Emmy award-winner Viola Davis on racial politics and gender equality

When Viola Davis became the first African-American woman to win a best actress Emmy, she had a lot to say.

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER - ABC's "How to Get Away with Murder" stars Viola Davis as Professor Annalise Keating. (ABC/Bob D'Amico)

Her voice may have been wrought with emotion, but there was no sentimental guff when Viola Davis accepted the first Emmy for best actress in a drama to be awarded to an African-American. She went straight into a quote from Harriet Tubman, the 19th-century slave who became an antislavery activist: “In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me, over that line. But I can’t seem to get there, no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.”

In little more than 60 seconds, Davis managed elegantly to precis the racism and sexism in Hollywood while nodding to those among the showbiz fraternity — nay, sorority — who are changing this. It included Shonda Rhimes, the producer and writer who is creating some of the most compelling roles for black women on television in Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, the show for which Davis won her gong.

Sitting in front of the 50-year-old actress in a gilt-edged hotel room in Paris, I wonder if she minds spending every interview talking about racial politics. “Not especially, but I have to, it’s important. I had an idea of what I’d say if I won the Emmy, but I didn’t really prepare. I spend a lot of time doing public speaking, so things like that are already in my lexicon. What I wanted to impress was the difference between talent and opportunity. The reason no black woman had ever won the Emmy is not because we’re not as good, it’s the lack of lead roles written for us.”

Back in September last year, a New York Times TV critic ruminated on Davis’s beauty. She, apparently, fails to meet the “narrow beauty standards some African-American women are held to … being older, darker-skinned and less classically beautiful than Ms [Kerry] Washington, or for that matter Halle Berry”.

Davis says she would once have found this hurtful. “Saying someone is classically not beautiful is a fancy way of saying ugly, and of denouncing you.”

She talks often about wanting her role as law professor Annalise Keating in Murder to be realistic, and says: “We need our heroines to be flawed.” She pushed to be seen without make-up and pulling off her wig to show her short, natural afro beneath. “It’s so important. Life is messy, people are messy.”

We discuss Keating’s conflicted and complex antihero peers in shows such as Scandal and ­Orange is the New Black. Some of them are far from sexy, too. Certainly, Davis’s gait in the show, in her sensible mid-heels, is no feline slink, unlike, say, Robin Wright Penn’s simmering, sinuous, sexy first lady in House of Cards, Claire Underwood. Davis says, with weary emphasis: “We are raised in a cultural imprint of all kinds of more or less respectable pornography, but pornography nonetheless.

“I never wanted to be sexy, I wanted to act — I wanted to be an actor portraying another human being. If we focus on the vanity, how can the humanity and the human translate? Robert De Niro didn’t play Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver with a simmering undercurrent of sexiness. He’s playing a psychopath!”

Davis’s acting history includes a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, and awards and accolades garnered on Broadway. She has been nominated for two Oscars: the first for Doubt; the second for The Help, about black maids in the American south in the 1960s. Some critics think she is the best actress in Hollywood.

Her present role as an adulteress, academic and possible murderer has been compared to another Rhimes creation, Olivia Pope in Scandal, Washington’s hard-bitten political fixer. Davis is quick to give credit to other black actresses. There’s a corollary, though. “Even in black movies, the role of female love interest is specific. I feel for young black girls who never recognise anything of themselves. The [brown] paper-bag test, that was the thing, and still is the thing,” she says, describing an old measurement of black beauty. “If you are darker than a paper bag, then you are not sexy.”

Is this as much about sexism as racism? The film Suffragette, which will be released in Australia next month, prompts the question where the race and sexual equality movements intersect. “In America, white women got the vote in 1920; black women in 1965. I can feel compassion for another woman’s situation; we should all have an ability to feel for somebody else. But there is a difference.”

Davis is not angry; she is clear, determined and categorical. There is little in the way of a smile, save when she mentions her five-year-old adopted daughter. She cares for her with her husband, actor and producer Julius Tennon, who works for the couple’s production company, JuVee. She also has a nanny, but says she tries as much as possible not to use her. “I have a flexible job, so I can take her to school every morning, and my husband is at home working, so it fits beautifully. Or she comes on set with me — I have a lot of toys in my trailer.”

We move on to more frivolous things, such as what she is wearing. She wrestles to find labels: MaxMara, Vera Wang. “Please don’t ask me about fashion, I am useless.” She does her own nails, if at all. “I don’t wear lipstick, as a rule. I’d rather be kissing my daughter.”

How did she finish her triumphant night at the Emmys? “At the HBO party, where I ate a lot of food and drank a lot of champagne.” Did she have a hangover, especially given the mere three hours of sleep before an early morning set call? “No, I was fine.” Sensible or just a strong constitution? “Oh, I’d say the latter. It’s in my DNA to be strong.”

How to Get Away with Murder, season two, screens Mondays, at 11.40pm, on Seven.

The Sunday Times