dying of Politeness. Davis alleged that Murray attempted to use a massage device inappropriately on her; There have been several allegations against Murray in relation to recent productions, including the shelving of Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, Being Mortal, following allegations of sexual assault against Murray.

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Hoffman was later accused of exposing himself to a minor and assaulting two women; The decades-long allegations came to light in 2017. Murray defended Hoffman’s actions, calling him a “crazy” flirt but a “really good guy.”

Davis, who founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, shared that the curse of turning 40 as a woman in Hollywood impacted her career in terms of on-screen sexualization.

“When I started, I heard that you don’t get roles after 40. But I got these huge roles and I was like, well, obviously that’s not going to happen to me. And so it was amazing to realize that it was,” Davis said. “It was absolutely breathtaking and heartbreaking. It felt like compulsory retirement.”

She added that despite the Stuart Little movies, “work has just dried up” and that there is an “incredibly painful” gender double standard in the industry.

“I have a theory as to why it’s happening. I think a lot of male screenwriters put in a female character when they need it – a girlfriend or a daughter or whatever – and then when they cast all the other roles in their mind, the first choice is always male. And so the really cool pieces for people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, whatever, always go to men,” the alum told A League of Their Own. “It’s not fair because they’re becoming soldiers and they have younger and younger co-stars. I always say, ‘Go through and find out who might be a woman or a person of color and change the first name.’ I once said to my agent, ‘Can we find out what Liam Neeson is refusing and go for those roles?’”

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