What Happened to Geena Davis? Netflix Comeback at 70 in 2026

If you grew up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Geena Davis was everywhere: the sweet newlywed ghost in Beetlejuice, the Oscar-winning dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist, Thelma riding shotgun toward the Grand Canyon, and Dottie Hinson catching fastballs barehanded in A League of Their Own. Then, somewhere after the mid-’90s, the big studio leads seemed to stop coming. So whatever happened to Geena Davis? As it turns out, she never really left — she just changed what she was fighting for. And in 2026, she’s back on screen in a big way.

01Profile

Full name

Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis

Born

January 21, 1956, in Wareham, Massachusetts

Age

70 (as of October 2026)

Occupation

Actress, producer, author, advocate

Breakout years

1982–1996

Best-known work

The Accidental Tourist, Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own, Beetlejuice

Major honors

Academy Award (1989), Golden Globe (2006), Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (2019)

Founded

Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (2004), Bentonville Film Festival (2015)

Two Oscars, a Golden Globe for playing the President, and a well-documented side career as a competitive archer. Not many résumés look like this one.

02The Rise: From Model to Oscar Winner

A small part in a very big movie

Davis grew up in a small Massachusetts town and studied drama at Boston University before moving to New York, where she worked as a model. Her first film role came in 1982’s Tootsie, playing a soap-opera actress opposite Dustin Hoffman — a part she has described in her memoir as both a lucky break and a crash course in how Hollywood treated young women. A short-lived sitcom or two followed, along with a run of supporting parts.

The Fly, Beetlejuice, and an Oscar

The mid-’80s turned her into a recognizable name. She co-starred with Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), then played Barbara Maitland, half of the recently deceased couple haunting their own house, in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988). The same year she played Muriel Pritchett, the eccentric, fast-talking dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist. The role won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 1989 ceremony.

Thelma and Dottie

Then came the two films that still define her for a lot of people. Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991), with Susan Sarandon, became a cultural flashpoint and earned both leads Best Actress nominations. A year later, Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own (1992) cast her as Dottie Hinson, the star catcher of the Rockford Peaches, in a film that’s still quoted on ballfields today. By the early ’90s, Davis was one of the few women in Hollywood who could open a movie.

03Stepping Away: After Cutthroat Island

The turn came with Cutthroat Island (1995), a lavish pirate adventure directed by Renny Harlin, to whom Davis was married at the time. The film was one of the most expensive productions of its day and performed very poorly at the box office; it has frequently been cited in trade coverage as one of the biggest financial flops in film history. The following year’s action thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) earned a cult following but only modest returns.

Davis has spoken openly about what happened next. In interviews and in her 2022 memoir, she has said that leading roles became much harder to find as she moved into her forties — an experience she connected to how the industry treats women of a certain age rather than to any single flop. She kept working, but the projects got smaller, and her energy started flowing elsewhere.

• 1995Cutthroat Island is released and struggles badly at the box office.
• 1996Stars in the action thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight.
• 1999Plays Mrs. Little in the family hit Stuart Little; separately reaches the semifinals of the U.S. Olympic archery trials.
• 2004Founds the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
• 2006Wins a Golden Globe for playing the first female U.S. President in ABC's Commander in Chief.
• 2015Launches the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas.
• 2019Receives the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
• 2022Publishes her memoir, Dying of Politeness.

It’s worth noting that “stepping away” is only partly accurate. Stuart Little was a genuine hit, and Commander in Chief — though it lasted just one season — earned her a Golden Globe. Later TV work included a recurring role as a surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy and a part in Netflix’s GLOW. What changed was the center of gravity.

04The Advocate: Counting Characters

The moment that started it

The origin story Davis tells most often is a simple one. Watching children’s TV and movies with her young daughter in the early 2000s, she noticed how few female characters there were — and how often the ones that did appear were sidelined. When she raised it with industry contacts, she has said, many insisted the problem had already been fixed. So she decided to get the numbers.

Data, not shaming

In 2004 she founded what is now the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Its approach is research-first: it counts who appears on screen, who speaks, who has a job, and how characters are portrayed, then shares the findings privately with studios and creators. Davis has repeatedly described the strategy as collaborative rather than confrontational — show creators the data and let them fix it. The institute’s motto, “If she can see it, she can be it,” has become a familiar phrase in industry diversity discussions.

The work has expanded well beyond gender. The institute’s research now covers race, LGBTQIA+ representation, disability, and age. In September 2025, it released a report on representation in children’s television, launched at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation in New York, which found that male characters still outnumbered female characters in the most popular kids’ shows, even as female leads hit a record high in new programming. Another 2025 report examined how women in midlife — and menopause specifically — are portrayed in top-grossing films.

A festival in the heartland

In 2015 Davis added a second project: the Bentonville Film Festival in northwest Arkansas, created to spotlight work by women and other underrepresented filmmakers. It’s grown into an annual fixture with major corporate sponsors, and Davis still serves as its chair.

The Hersholt and the memoir

In 2019 the Academy gave her a second Oscar statuette, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in recognition of her advocacy. Three years later she published Dying of Politeness, a memoir about learning to stop apologizing for taking up space — she has called it her “journey to badassery.” It includes candid stories from the sets of Tootsie, Beetlejuice, and The Accidental Tourist, and it found a warm reception from reviewers.

05What She Is Doing Now

Back on screen in The Boroughs

The biggest news of Davis’ 2026 is a return to a prominent TV role. She co-stars in The Boroughs, an eight-episode Netflix sci-fi series from the Duffer Brothers’ production team (the people behind Stranger Things), which premiered on May 21, 2026. Created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the show is set in a seemingly idyllic retirement community where a group of residents discover an otherworldly threat that’s stealing the one thing they’re short on — time.

Davis plays Renee, a retired music manager and strong-willed resident, alongside Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, and Jena Malone. Reviews were mixed-to-positive overall: TV Guide called it a fun, Spielbergian adventure, while Forbes felt it started strong but lost steam over eight episodes. Several outlets singled out Davis’ performance, and Newsweek framed the part as a role she was born to play. For an actress who spent years saying Hollywood has little room for older women, a hit ensemble built entirely around characters in their later decades is a fitting place to land.

Still running the festival

In June 2026 Davis presided over the 12th annual Bentonville Film Festival, held June 15–21 with digital screenings running through June 28. The lineup opened with Family Movie, starring Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, and included the festival’s signature “Geena and Friends” event, in which Davis and other actors re-perform famous all-male movie scenes with women and gender-nonconforming performers in the parts. In announcing the festival, she said:

As we enter our twelfth year, I’m incredibly proud of how Bentonville continues to grow as a place where artists, audiences, and industry leaders come together to champion bold creativity, meaningful connection, and stories that reflect the richness of the world around us. — Geena Davis, Bentonville Film Festival announcement, 2026

Hosting in Cannes

On May 21, 2026, Davis hosted the 32nd amfAR Gala Cannes at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the glamorous AIDS-research fundraiser held on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Performers that night included Robbie Williams, Zara Larsson, and PinkPantheress, and Deadline reported the evening raised $20 million. Coverage noted she was returning to the event nearly three decades after her earlier appearance there.

Books, talks, and causes

Davis has also kept a busy schedule off screen. In April 2025 she published her first picture book, The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page, which she both wrote and illustrated, and discussed it on NPR. In April 2026 she delivered the Schooler Lecture at Ohio’s University of Mount Union, talking through her five-decade career, her memoir, and the institute’s work. She’s also been announced as part of the Global Down Syndrome Foundation’s 2026 “Be Beautiful Be Yourself” Fashion Show, where she’s billed as a disability-inclusion advocate, and she appeared at the 2026 Fashion Trust U.S. Awards.

06Summary

Geena Davis didn’t vanish after the ’90s — she redirected. When studio leads got scarce, she built an institution that measures exactly the kind of imbalance she’d experienced, then a festival to put different voices on screen. Now, at 70, she’s leading a Netflix ensemble, hosting galas in Cannes, and still chairing her festival every June.

If you haven’t checked in on her since A League of Their Own, The Boroughs is an easy place to start. And if you ever wondered why more recent kids’ shows seem to have more girls in them, there’s a decent chance her institute’s spreadsheets had something to do with it.