Although they played a married couple in Thelma & Louise, the 1991 film for which Geena Davis (Massachusetts, 70 years old) was nominated for an Oscar, the real love story between the actress and actor Christopher McDonald (New York, 71 years old) came from before. During an appearance at a recent SAG-AFTRA actors’ union event, the actor, used to being the villain in films (he is, for example, in the mentioned movie), showed his most vulnerable side when recalling his romantic relationship with Davis. A story that dates back to 1985: “Geena Davis and I were engaged for about five weeks, and she fell in love with Jeff Goldblum during the filming of her first movie in Europe,” the veteran actor recalled before an audience that had attended a retrospective of his work and encountered the tale of a love triangle in pure Hollywood style.
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“I was devastated,” McDonald admitted about this romantic episode that he had to recall only five years later, in 1990, when he coincided with his ex-partner on the set of Thelma & Louise. By then, the couple formed by Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum (Pennsylvania, 73 years old) had already fallen apart. And also by then, McDonald had already met actress Lupe Gidley, whom he married in 1992. From that shoot with Davis, McDonald recalled it was a “fantastic” and “very cathartic” experience, and he told Los Angeles Times during an interview in 1992.
As McDonald explained during his confession on the SAG-AFTRA stage, Davis and Goldblum met in 1985 during a shoot in Europe, specifically in the Croatian city of Samobor. The team of the comedy with touches of horror and fantasy Transylvania 6-5000 traveled there, including the actor couple, who ended up falling in love — “on set… sometimes things happen,” McDonald said referring to this encounter —.
At that time, both Davis and Goldblum had already gone through a first divorce: she from her first husband, Richard Emmolo, a New York hospitality businessman with whom she began a relationship in 1978 and married in 1981, a year before Davis debuted in the film Tootsie — they separated in 1984—; he, from Patricia Gaul, an actress he was married to for five years and from whom he divorced in 1985.
After their first movie together, already as a couple, they filmed two more: The Fly, by David Cronenberg (1986) — “we were very passionate about it and loved working on it,” the actress said about her participation in this film — and Earth Girls Are Easy (Julien Temple, 1988). They ended up marrying in Las Vegas in 1989 and separated a year later, with the reasons unknown. In Dying of politeness, the memoir the actress published in 2022, she alludes to her story with Goldblum: “Our relationship was full of joy. It was a magical period of my life,” she wrote in the book about her second husband.
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In the same vein, Davis told People in 2022: “[Our relationship] was wonderful. It really was.” She also confessed to the American magazine that she especially liked marrying a fellow actor, “someone who knows exactly what you’re going through” and who “didn’t compete” with her. In April 2025, the actress also spoke with US Magazine about how her professional relationship with Goldblum was, saying that he recommended her to co-star with him in The Fly and that she “read him books aloud while they did his makeup, which could last four or eight hours” [due to the prosthetics he had to wear for his character] and recalling that, although he gave her the opportunity, “I had to audition.”
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The ex-couple reunited during the 30th SAG Awards ceremony in 2024, where both presented one of the awards and where, on stage, they showed signs of at least maintaining a good relationship… and even some affection.
After her marriage to Goldblum, Davis was married to film director Renny Harlin from 1993 to 1998, and from 2001 to 2017 to Iranian surgeon Reza Jarrahy, with whom she had her three children. For his part, the Jurassic Park actor waited until he was 62 to become a father. It was in July 2015, with his third wife, gymnast Emilie Livingston, 30 years younger than him and whom he married in November 2014. The couple is still together and welcomed their second child in April 2017. Despite Christopher McDonald’s statements, he and Geena Davis played a secondary role in each other’s lives. McDonald has been married to the same woman since November 1992.
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