Dax opens the episode with his trademark enthusiasm, rattling off Geena Davis's filmography — Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own, Beetlejuice, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Fly — as Monica declares her a legend. It's a quick, warm welcome that frames the conversation as a meeting with one of Hollywood's most distinctive and varied careers.

The conversation opens on a surprisingly grounded note: Geena Davis has been living like a nomad. After the Palisades fires claimed her home, she rented in Venice, then had to vacate for a New Mexico shoot. Returning to LA just as the fires hit, she found every rental gone and ended up in a Glendale backyard guest house, booked under her assistant's name. The landlord — politely oblivious to his tenant's identity — helpfully pointed out which neighbors were minor TV actors, doing precisely what Geena had asked him not to do. Dax and Monica find the whole scenario both funny and charming.

Wareham, Massachusetts is 348 years old, and the Davis household felt every year of it. Geena's parents — a civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers and a produce-growing, canning mother born in 1919 — were shaped by Depression-era Vermont frugality. The moral code they instilled was extreme: have no needs, serve everyone, never be a burden. Geena tells the story of being invited to a friend's house at 9 p.m. as a junior in high school — her first real social invitation — and her father simply refusing to let her go. She was never invited again. Alongside the social isolation was a rich private world of compulsive rituals: she had to find Y-shaped sticks on her paper route to 'approve' her path forward, and at bedtime she worked to psychically deceive a mind-reading monster by mentally placing herself in the kitchen. Dax, who had his own OCD behaviors driven by a chaotic home life, finds Geena's childhood eerily relatable.

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The conversation goes deep and surprisingly funny as Dax and Geena compare notes on their childhood OCD-adjacent behaviors. Dax's rituals involved toilet paper, hallway walls, and the desperate need to do everything twice. Geena's were more imaginative: the monster under the bed could read minds, so she had to fill her own mind with decoy locations ('Here I am in the kitchen, having crackers') to send it elsewhere. There was also a colossus giant just below the horizon that would take one step toward her when she misbehaved. Dax's explanation for his rituals is clear — a violent, addicted stepfather made home feel unsafe, so controlling small things was a coping mechanism. Geena's explanation is murkier but converges on the pressure of having to be perfect in a household run by a church deacon with extremely high moral standards.

The family's ethic was not merely polite — it was extreme. Geena would decline food at friends' houses because accepting would burden the host, and her friend's mother eventually had to call Geena's mother directly to override the refusal. The clearest casualty of this ethos was social: as a junior in high school, Geena received her first real social invitation — a call from the cool boy in class asking her to come over. Her father refused to let her go because it was 9 p.m. She never got asked again. Dax and Monica observe that Geena clearly understood even then that this was wrong and damaging, even if she couldn't fully articulate it at the time.

The moment Geena heard about her school's new exchange program, something clicked: a chance to become someone else. She arrived in Sweden two days before starting high school with no Swedish language skills, was assigned a buddy to navigate classes taught entirely in Swedish, and had to translate entire homework assignments word by word from a dictionary. The academic struggle was secondary to the social transformation: Swedish classmates assumed she must have been wildly popular back home, and Geena happily confirmed it. She also fell in love for the first time — with Mats, a tall blonde classmate whose family gave Geena the warm, wine-at-dinner family life her own home never offered, including a shared hotel room on a school trip to Amsterdam.

College was where Geena shed her shell — she went goth, pierced her own ears, and started taking charge of who she wanted to be. New York brought modeling jobs (including Victoria's Secret) that she navigated through what she describes as productive dissociation: going out, performing beauty, then retreating to massive practical underpants. The real creative outlet was the Ann Taylor window. On a dare, she sat down in an empty chair among the mannequins and went perfectly still. Crowds gathered, confused. Other passersby asked what everyone was waiting for and were told 'just wait.' Geena occasionally moved like a robot, prompting gasps. The store manager was initially horrified — then saw the crowd and immediately turned it into a regular five-hour Saturday attraction. Geena even shaved her arms and wore a matching wig after an audience member spotted the arm hair, committing fully to the illusion.

The path from Ann Taylor window to Tootsie reads like a screenwriter's first draft — too clean to be real. A model agency was asked for someone who could act; Geena was their one candidate. She auditioned, got the part, learned she had it while in Paris for runway shows, and immediately flew home. The first scene she shot was with Dustin Hoffman, in her underwear. She was completely calm. Pollack pulled her aside, baffled: 'Why are you not nervous?' Hoffman was equally generous, deciding early on that Geena was going to have a career and acting accordingly — taking her to dailies (usually off-limits to actors), explaining how to use footage to diagnose whether your intentions actually read on screen, and treating her as a collaborator rather than a day player.

The aftermath of Tootsie was TV work rather than the movie career Geena might have expected. She joined Buffalo Bill through a connection with Dabney Coleman (who was also in Tootsie) and was encouraged by a producer to try writing. She eventually completed an episode — assistant-heavy, naturally — that made it to air. The experience was enormously satisfying but didn't hook her on writing the way it might have. Beneath the professional momentum was a continuing identity fog: she was modeling underwear, appearing in movies, attracting male attention, and simultaneously still half-convinced it was all a trick of the camera. She and Dax share a rueful mutual recognition: they were both so starved for approval in childhood that simply receiving affection from someone was enough to manufacture reciprocal feelings.

Jeff Goldblum was — and apparently remains — exactly as peculiar and fascinating off-screen as on, and Geena was immediately smitten. The pair made The Fly with David Cronenberg (a radical reinvention of the campy original) and Earth Girls Are Easy, working back-to-back in a stretch that felt all fun and no stress. Beetlejuice came through a meeting with Tim Burton, whose studio walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with his own illustrations of what the film would look like. Geena told him she got the movie. Burton later confided that was exactly why he hired her — he wanted at least one person on set who understood what they were making, because he certainly wasn't sure he did.

Winning an Oscar at 32 is remarkable enough, but Geena's preparation for The Accidental Tourist was perhaps more important than the award itself. Knowing William Hurt's reputation, she hired an acting coach specifically to 'proof' her against being drawn into his emotional vortex. Her natural tendency — rooted in childhood — was to people-please, interpret someone else's unhappiness as her own failure, and try to fix it. The coach trained her to respond to Hurt's darkness with a simple, kind, disengaged phrase ('I'm sorry to hear that. Okay.') and move on. It was completely unnatural. She practiced until it worked. Dax, who is currently learning the same skill living with three women, finds the parallel almost painfully relatable.

The very first creative meeting for Thelma & Louise revealed everything. Susan Sarandon opened her script to page one and told Ridley Scott she thought they could move a line to the next scene. Just like that. No preamble, no apology, no softening. Geena sat there astonished: 'How did she just do that?' The behavior that had seemed shocking in a meeting was Sarandon's baseline on set for the entire production. Geena spent the film doing the opposite of what she'd always done — actually saying what she thought — and watching Sarandon be universally adored for it. The lesson she took away was both the simplest and the hardest of her career: you don't have to apologize for having thoughts about the work you're in.

The cultural reception of Thelma & Louise in 1991 was more complicated than its legacy suggests. A week after release, Susan and Geena were on the cover of Time magazine alongside editorials denouncing the film's supposed misandry. (Dax's response: 'You mean rapist-bashing?') It succeeded commercially anyway. Brad Pitt showed up as an unknown and was instantly, obviously a star — playful, loose, fully committed, and having the best time of his life. Years later, sitting next to George Clooney on a transatlantic flight, Geena learned that Clooney had auditioned for the Pitt role and never let go of the loss. She had no memory of his audition — and lied and said she did, because she wasn't yet brave enough to say otherwise.

The coaches told her she had a lot of untapped athletic ability. Geena had never thought of herself as coordinated, let alone athletic — the gym-class awkwardness of a very tall, shy girl from Wareham didn't suggest future baseball phenom. But she trained hard, caught up with co-stars who had weeks of head-start preparation, and pulled it off convincingly enough to genuinely believe she could play. Madonna turned out to be a complete non-diva: low-key, team-first, normal. The film was a hit by any measure — commercially and as a cultural moment. It would also set Geena on a path to discovering, film role by film role, a body she'd never known she had.

The perfect run of hits had to end somewhere, and it ended in a pirate ship. Cutthroat Island was a project Geena resisted from the start — originally intended for Michael Douglas, who got out of it while Geena couldn't. Her husband and director Renny Harlin was also pressured into it. They were coerced into making a movie neither wanted to make; it set the Guinness record for biggest financial disaster in cinema history. Long Kiss Goodnight, by contrast, was exactly what Geena wanted to make: an action thriller in which a suburban housewife/amnesiac turns out to be a deadly government assassin. Working with Samuel L. Jackson — coming off Pulp Fiction, at peak cultural heat — was an all-laughs, no-drama experience. Dax calls it one of the three greatest comedies ever made and is barely joking.

The pattern that Dax and Geena identify is consistent: when the external world becomes uncontrollable, find something precise. After the chaos of Cutthroat Island and the uncertainty of what came next, Geena watched archery coverage from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and had an immediate, visceral response. She found a coach, started competing, and trained like an athlete — four to five hours at the range every day, not in a backyard. Two and a half years in, she had won the California Cup and qualified from a field of 300 to be one of the top-32 semifinalists at the U.S. Olympic trials for Sydney 2000. She even got to travel to Sydney a year early for a venue dress rehearsal, wearing the U.S. uniform and walking out to the crowd. She didn't medal. She didn't care.

Geena describes the precise moment she became a gender-equity advocate: she had her daughter on her lap watching a preschool show and noticed the cast was overwhelmingly male. She started looking into it, renting video after video, finding the same pattern everywhere. When she raised it in industry meetings, every executive — from studio heads to showrunners — assured her the problem was ancient history, often citing a single movie with one female character as evidence of full equality. The comparison Dax makes is apt: 'It's like saying, we have Obama as president, so racism is over.' The problem was unconscious. Geena saw that clearly. And she also understood that the only lever that would work on unconscious bias was data — undeniable, externally validated, peer-reviewed numbers that removed the possibility of continued self-deception.

The study was comprehensive and damning. Male characters outnumbered female characters 3-to-1 across children's TV and film. Lead characters were 11-to-1 male. Crowd scenes were wildly skewed. When Geena and her team presented these findings to the first studio, the executives put their heads in their hands: 'How did we not know this? All we care about is doing right by kids.' The reaction at every studio was identical — shock, shame, and a stated commitment to change. And change happened, though slowly. The follow-up research Geena cites from around 2020 found that new children's TV programs had reached 50-50 gender parity — a transformation driven, she believes, by making unconscious bias impossible to ignore by naming it and quantifying it.

The conversation wraps with Geena's current moment: The Borrows is a hit, she went viral at Coachella appearing onstage with Sabrina Carpenter in a Thelma & Louise-style convertible, and she has, at last, stopped falling for men simply because they showed interest first. Dax uses the show's age-gap romance subplot as a teaching moment with his daughters — pointing out that an older woman with a younger man feels highly noticeable while the reverse never registers. Geena and Sam Jackson, it turns out, have quietly wanted to do a Long Kiss Goodnight sequel for years, and she pitches Netflix directly. The remaining runtime is a rerun Fact Check with Monica and Dax covering the Monster Jam adventure (Delta's stuffed Groot goes missing for 90 terrifying minutes), the most-watched Netflix shows by hours, the origins of the maxi pad, Seth MacFarlane's 46 combined animated TV seasons, and Monica's sleepless obsession with Penn Badgley's You.