Newsmaker: Geena Davis

Hollywood has no shortage of polymaths, but Geena Davis might be in a category of her own. She has won Academy Awards for both acting and advocacy, founded the groundbreaking nonprofit Geena Davis Institute, written the memoir Dying of Politeness (2022), and even excelled at competitive archery—at one point contending for a spot on the US Olympic team. But one thing she hasn’t done until now: write and illustrate a children’s book.

With The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page (Philomel Books, April), Davis offers a funny and self-referential take on embracing differences. She talked to American Libraries at the American Library Association’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia about her new book, striving for equitable representation in media, and the roles for which she’s most often recognized.

The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page is your debut picture book. What inspired you to write and illustrate a story about self-acceptance and taking up space?

Partly because it’s very much my story. Growing up, I was always the tallest kid in class, and it really impacted my feelings about myself and my self-esteem. It wasn’t until I stopped growing—which was a huge relief, because I thought, “How long is this going to go on?”—and became an adult that I realized that I love it. When I learned how to play a sport for the first time, which was baseball for the movie A League of Their Own, I was like, “Wait a minute: It’s okay to inhabit my body, and it does things.” It was such a revelation. So I always had in mind that I might like to make a children’s book about that.

Do you have any plans to write or illustrate other children’s books or share more of your art with a broader audience?

Yes, my next book is called The Girl Who Was Too Small for the Page, and she’s about that big [pinches fingers]. You have to use a magnifying glass to read it [laughs]. No, but something—some other idea—will have to come to me. I would love to.

The Geena Davis Institute recently celebrated 20 years of research and advocacy for equitable representation in media. What do you think has improved in Hollywood since the institute began collecting data? What still needs to change?

When we started, the first thing I did was get a study done that looked at 30 years of children’s movies and television. What we found was only 11% of films had any character that was female who could have been called a lead character. In 2018 and 2019, we reached [gender] parity with the lead characters in kids’ TV and movies. COVID set us back some, but now that things are ramping up again, I think we’ll get right back there. We’ve made a lot of progress. The representation of characters of color is almost at population representation. That’s what I want to happen on screen, for the population to reflect the real population—which is naturally very diverse and half female.

The slogan of the institute is, “If they can see it, they can be it.” You’ve taken on a lot of strong, complex characters over the years. Is there a role that fans tell you over and over was especially empowering for them to watch?

It’s funny, because a certain percentage of people will say, “I love your movie,” and I’m like … okay? So I started asking. It’s always Beetlejuice for those who think I made one movie. But A League of Their Own is a big one, because I get almost the same number of young women and girls who say “I play sports because of that movie” as when it first came out. I had no idea that I would be in a movie that would last that long, and people would still find it relevant. Thelma & Louise, I get a lot. A certain segment of the population loves The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s nice to have so many films that people responded to like that.

What role have libraries played in your life?

When I was a kid, we weren’t well off by any stretch. So our books came from the library in my small hometown. I loved the smell, it was very distinctive, and it felt very special when you got a book from the library. You had to treat it nice. You had to get it back. I just loved the entire experience.