Geena Davis stars in A&E thriller ‘Coma’

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — Sometimes a role in a movie can change an actor’s whole career. Sometimes it can change a life. That’s what happened to Geena Davis when she co-starred in “A League of Their Own” and learned to play baseball.

“It had a massive impact on me because growing up I was tall and gangly, and I didn’t want to try sports because I was too physically embarrassed,” she says. “I did it well enough to pull it off in the movies. ... I took up archery in real life just because I thought I’d like to do a sport that’s not the ‘movies’ version. It really changed my self-image, my body perception.

“I think I’d always felt uncoordinated and not physically capable of doing a lot of things. And it was so transformative. I always talk about the benefits to girls who play sports when they’re young. I was finding it out in my 30s. It was the same thing, ‘Wow, my body can actually do things, and it feels fabulous when I accomplish something.”

She went on to place among the semifinalists in the women’s Olympics archery team. “And it was so interesting to do something where you can measure how good you’re doing, rather than our industry (which) is so incredibly subjective. It’s just what do people think about you? But here it doesn’t matter what you wear if you hit the bull’s eye.”

Actually, Davis had hit the bull’s eye several times in her life. She was only two years out of Boston University when she snagged her first movie part in “Tootsie.” She went on to star in “Beetlejuice,” “The Accidental Tourist,” “The Fly” and three television series.

But it was “Thelma & Louise” that proved pivotal. “That really changed my perception greatly and helped me focus on what I wanted to play.

“I’d been playing fleshed-out characters already, but that was really for selfish reasons as it was more interesting to act that kind of part. But from then on, I’ve always thought about what are the women in the audience going to think about my character? Not that it needs to be a role model, just somebody in charge of their own fate.”

That fuse is glowing again in her latest role as the chief of psychiatry conducting genetic research on Alzheimer’s disease in A&E’s two-part thriller, “Coma,” premiering Sept. 3. It reunites her with Ridley Scott, who co-produced “Coma” and who directed “Thelma & Louise.”

The mother of three children — twin boys, 8, and a daughter, 10 — Davis works when she wants to. She chooses projects that intrigue her, she says. Lately she’s been doing a film about every two years.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done two movies back-to-back. Oh, I went from ‘A League of Their Own’ directly to ‘Hero,’ both for Columbia. I never knew what my next project was by the time I finished what I was working on.

“I think it’s just a product of being really fussy. I sort of set this goal for myself that I didn’t want to play a boring part. I didn’t want to be ‘the girl.’ So many female characters are ‘the girl’ that’s in danger or being rescued. It’s the girlfriend of the one playing baseball, instead of the one playing baseball. So I’ve tried to avoid that if possible.”

She adds, “I’d rather be the action hero. And you have to wait for those parts to come along. So you have to be good at waiting or it will drive you nuts. I’m very fussy and like to wait till something comes along that’s worth leaving the house for,” she says.

Davis is married to her fourth husband, a plastic surgeon of Iranian extraction whose specialty is craniofacial reconstruction on children, often in Third World countries.

Davis travels out of state as often as once a week on speaking tours on the empowerment of women. She and her husband manage by coordinating their schedules with the needs of the children. “I try to be gone only one night even if it’s far away. We try to never have circumstances where he’ll be in Guatemala and I’ll be in D.C.”