The clever advice Dustin Hoffman gave Geena Davis to shut down Jack Nicholson’s advances
Geena Davis was able to dodge Jack Nicholson’s unwanted advances with some advice from a friend.
Davis, 66, told the New Yorker that Nicholson came on to her after a dinner with casting directors, and she used advice given to her by “Tootsie” co-star Dustin Hoffman to politely reject him.
“Say, ‘Well, you’re very attractive. I would love to, but it would ruin the sexual tension between us,’ ” Davis remembered Hoffman telling her about what to say if a co-star wanted to sleep with her.
Davis shared how the advice worked on Nicholson.
“After ‘Tootsie,’ my modeling agent took me and a couple of other actor-slash-models to Hollywood to meet casting directors. He happened to know Jack Nicholson, and every single night Jack Nicholson had dinner with us. Then one day there was a note under the door that said, ‘Please call Jack Nicholson at this number.’ I was, like, ‘I can’t believe it!’ ” she said.
She continued: “So I said, ‘Hello, Mr. Nicholson. This is Geena the model. You called me?’ He said, ‘Hey, Geena. When is it gonna happen?’ I was, like, ‘Oh, no — why didn’t I realize this is what it was going to be about?’ “
That’s when she remembered the tactic Hoffman told her about.
“But it immediately came into my head what to say: ‘Uh, Jack, I would love to. You’re very attractive,’ ” she said. ” ‘But I have a feeling we’re going to work together at some point in the future, and I would hate to have ruined the sexual tension between us.’ He was, like, ‘Oh, man, where’d you get that?’ So it worked.”
The “Thelma & Louise” icon recently opened up about her bad experiences with Bill Murray while filming “Quick Change” in 1989.
In her new memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” Davis claimed that Murray, now 72, greeted her in a hotel suite with a massage device he insisted on using on her, even though she refused. She claimed that Murray also screamed at her for being late to production in front of all their colleagues.
Davis also shared earlier this year that, after her Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress in “The Accidental Tourist” in 1989, directors started treating her differently, assuming she thought she was “all that.”
“Without having met me or having spent any time with me or anything, they just assumed I was going to be like, ‘Well, now no one is going to tell me what to do!’ ” Davis said on an episode of the “Allison Interviews” podcast in January. “I think maybe because I was a woman, the directors felt that way. And maybe it was even unconscious bias that they would maybe do it to a woman and not a man. But they didn’t want a woman to potentially cause them any problems.”
