Susan Sarandon Reflects on Thelma and Louise, Rocky Horror and Her Career Legacy

Susan Sarandon Looks Back at a Career Built on Risk, Rebellion and Staying Power

Susan Sarandon has spent more than five decades doing what few actors manage to do once: making characters feel dangerous, human, funny, wounded and unforgettable all at the same time. Now, as Thelma & Louise reaches its 35th anniversary year and The Rocky Horror Picture Show continues to pull new generations into its strange orbit, Sarandon is reflecting on a career that has become part of American movie memory.

For many stars, one career-defining role would be enough. Sarandon has several. There is Louise Sawyer, the sharp-edged waitress who drove into cinematic legend beside Geena Davis. There is Janet Weiss, the wide-eyed heroine of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film that somehow grew from cult curiosity into one of the longest-lasting midnight-movie phenomena in history. There are decades of acclaimed performances, awards attention, political outspokenness and an unmistakable screen presence that has made her not just recognizable, but enduring.

Yet when Sarandon talks about legacy, she does it with a kind of amused disbelief. Asked about the staying power of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she laughed at the idea that it may be one of the things she is most remembered for. The film, after all, was once an oddball musical curiosity, a strange and grungy piece of counterculture that no one could have fully predicted would become a ritual for fans around the world.

“It’s so funny to have that as what I’ll be remembered for,” she said, reflecting on the film’s strange afterlife.

That afterlife has only grown. Sarandon recently attended an opening-night production connected to the Rocky Horror world and came away impressed not by nostalgia alone, but by the freshness of what she saw. She remembered the original spirit of the show as rougher, stranger and less polished than the glossy versions that followed. For her, the new staging worked because it returned to that rawness.

She liked that it felt “grungy,” she said, because that was part of what made it alive in the first place. Over time, she noted, the property had become more polished, even “Vegasy,” but this production seemed to recover some of its unruly original energy. The casting choices, she added, gave the show a fresh charge, with performers stepping into roles in ways that felt unexpected.

Sarandon praised the cast warmly, singling out performers who brought surprise and vitality to the production. She mentioned Amber as someone who “just killed it” and spoke fondly of watching her friend Harvey, known to audiences from Blue Beetle, take on multiple parts with obvious joy. The audience, she said, was excited — not merely because they were revisiting a famous title, but because the show still felt alive.

That may be the secret to Sarandon’s career as well. Her best-known work does not sit quietly in the past. It keeps moving. It keeps being reinterpreted. It keeps finding younger viewers who come to the films not as museum pieces, but as discoveries.

This year, Thelma & Louise has been everywhere again, lifted by its 35th anniversary and its continued reputation as one of the boldest American films of its era. When it was released, the film was thrilling, controversial and sharply modern. It turned a road movie into a feminist landmark, giving audiences two women who were funny, flawed, furious and impossible to dismiss. Sarandon’s Louise was not written or performed as a symbol first. She was a person first — guarded, loyal, wounded and brave.

That is why the movie lasted. It was never only about escape. It was about what happens when two women realize that the rules were never built to protect them. Sarandon and Davis gave the film its soul, making the friendship at its center feel both ordinary and revolutionary. They laughed, fought, drove, panicked and pushed forward with the desperate intimacy of people who had crossed a line and could no longer return to the lives they once accepted.

For American audiences, Thelma & Louise remains more than a classic. It is one of those rare studio films whose ending became part of the national imagination. Even people who have not seen it know the image: two women, a car, a cliff, a refusal to surrender. It is the kind of final frame that does not fade.

Sarandon, however, does not speak about these milestones like an actor trapped by them. She seems grateful, but not frozen. During the interview, she moved easily from career reflection to her latest film, where she plays Sylvia in a project directed by Zach, a filmmaker she described as passionate, thoughtful and kind. The role, she said, drew her in partly because of him and partly because the film felt like “an odd little gem.”

That phrase says a great deal. Sarandon has always had a taste for the unusual. The films that interest her are often not the obvious ones. She has built a career by moving between mainstream recognition and smaller, stranger projects, trusting instinct over formula. In this case, she had known about the story for years. Zach had previously made a short version, and Sarandon had seen it long before the feature came together. By the time the full film finally became real, she felt as if she had already met Sylvia.

“I was so impressed,” she said of the earlier version, explaining that she had followed the project’s long path toward becoming a feature.

The new film also gave her a chance to build a relationship on screen with a younger costar. Asked how the two developed their chemistry, Sarandon made it sound almost effortless. The set, she said, felt safe and open. Zach created an atmosphere where actors could play. Some of what happened was scripted; some of it, she suggested, emerged naturally in the moment.

“It was so easy,” she said. “We just had fun.”

That ease matters. In a business often built on pressure, image and hierarchy, Sarandon spoke about collaboration as something lighter and more human. Her costar described the experience of working with Sarandon not as intimidating, but surprisingly normal. The word “iconic” came up, as it often does around actors with Sarandon’s résumé, but the younger performer laughed off the grandness of it. To her, Sarandon was not an untouchable legend. She was simply there, doing the work.

That may be one reason Sarandon has remained relevant for so long. She has the career of an icon but the working habits of an actor. She shows up. She listens. She plays. She does not appear overly interested in protecting a monument to herself.

There was humor in the conversation, too. When the interviewer pointed out that the film had gathered a remarkable cast, including Sarandon and Aubrey, the younger costar joked that it had all felt “normal,” not iconic. She admitted that she mostly knew Sarandon from Enchanted, where Sarandon played a wicked queen. Sarandon quickly joined the joke, noting with a smile that she had also played a good witch.

It was a small exchange, but it captured something important about Sarandon’s screen life. Different generations know her differently. For some, she is Louise. For others, she is Janet from Rocky Horror. For others still, she is the glamorous villain of a Disney fantasy, a political activist, an Oscar-winning dramatic actress, or a familiar face whose presence instantly gives a project weight.

That multigenerational recognition is rare. Many performers are trapped by the era that made them famous. Sarandon keeps slipping out of those boundaries. Her career has crossed midnight movies, prestige dramas, studio hits, independent films, family entertainment and political dramas. She has never belonged to just one audience.

The conversation also turned personal when Sarandon was asked about motherhood. A fellow actor in the film had recently announced she was expecting, and Sarandon, a mother of three, was asked whether she had offered advice. Sarandon’s answer was funny, frank and deeply practical. She had not yet given major advice, she said, but she had told the expectant mother that exhaustion near the end of pregnancy has a purpose.

By the ninth month, Sarandon joked, fear gives way to readiness. The body and mind reach a point where the unknown becomes less frightening than simply wanting the baby to arrive.

It was a very Sarandon answer: warm, direct, unsentimental and honest. She did not wrap motherhood in polished celebrity language. She talked about it like someone who had lived it and remembered the physical reality of it.

She also spoke with affection about the expectant actor’s future as a parent, saying she believed she would be “a great mom.” Her reasoning was simple. The woman had been kind and generous to her on set, and if she could be that loving toward a colleague, Sarandon suggested, she would be even more so with her own child.

That moment added another layer to the interview. Sarandon’s legacy is often discussed in terms of famous films, famous roles and famous images. But listening to her talk, the deeper theme is continuity — the way art, friendship, motherhood and mentorship pass from one generation to the next.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show became bigger than anyone expected because audiences claimed it and kept handing it down. Thelma & Louise endured because younger viewers kept finding new meaning in its rage and freedom. Sarandon’s latest work continues that pattern: an actor with nothing left to prove still stepping into new stories, new sets and new relationships with curiosity.

That curiosity may be the real legacy. Sarandon’s career has never been about staying comfortable. From the beginning, she gravitated toward characters who were searching for exits — from innocence, from silence, from bad marriages, from social rules, from fear. Janet Weiss begins as a figure of conventional innocence and ends transformed by a night of chaos. Louise Sawyer begins as a woman trying to hold herself together and ends as part of one of American cinema’s most defiant images. Even in smaller films, Sarandon often seems drawn to people standing at the edge of change.

The American movie landscape has changed dramatically since Sarandon first became a star. The kinds of adult dramas that once shaped careers are harder to find. Theaters compete with streaming platforms. Fame moves faster. Audiences fragment. But Sarandon belongs to a class of actor whose work still cuts through the noise because it was built on specificity. She never simply played “strong women.” She played complicated women. That distinction is everything.

Strong women can become slogans. Complicated women become unforgettable.

That is why Thelma & Louise still matters 35 years later. That is why Rocky Horror still fills rooms with people ready to shout, sing and dress up. That is why a new generation can meet Sarandon through one role, then look backward and discover an entire body of work waiting for them.

In the interview, Sarandon had not yet seen the final cut of her new film. She was curious, she said, to see what made it in. After all these years, that curiosity still seems genuine. For all the anniversaries and tributes, for all the talk of legacy, she remains an artist interested in the next version, the final edit, the unexpected moment between actors that may or may not survive the cut.

That is the paradox of Susan Sarandon’s career. She is already part of Hollywood history, but she does not speak like someone who lives there. She speaks like someone still moving, still watching, still surprised by what lasts.

And perhaps that is why her work has lasted, too.