Christopher McDonald has spent decades playing memorable characters, from Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore to Darryl Dickinson in Thelma & Louise.

But one of the strangest stories of his career happened before the cameras even started rolling.

McDonald recently revealed that he and Geena Davis had once been engaged — and that their relationship ended when Davis fell in love with Jeff Goldblum.

McDonald says he was devastated.

Then, years later, Hollywood handed him an almost absurd assignment.

He was cast as Davis’ husband in Thelma & Louise.

Speaking during a career retrospective for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation on Aug. 22, McDonald recalled the painful breakup, the unexpected reunion and the surreal moment when the former couple had to pose for fake wedding photographs together for the film.

What could have become an unbearably awkward situation instead ended very differently.

McDonald says he and Davis eventually repaired their friendship.

McDonald Says He and Davis Were Engaged

According to McDonald, he and Davis were not merely casually dating.

They had become engaged.

“The inside story is Geena Davis and I were engaged to be married for about five weeks,” McDonald recalled.

Then Davis went to Europe to work on one of her early films.

That movie was the 1985 comedy-horror film Transylvania 6-5000, which also starred Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr. and Carol Kane.

McDonald says Davis fell in love with Goldblum while making the movie.

He does not speak about Goldblum with bitterness today.

In fact, he joked that he could understand the attraction.

But at the time, the breakup hit him extremely hard.

“I was broken,” McDonald said.

He Learned the News While Performing Hamlet

The timing made the experience even more painful.

McDonald was working in a production of Hamlet, playing Laertes.

He still had roughly three weeks left in the production and had planned to travel to Europe afterward to join Davis.

Instead, he received very different news.

McDonald says it was Ed Begley Jr., Davis’ costar on Transylvania 6-5000, who told him what had happened.

The future McDonald had been expecting suddenly disappeared.

He remembered feeling “really, really devastated.”

For an actor, continuing to perform night after night while dealing with a major breakup would have been difficult enough.

But McDonald was also confronting the collapse of an engagement and the realization that the woman he planned to marry had fallen for someone else while working overseas.

Davis and Goldblum eventually married in 1987.

Their marriage ended in divorce three years later.

McDonald later moved forward with his own life as well. He married actress Lupe Gidley in 1992, and the couple have two children.

But before that chapter began, McDonald and Davis would find themselves unexpectedly reunited.

Five Years Later, Ridley Scott Cast Him as Her Husband

The irony arrived through Thelma & Louise.

Ridley Scott’s 1991 road movie starred Davis as Thelma Dickinson and Susan Sarandon as Louise Sawyer.

Thelma begins the film trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage to Darryl, a controlling, dismissive and self-absorbed husband.

McDonald was cast as Darryl.

That meant the man who had once expected to marry Davis in real life was suddenly being asked to play her husband onscreen.

McDonald recalled that Davis initially did not know who Scott had hired for the role.

She reportedly asked the director about the actor playing Darryl.

Scott described him as tall and funny.

Then Davis discovered the answer.

“I used to go with him,” McDonald recalled Davis saying.

Scott apparently considered that history a bonus rather than a problem.

“Even better. Perfect! Now go,” McDonald remembered the director responding.

For Scott, perhaps the real-life history promised an extra layer of chemistry.

For McDonald and Davis, it meant confronting something much more personal.

McDonald Called Davis Before Filming

McDonald says he did not want the old breakup hanging over the production.

So he contacted Davis.

The next day, he called and asked if she wanted to have lunch.

The former couple met, talked and, in McDonald’s words, “hugged it out.”

He remembers the afternoon warmly.

That conversation seems to have cleared away the tension before they began working together.

It also says something about the distance both actors had traveled emotionally since the engagement ended.

McDonald was no longer the devastated man hearing bad news from Europe.

Davis was no longer simply the former fiancée who had broken his heart.

They were now two professional actors preparing to make a movie together.

And the production soon asked them to do something almost comically uncomfortable.

Then They Had to Take Fake Wedding Photos

The Thelma & Louise set decorators needed photographs for Thelma and Darryl’s home.

Naturally, that included wedding pictures.

So McDonald and Davis — two people who had once been engaged to marry in real life — had to pose together as newlyweds for fictional photographs.

The irony was impossible to miss.

“Oh my god, are you kidding me?” McDonald remembered thinking.

Years earlier, the pair might have expected to take genuine wedding photographs together.

Instead, after the relationship had ended, they were taking pretend ones for a movie in which McDonald played a husband audiences were supposed to dislike.

Yet the awkward assignment apparently helped reinforce their ability to laugh about the past.

The photos went into the set.

The movie went forward.

And McDonald says everything ultimately turned out well.

Darryl Became One of the Movie’s Most Memorable Characters

McDonald’s role in Thelma & Louise is not enormous, but Darryl makes an immediate impression.

He represents the life Thelma is trying to escape.

He talks down to her, dismisses her feelings and expects her to remain obedient.

When Thelma leaves with Louise for what is initially supposed to be a short getaway, she is afraid even to tell him where she is going.

McDonald plays the character broadly enough to be funny while never losing the sense that Thelma feels trapped by him.

That makes the casting even stranger in retrospect.

Davis was acting opposite a man who had once genuinely planned to become her husband.

Now she was playing a woman desperately trying to get away from him.

Few films can claim a behind-the-scenes irony quite that specific.

McDonald Says They Are Close Friends Today

Any resentment McDonald once felt appears to have faded long ago.

During his recent remarks, he spoke warmly about Davis.

He described her as a “remarkable woman” and said they are now dear friends.

He also mentioned Davis’ 2022 memoir, Dying of Politeness, saying she wrote something kind about their history together.

His tone suggests that he now sees the breakup as a painful but long-resolved part of his life.

That does not mean he has forgotten what it felt like.

He openly acknowledges that losing Davis to Goldblum left him shattered at the time.

But decades later, he can tell the story with humor.

One of Hollywood’s Strangest Reunions

Actors routinely work with ex-partners.

But McDonald and Davis’ situation was unusually layered.

They had been engaged.

She fell in love with another actor.

McDonald learned the news while preparing to join her overseas.

He was devastated.

Five years later, Ridley Scott unknowingly — or perhaps happily — created the most ironic reunion possible.

He cast McDonald as Davis’ husband.

Then production asked them to pose for wedding photographs.

What could have been deeply uncomfortable instead became part of a friendship that survived long after the movie ended.

McDonald still remembers how painful the breakup was.

But he also remembers the lunch that allowed them to move beyond it.

And more than three decades after Thelma & Louise, the former fiancé who once felt “broken” can now look back at the experience and laugh at just how strange Hollywood made their reunion.