Bill Pullman Reunites With Geena Davis in The Boroughs, A League Of Their Own Returns
Bill Pullman and Geena Davis are back together in a league of their own, this time in Netflix’s The Boroughs. Pullman plays Jack and Davis plays Renee, extending a screen partnership that began in 1988 and reached its best-known form in the 1992 film A League of Their Own.
1992 Cast Link
Davis and Pullman portrayed wife and husband in A League of Their Own, the Penny Marshall-directed film about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Davis played Dottie Hinson, the Rockford Peaches catcher and sister of Lori Petty’s Kit, while Pullman appeared near the end as Bob, Dottie’s husband.
Pullman said he remembers the old film through a very specific physical detail. “I come into it from the war. I’ve been injured. It’s in the script that I got shot in my foot, and I was at rehearsals we had in Chicago. The DP, [Miroslav Ondříček], had a limp, and I thought ‘This is kind of interesting, you know, to be doing these scenes, and he’s kind of there watching rehearsals, and he’s limping. And then in comes Tom Hanks, and I realized he’s decided to have a limp,”” he said.
The Boroughs Roles
In The Boroughs, created by Will Matthews and Jeffrey Addiss, Davis plays Renee, a former music producer, and Pullman plays Jack. Pullman said he had once been wary of television because he did not want to sign a five to seven year contract, but the series changed that calculation. “But this one, ‘Oh Jesus, sign me up.’ Really? This is a great group of people. This is a great premise, and this is the one that I [die in] and then I don’t have to do the dirty work of going on all those other episodes and writers coming up with story lines and everything,”” he said.
Jack dies at the end of the first episode at the hands of a mysterious creature siphoning brain fluid from his sleeping body, which makes Pullman’s reunion with Davis unusually brief on screen. He added, “Yeah, I wanted it. So there was a little bit of loss and grief.”
1988 to 2020s
The pairing did not begin with A League of Their Own. Davis and Pullman also appeared together in The Accidental Tourist in 1988, and Davis said the two had a natural connection from past collaborations. She also worked with Alfre Woodard on the 1980s sitcom Sara, and Woodard plays Judy in The Boroughs alongside Alfred Molina as Sam Cooper.
For viewers, the draw is straightforward: a familiar screen duo now sits inside a new Netflix series with a different tone and a much darker exit for Pullman’s character. That contrast gives The Boroughs a built-in reference point from A League of Their Own without turning the reunion into simple nostalgia.
