Viola Davis
Will it be third time lucky for Viola Davis at this month’s Oscars? She’s backing herself all the way.
It’s the run-up to Christmas and everybody in Los Angeles is bemoaning the chilly weather. As we settle down in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Viola Davis draws a warm jacket around her shoulders. Not that she’s complaining: throughout our conversation she is determinedly upbeat, celebratory, optimistic. She radiates satisfaction that, at 51, all the hard work is really beginning to pay off.
Five years ago, when Davis was playing the role of the maid Aibileen in The Help, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, she told me that as a “dark-skinned actress in Hollywood” she had done “what it was at my hand to do”, even if that didn’t allow as much scope for her talents as she would have liked. “I’ve had to sink my teeth into a role that was a fried-chicken dinner and make it into filet mignon,” she said.
Now she’s got film roles coming out of her ears, the lead in TV drama How to Get Away with Murder and her own production company, and she stars opposite Denzel Washington in the film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play Fences. (After our meeting, she begins 2017 by winning a Golden Globe for that performance, saying in her acceptance speech that the film “Doesn’t scream moneymaker, but it does scream art and it does scream heart”. She has also scored another Oscar nomination — her third, after receiving nods for Doubt in 2009 and The Help.)
Surely the role of Rose Maxson in Fences is filet mignon? She bursts out laughing. “This is absolutely a filet mignon — a medium-well done filet mignon.” And Davis clearly relishes every bite: her performance as a wife and mother in 1950s Pittsburgh, struggling at every turn to hold her family together, to absorb the rage and disappointment of her husband Troy and to protect her son’s innocence and ambition, is electrifying — so involving that it invokes an almost physical response.
“That was the role of womanhood in the ’50s,” says Davis. “You were an instrument for everyone else’s joy except for your own. The ’50s in America had the highest rate of alcoholism and depression. There were whole manuals about how to make your husband happy — put on make-up when he walks through the door after a long day of work, don’t weigh him down with any of your problems, ask him about his problems, greet him with a smile, make sure the children are fed and they’re clean, his favourite meal is on the table — and nowhere in that manual is there anything about her joy and the centre of her happiness.”
She’s been here before, and with Washington; they are reprising the roles they played in the 2010 Broadway revival of the play, for which they both won Tony awards. Part of Wilson’s 10-play Century Cycle, in which the playwright chronicled the experiences of African-Americans decade by decade, Fences’ transition to the big screen has taken so long because its author, who died in 2005, insisted its director be black — a simple demand, but revealingly hard to accomplish in Hollywood until Washington filled the void.
Davis has two show-stopping speeches in the film, in which she first rails at life and at last attempts to make her peace with it. What was different about playing Rose this time? She replies that she “had been sitting with this narrative for so long and never quite got the ending until I did the movie. And I keep saying to myself that the reason I didn’t get the end is because she is at a place that probably most of us as human beings never get to, and that is a place of forgiveness and grace. I think that most of us spend a lifetime holding on to the past, even when we feel like we’re letting go a bit.”
She holds close to the advice of psychiatrist Irvin D Yalom that one must “give up all hope of a better past”. Davis grew up in extreme poverty; she has spoken about the makeshift dwellings that she, her parents and five siblings occupied in Rhode Island, about hunger and lack of sanitation, about her father’s violent abuse of her mother. The “letting go” seems to take two distinct but related forms: allowing herself to feel good about what she has achieved, and building platforms that will help broaden the possibilities for a new generation of black actors, writers and directors.
She cites her delight at seeing Shonda Rhimes, the writer and producer behind Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, accepting a Norman Lear Achievement Award In Television last year. “She said: ‘I happily accept this award because I deserve it.’ I LOVE IT. Absolutely love it. It’s the waking up and understanding that OK, you may not be the best person out there, but you’ve put in enough work to understand that you deserve what you’ve got. The happily ever after comes after you’ve done the work. And to literally understand, especially as a woman, that a closed mouth doesn’t get fed. You’ve got to ask for what you want and expect to get it.”
I remark that it’s noticeable how often women play down their successes; how they will even deflect minor compliments. Why does she think that happens? “I think tapping into one’s power and one’s potential is a very frightening thing,” she says. “And for women it’s a very new thing. I used to feel that self-deprecation was an answer to humility — that people would see me as a humble person the more I put myself down. And people do say that: ‘Oh! I ran into so-and-so and they kept saying, “Oh, my work in this really sucked,” and they were great!’ And I often think to myself, what if someone says, ‘You know what, I’m confident, I’m happy about the work I did. I really felt like I gave it my best and it came out great,’ the same way men do. Why is that not seen as humble?”
Her increasing ability to feel comfortable with her achievements is linked to an awareness of her emerging position as a figure of influence. “The more I’m pushed into a position of leadership and I know I have to be the mouthpiece for so many other people who can’t speak for themselves, the more confidence I’m gaining.” And that extends to the way she views her own past and the more she shares her story. She explains: “I can hear myself say, ‘Oh yeah, I took the bus five hours just to get to the theatre, then took it five hours back,’ and I’m listening to that, being an objective observer and thinking — ‘I did that?’ It’s like looking at an old picture of yourself when you felt you looked bad, and you go, ‘Wow, I was fabulous!’ That’s how I feel about my life now — that I’m looking back at it and I’m like, ‘I’m pretty fabulous. I really am.’”
Back in 2011, when we talked about Davis’s commitment — largely via JuVee, the production company she founded with her husband, Julius Tennon — to addressing the limited opportunities for black people in the entertainment industry, she expressed a hope we wouldn’t be having the same conversation in five years’ time. Naturally, because challenging entrenched privilege takes time, we are, but the ground has shifted. Davis is scheduled to play Harriet Tubman, who liberated slaves in the Civil War, and to star in Steve McQueen’s Widows, a revisiting of Lynda La Plante’s TV series co-scripted by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn. “It’s not even a role necessarily written for an African-American, but not according to [McQueen]. He’s like: ‘Why not?’”
Davis brings up The Help, and says although she loved making the film, she understands the criticisms levelled at it — that African-American women were again placed in the role of maids and “not portrayed as tapping into their anger as much as they could have. Tapping into all the things they could have been other than the maid”. Partly, she thinks, that relates to the image of the black maid as a nurturer, a second mother, so that “even within the movie, there are certain things that are not going to be explored if it messes up the memory of that perfect mother. She couldn’t be angry. She couldn’t be sexualised. She’s gotta stay in that image that brings us comfort and joy, knowing that we’re loved and nothing more.”
Davis loves the riposte to that one-dimensional figure provided by the character of Annalise Keating, the firecracker law professor, ambitious, potent and flawed, who she plays in How to Get Away with Murder. “It’s blowing the lid off everything people say we should be, especially as a dark-skinned woman — that you can’t be sexual, you can’t be unlikeable. You can be angry but with no vulnerability. You can’t be damaged. You can’t be smart. It blows the lid off all of it. And even if it’s not executed all the time in ways that people like, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s out there. She’s on screen. She’s making an impact.”
Another fundamental has changed in the past five years — in 2011, she and Tennon adopted a baby, Genesis, who is frolicking in a nearby hotel room. Davis combines motherhood — which she says has changed her utterly — with work via clever stratagems and good planning. She often takes Genesis to work with her, only makes one film a year and has a TV shooting schedule that allows her days off and free weekends. She claims to live by the mantra “I’m tired, and I’m doing the best I can” — but she doesn’t look remotely weary. And things might be about to get a lot busier. She was the first African-American to win an Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series for her role as Annalise Keating. Her role as Rose Maxson in Fences is seen as a strong contender for an Academy Award for best supporting actress on February 26. Has she allowed herself to think about it? She pauses, laughs, parries.
“You know what I know about that? Because I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not. But what I will say about it is this — and this is how I keep my perspective — I’ve gotta go back to work. The carpets are going to be rolled up, the people are going to stop calling. And you can’t bring that Oscar on a set. And that Oscar can’t do the work for you. You gotta do it. That’s what I’ll say.”
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