Callie Khouri won an Oscar for her very first screenplay. At 68, she’s doing it again — but this time with songs. The writer behind Thelma & Louise, the 1991 feminist road movie that still resonates powerfully, has adapted her own script into a musical theatre production premiering at London’s Young Vic. In an interview during one of this summer’s heatwaves, Khouri reflects on a career that began against all odds and a story that refuses to grow old.
A Streak of Beginner’s Luck
“I have a world-class case of beginner’s luck,” Khouri says, laughing. She won the Academy Award for Thelma & Louise, then topped it with Nashville, her first television series, which ran for six seasons. Now she’s attempting something neither film nor TV had prepared her for: a stage musical.
“It’s not good to walk through the world feeling like prey,” she says quietly. Those words anchor everything — from the film’s origin to this new adaptation. Khouri wrote the original screenplay at 29, in secret between freelance gigs, while living in Santa Monica and working on music videos. “Scenes would wake me up in the middle of the night. It was the easiest job I ever did.”
The path to Ridley Scott’s camera was improbable. A complete unknown, she passed the script through a chain of contacts until it reached the director, who decided to helm it himself. The rest is cinema history — Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, a young Brad Pitt, and a finale that shocked audiences into debate.
A Different Kind of Road Movie
The musical is not a nostalgia trip. Khouri has reworked the story for the 21st-century stage while deliberately avoiding modern conveniences. “No mobile phones,” she insists. “It’s a completely different telling of this same story.”
Uber-producer Sonia Friedman helped accelerate what had been a decade-long gestation. The creative team is strikingly assembled: Neko Case providing the score, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber handling choreography, and Trip Cullman directing. Khouri describes Case’s music as “tactile” and “like a clarion call” — a poet’s approach to songwriting that suits the material’s emotional weight.
Rachel Tucker and Amy Lennox star as Louise and Thelma respectively. Khouri remains coy about what’s new versus what’s inherited from the film. “I don’t want to reveal magic tricks,” she says. “One of the things I really enjoyed about the movie was that people walked in having no idea what to expect.”
The World Hasn’t Moved On
What unsettles Khouri most is how little has changed. The casual sexism, the threat of violence, the constant vigilance — these persist. “I wish so much that it wasn’t,” she says. “I wish the world had made that shift to be a more hospitable place for women, and especially for young women.”
She calls the rollback of abortion rights in the United States “barbaric.” The Epstein files remain partially unreleased. Bill Cosby walks free. “#MeToo happened, but the backlash is real,” she notes. “I never feel like anything’s going to make a tectonic shift. I know how slow change is.”
Yet she remains incensed by the broader picture — young men dying in “wars that are fought over money,” power accumulating in the hands of “psychopaths.” “To me, equality is the obvious goal for all of society, but there are a lot of people that don’t think that, and they don’t want to let go of it, and they’ll fight. And so will we.”
Gardening, Algorithms, and the Stage
Khouri’s personal life offers counterbalance. She took up gardening during the pandemic and appeared on Gardeners’ World. “That’s my crack,” she says with relish. At home in Nashville with husband T-Bone Burnett, she tends her garden and reflects on an industry that has grown harder, not easier.
“The film and television business has gotten really hard,” she observes. “Everybody feels like we’re working for an algorithm. It’s not about original ideas as much as it once was. It’s a lot about IP and sequels and tent-poles.” Thelma & Louise is, of course, powerful IP — but Khouri insists the musical elevates rather than exploits it. “Everybody — Neko, myself, Trip — we are all finding ways to elevate it to being worthy of being on a stage.”
She’s finding the process “so much fun.” At 68, with nothing left to prove, she approaches this new frontier with the same fearlessness that wrote a screenplay three and a half decades ago. “I was called to tell this story,” she says. “And I didn’t really have a great desire to tell it again. But once we started the musical, I could see a whole new way.”
Thelma & Louise runs at the Young Vic until 24 October.
Why it Matters
The adaptation of Thelma & Louise into a musical isn’t merely a commercial exercise in franchising a beloved film — it’s a test of whether feminist storytelling can survive the transition to a new medium without losing its edge. Khouri’s honesty about the persistence of the very issues the film addressed in 1991 — sexual violence, institutional indifference, the rollback of reproductive rights — makes this production more than entertainment. It asks audiences to consider why a story about two women refusing to be victimised still feels urgent, and what that says about the pace of genuine social progress. In an era when cultural institutions are increasingly risk-averse, the decision to mount this particular story on a London stage is itself a statement about what theatre should dare to confront.
