Washington: Veteran actor Geena Davis has long been an advocate for gender equality in the film industry and she recently opened about an inappropriate audition she went on early in her career.
While promoting her latest documentary, ‘This Changes Everything’, the 63-year-old actor recalled a time when a male director made her sit on his lap to enact a love scene, reported Fox News.
“I was auditioning for a part where, in one scene, my character was going to be sitting on the lap of the male character,” Davis told USA Today.
The ‘Glow’ star explained that women didn’t realise they could stand up for themselves back then and said although she felt “uncomfortable”, she didn’t know “you could say no.”
“The director said, ‘Just act the scene out with me,’ and made me sit on his lap. It was kind of a sexy scene. I didn’t want to do it, and I was very uncomfortable, but I didn’t know you could say no,” she added.
The actor said that she hopes women aren’t going to suffer that now.
“So hopefully in the time of #MeToo and Time’s Up, women aren’t going to have to suffer through that. It’s pretty standard that you don’t meet alone with a man in a private room or hotel suite anymore, but plenty of that stuff goes on and has gone on for a long time,” she said.
‘This Changes Everything’ released on August 9 and takes a candid look at gender equality in Hollywood with firsthand accounts from actors like Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Oh, Jessica Chastain, Taraji P. Henson, and Tiffany Haddish.
Davis’ new documentary addresses how women are under- and misrepresented in the entertainment business.
She has been a women’s rights activist for years now. In 2004, Davis founded the ‘Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media’, which is a “non-profit research organization that researches gender representation in media and advocates for equal representation of women.”