A few weeks after surprising audiences during Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella set, Geena Davis was still laughing about the experience.
“The reaction really blew my mind,” she told the Los Angeles Times after appearing in a filmed segment inspired by Thelma & Louise. “I didn’t expect to suddenly be trending.”
The moment connected a younger audience with one of Davis’ most enduring roles, but the interview itself pointed toward something larger: the continued demand for stories where women — including older women — get to lead.
That idea runs through Davis’ latest project, The Boroughs, a Netflix sci-fi series about residents of an upscale retirement community facing a mysterious threat. Davis plays Renee, a fearless community volunteer ready to fight back when neighbors begin dying under strange circumstances.
“She’s ferociously brave and doesn’t feel like time has passed her by,” Davis said of the character.
The role fits naturally into a career built around women who act instead of waiting to be acted upon. From A League of Their Own to The Long Kiss Goodnight, Davis has repeatedly chosen characters with agency, ambition, humor, and physicality.
“I decided early on that I didn’t want to play just the girlfriend of the person doing the stuff,” she told the Times. “I wanted to do cool stuff, too.”
That philosophy eventually expanded beyond acting and into advocacy through the Geena Davis Institute, which studies representation and unconscious bias in entertainment.
The work remains especially relevant in conversations around aging onscreen.
Despite audiences spanning every generation, older adults are still rarely centered in genre television — particularly action, fantasy, and sci-fi. The Boroughs pushes against that pattern by allowing older characters to be funny, romantic, frightened, capable, reckless, and heroic all at once.
Importantly, the series does not frame age itself as the problem.
As Davis noted in the interview, the cast never approached the project thinking of themselves primarily as “older characters.” They were simply people inside a suspense story with something at stake.
That distinction matters because representation often shapes expectations quietly. Audiences absorb who gets to be visible, powerful, complicated, desirable, or central to the action — and who disappears into the margins.
Davis has spent decades resisting those limits, both onscreen and off.
Even now, she speaks about her career with the excitement of someone still discovering new possibilities. In the Times interview, she described revisiting theaters to watch audience reactions during screenings of Thelma & Louise and recalled learning to study her own performances objectively after advice from Dustin Hoffman on the set of Tootsie.
There is pride in those memories, but also momentum.
At 70, Davis is starring in a new sci-fi series, reconnecting with younger audiences, and continuing to advocate for broader representation across entertainment. Not as nostalgia. Not as a comeback narrative. Just as ongoing work.
Read the full interview in the Los Angeles Times, and support the Geena Davis Institute by helping fund research on representation and inclusion in entertainment.