Viola Davis
ON FINDING HER VOICE AND # BLACKLIVESMATTER
Poised to star as both Michelle Obama and blues legend Ma Rainey, Viola Davis says the key to a character is discovering what they’re fighting for and what holds them back. She talks about her extraordinary journey out of poverty and into the deeply troubling Hollywood system.
during the fraught, emotional days after the killing of George Floyd, Viola Davis wanted, more than anything, to be out on the streets of Los Angeles, shouting, protesting, holding a sign. She wanted to join the thousands of others who flooded cities across the nation and around the world to call for justice for Floyd and all the other Black men and women unjustly killed by the police.
“She called me and said she was going,” Viola’s close friend and neighbour, the actor Octavia Spencer, tells me by email. “I immediately talked her out of that.” Octavia and Viola were both concerned about putting themselves or their loved ones with health conditions at risk – and were acutely aware that due to systemic healthcare inequality, Covid-19 has a much higher mortality rate for Black Americans. “Both of us cried,” Octavia continues. “This was our civil rights movement, and we were sidelined because of health issues. We felt isolated from the movement.”
Then they had an idea: what about a neighbourhood demonstration with friends and family members who needed to be mindful of their health? They banded together with Viola’s husband of 17 years, the actor and producer Julius Tennon; fellow actor Yvette Nicole Brown; and a handful of others – and camped out on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Studio City. They wore masks, which also rendered them unrecognisable, but even so, someone across the street brought them a
pizza in a show of solidarity. Viola’s sign read, simply, ‘AHMAUD ARBERY’.
“We said we’d just be out there for a few minutes, and it ended up being hours, hours,” Viola tells me a few weeks later from her home in Los Angeles. “Almost like a big dam bursting open.” She pauses. “We got a lot of beeps,” she says. “We got a few fingers.” She means middle fingers, of course. “But this was the first time the fingers didn’t bother me.”
I ask Viola if she’d protested like that before, and with a kind of resignation and pride, she says, “I feel like my entire life has been a protest. My production company is my protest. Me not wearing a wig at the Oscars in 2012 was my protest. It is a part of my voice, just like introducing myself to you and saying, ‘Hello, my name’s Viola Davis.’”
Let me tell you about that voice.
I know you’ve heard it. But to be enveloped by it, to have it directed at you, while she’s swaddled in plush black towelling, at ease in her kitchen, is spinetingling. Viola’s voice, so much like the stringed instrument she shares a name with, is deeper than you might expect – resonant, warm, filled with purpose. Her presence radiates even through cyberspace. At times, Viola’s delivering a reckoning, or a buried history, or a call to arms. Occasionally, she says my name to emphasise a point, and it stops me in my tracks. Has anyone ever said my name before? Has anyone ever taken such care over it? I’ve no idea what to do with my hands, my face, but I keep assenting, nodding, just trying not to fall behind.
Our interview takes place on Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating Black emancipation that’s never before had so much mainstream recognition. For a woman who entwines her voice and mission inextricably into her career, it’s fitting. Viola, who turned 55 in
August, languished in the margins for years before vaulting into the public consciousness in the last decade.
In 2015, she became the first Black woman ever to win an Emmy for lead actress in a drama for How to Get Away With Murder, which finished its twisty, unsettling six-season run this spring. In 2017, she won an Oscar for her supporting role as Rose Maxson in Fences – a part for which she also collected a Tony. She’ll portray Michelle Obama in Showtime’s upcoming series First Ladies, which is being produced by Juvee Productions, the company run by Viola and her husband. Viola lends extraordinary gravity to the roles she plays, a presence both weighty and magnetic. Her performance in The Help as maid Aibileen Clark helps elevate it from apologetic pablum to a sincere examination of the psychological warfare of deep-seated racism: the emotional stakes of the whole movie happen on her face.
Viola credits the power of her work to the despair of her impoverished childhood in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The fifth of six children, with an alcoholic and sometimes violent father, the young Viola was often in trouble at school, hungry, and unwashed. Her family couldn’t always afford laundry and soap, let alone breakfast and dinner. She wet the bed until she was 14 and sometimes went to school stinking of urine. “When I was younger,” says Viola, “I didn’t exert my voice because I didn’t feel worthy of having a voice.”
It was the support and affection of people who knew she was worthy that lifted her out of what she calls “the hole”: her sisters Deloris, Diane, and Anita, and her mother, Mae Alice. “[They] looked at me and said I was pretty,” she says. “Who’s telling a dark-skinned girl that she’s pretty? Nobody says it. I’m telling you, Sonia, nobody says it. The dark-skinned Black woman’s voice is so steeped in slavery and our history. If we did speak up, it would cost us our lives. Somewhere in my cellular memory was still that feeling – that I don’t have the right to speak up about how people treat me, that somehow I deserve it.” She pauses. “I didn’t find my worth on my own.”
In school, Viola learned the accepted version of American history, which only raised more questions. “I learned so many things that didn’t include me,” she says. “Where was I? What were people like me doing?” One summer, when Viola was a teenager, a counsellor at Upward Bound heard her and her sister repeating what they’d learned: that the slaves were illiterate. He hauled them to the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society in Providence and showed them microfiche of the Black abolitionists to inspire them. “We sat there for hours, and we cried,” says Viola “We cried the entire time.”
Now let me tell you about Viola’s mind.
Viola doesn’t do small talk. We were only minutes into the interview when she told me that her fundamental need, the root of her being, is to be worthy and valued. It’s somewhat disconcerting to converse with someone with so much self-knowledge – and not just self-knowledge but knowledge. Right now, Viola’s reading a book that’s opening her mind to her history, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy Degruy. Discussing the book, she runs me through an abbreviated history of the oppression of Black Americans, citing the Casual Killing Act and the Protestant ethic on her way to mass incarceration and Black maternal mortality. Having discovered her worth, she clutches it with both hands, refusing to let go.
After graduating from Rhode Island College in 1988, Viola went
to Juilliard. Her experience was unlike the other students’. She celebrated her graduation with what her skimpy funds allowed her: instant ramen and pickled pigs feet. Juilliard’s since evolved, she believes, but when she was there, “It was a very Eurocentric training. It was the type of school that didn’t acknowledge my presence in the world.”
When she graduated from Juilliard in 1993, Viola was deep into James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Nikki Giovanni and Malcolm X. “I was reading everyone at that point,” she says. “Because I was angry.” It was then she began to dive into the plays of August Wilson, a voice not acknowledged at school. Viola won a Tony for King Hedley II and received early acclaim for Seven Guitars on Broadway. Her turn as Rose Maxson in Fences is considered definitive. This year, she’ll star as legendary blues singer Ma Rainey in the adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on Netflix. She’ll also executive produce a documentary for the streamer called Giving Voice, about high school students competing in a monologue contest based on his plays. Set during a recording session in 1927, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom inspires a performance from Viola that’s closer to her morally ambiguous lead in How to Get Away With Murder, Annalise Keating, than to the longsuffering Rose Maxson. As Rainey, she’s earthy, sweaty, and demanding, her talent nearly outmatched by her ego. Heavyset, gold-toothed, and bisexual, Rainey required a transformation: “She was 140kg. In Hollywood, everybody wants to be pretty, so they’ll say, Ooh, I don’t want to be 140kg, can we just ignore that? In my opinion – no. If they say she’s 140kg, you have to be 140kg, or else you’re not honouring her.” Viola gained weight and wore padding to approximate Rainey’s girth.
“When I was younger, I didn’t exert my voice because I didn’t feel worthy of having one”
– Viola Davis
The hardest part, she says, isn’t even the superficial circumstances of a character. It’s discovering what they strive for and what holds them back. She quotes a famous passage from Merton’s novel My Argument With the Gestapo: “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how
I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
For Viola, this is both life advice and acting credo. “It’s always something basic,” she says, at the heart of every individual, every character. But it’s the hardest element to isolate. “Sometimes I skip it,” she says dryly. “I say, ‘Maybe I’ll get the revelation later.’” For Rainey, she says, it’s about being respected. At one point, in a fit of pique, Rainey asks for three Coca-colas and won’t perform, or cooperate, until she gets them. Noisily she glugs them down while the white agent, white producer, and her Black band wait. It’s infuriating – but also badass.
During our conversation,
Viola lifts her screen and carries me from her dazzling white kitchen to a more secluded office, which is one big trophy case, with Viola’s many awards crowded along one wall. Viola doesn’t like the room – “As soon as I go in there, my anxiety goes up” – so she’s facing away from the statuettes, focusing instead on a photo of her and Meryl Streep on the set of 2008’s Doubt. Though Viola had made a name for herself on Broadway, Doubt was her mainstream breakthrough – a seven-minute performance that ended up snagging her an Oscar nomination. Meryl championed her scene partner, crying out at one point, “Somebody give her a movie!”
“What do you call someone who shares your belief system?” Viola asks me. “She’s in my tribe, Meryl is.”
Meryl’s career galvanizes Viola’s. In an industry that prizes ingenues, both actors have made a mark playing meaty, complex, mature women, though Viola didn’t have the benefit of the first 20 years of Meryl’s career, with roles designed to showcase her gifts. With a production company of her own, Viola knows she can find work. What concerns her are the Black actresses who are younger and fighting not to be invisible – the earlier versions of who she was. “There’s not enough opportunities out there to bring that unknown, faceless Black actress to the ranks of the known. To pop her!” She names other performers – Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon – all “fabulous white actresses”, who’ve had “a wonderful role for each stage of their lives. We can’t say that for many actors of colour.”
Viola took her part as Aibileen in The Help because she was hoping to pop. “I was that journeyman actor, trying to get in.” The film became a nationwide sensation and nabbed her another Oscar nomination, but its reductive view of race relations troubled many critics. In 2018, Viola told the New York Times that she regretted taking the role. She still does, even though The Help recently became the most viewed film on Netflix. Viola is effusive in her praise of writer-director Tate Taylor, who’s white, and the majority-female cast. “I cannot tell you the love I have for these women, and the love they have for me,” she says. “But with any movie – are people ready to be told the truth?”
The Help was filmed partly in Greenwood, Mississippi, and Viola was acutely conscious of the area’s racist roots: Emmett Till was tortured and killed a few kilometres away, in Money. The film reaches toward the tragedy of Aibileen’s story, then rapidly undermines its own high stakes, turning racism into a social farce. “Not a lot of narratives are also invested in our humanity,” says Viola. “They’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black, but it’s catering to the white audience. The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the cinema, and they talk about what it meant. They’re not moved by who we were.”
Here, Viola references the power of August’s work, versus what she calls
“watered-down” material. She points to To Kill a Mockingbird, recently revived as a stage play by Aaron Sorkin on Broadway. It’s beloved for a good reason, she says. But, “Atticus Finch was the hero. Tom Robinson was slaughtered and killed at a prison for something he didn’t do!” She laughs, the humour of disorientation, frustration, disbelief.
“There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help. But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth],” Viola says. The Help, like so many other movies, was “created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism”.
And, astoundingly, while The Help raised her profile, it didn’t open the floodgates to more substantive acting roles. People sometimes ask Viola why she did network TV for six years when she had a movie career. But Viola has worked wonders with the opportunities she’s been afforded, to say the least. “Viola is one of the great actors of all time, not just her time,” says Denzel Washington, who produced Fences and Ma Rainey while also directing and starring in the former. “She’s been recognised later than some. But some people get the opportunity early, and they’re done by Tuesday.”
Viola draws strength from both
the Black women who made a path for her and the little girls, like her daughter, following in her footsteps. “We’ve survived a hellish history.
“Viola’s one of the great actors of all time. She’s been recognised later than some. But some people get the opportunity early, and they’re done by Tuesday”
– Denzel Washington
“People share their stories with me a lot and hug me in supermarkets,” she continues.
As with many of us, the pandemic has given Viola a taste of a slower life. “I don’t put any limits on myself,” she says. “But I feel the disillusionment of being busy. My work is not all of me.” She pauses, then adds with suppressed mirth: “I used to say when I was younger that acting isn’t what I want to do, it’s who I am. I look back at myself, like, what the hell were you talking about?”
I think I understand. Acting helped her find her voice. But she’s discovered that her worth transcends her talent.
“To the world, she’s a warrior,” says Octavia. “To those of us who love her, she’s simply our sister.”