Geena Davis, 66, is speaking out about her negative experience in making Quick Change with Bill Murray. The actress claimed the 72-year-old actor insisted on using a massage tool on her, even though she refused, at their first meeting in a hotel suite, and later screamed at her on the set of the 1990 film, in her upcoming memoir, Dying of Politeness, according to NME. She wrote that the tool was called The Thumper and he kept wanting her to use it even though she emphatically refused, the outlet further reported.
Geena reportedly went on to write that when Bill later tracked her down in her trailer, he started screaming at her for being late as she waited for her wardrobe. He apparently continued screaming at her as she hurried onto the set and continued doing so even when she was in front of hundreds of cast, crew, and passers-by. HollywoodLife has reached out to Bill’s rep for comment but have yet to receive a response.
Geena also talked about the uncomfortable situation she was put in with Bill, in a new interview with The New York Times. It “was bad,” she said before adding “the way he behaved at the first meeting…I should have walked out of that or profoundly defended myself, in which case I wouldn’t have got the part. I could have avoided that treatment if I’d known how to react or what to do during the audition. But, you know, I was so non-confrontational that I just didn’t.”
The reporter Geena was speaking to in the interview processed to suggest she was blaming herself for Bill’s actions. “Ha. Point taken,” she replied. “There’s no point in regretting things, and yet, here I was regretting. And yes, exactly, it wasn’t my fault.”
Geena’s latest accusations about Bill come after she made headlines earlier this year when she said she was treated differently by directors after she won her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Accidental Tourist in 1989. “I had two directors, after I won the Oscar, who I had a rocky start with, because they assumed that I was going to think I was ‘all that,’ and they wanted to make sure that I didn’t feel like I was ‘all that,’” she said in an interview on the Allison Interviews podcast.
“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!’ I think maybe because I was a woman, the directors felt that way,” she continued. “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.”
Geena’s new book, Dying of Politeness: A Memoir comes out on Oct. 11.