Viola Davis is having fun playing POTUS in G20

Viola Davis has won every major acting award, but how will she fare in an action film set at the G20?

From left: Douglas Hodge, MeeWha Alana Lee and Viola Davis in G20. Picture: Ilze Kitshoff/Prime Video.

While growing up in “abject poverty and dysfunction” in Rhode Island, Viola Davis used acting as a source of fun. “For me and my sister it was playing two wealthy white women who went out for tea in Beverly Hills with our chihuahuas. It was an imagination playground. Then, somewhere in there, pain entered into it.

“Training, speech, technique, critics – there’s a sense of torture that you almost have to make peace with,” the 59-year-old actor says. It took her a long way, though. There were weighty, Tony-winning roles on Broadway in King Hedley II and Fences, a film-stealing appearance opposite Meryl Streep in Doubt and an Oscar-winning reprise of her stage turn in the film of Fences. A scene in the latter when Davis’s stoic Rose rails against her unfaithful husband, Troy, played by Denzel Washington (“I took all my wants and needs and dreams and buried them inside you”), is one of the most pulverising pieces of acting you will see.

Viola Davis with Denzel Washington in Fences.

Davis’s career has brought her fame, respect and a heap of awards. She was the first black winner of the Emmy for leading actress in a drama, for the legal series How to Get Away with Murder, and is one of only three people, along with Helen Hayes and Rita Moreno, to have achieved an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) and the triple crown of acting (acting awards at the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys). “But internally you’re always trying to get back to the fun,” she says. So when she was asked to play an ass-kicking American president in a preposterous hoot of an action movie called G20, her response was “Hell yeah!” she says. “I needed some levity in my life.”

The movie is set at a G20 summit in Cape Town where world leaders including Davis’s Danielle Sutton are taken hostage by terrorists who want to use deepfake videos of the leaders saying controversial things to tank global currencies so they can make a fortune from crypto. Nobody said it was realistic. Although the script is often hilariously corny – there are references to Sutton “solving world hunger” – it’s undoubtedly fun. You don’t get many female action stars who are pushing 60, but Davis is a powerhouse.

“I don’t think every movie you do has to be considered for an Academy award,” she says. “I wanted to do something that families could

watch together, something popular.” Really? This is a film in which the head of the IMF throttles a terrorist in a lift and the South Korean president has his ear chopped off. It’s not exactly Paddington. There is a joie de vivre, though, in the way Sutton, a former soldier, vanquishes terrorists with fists, boots, bullets and jujitsu throws. The film is fizzily feminist, with most of the badass roles taken by women, including a plucky Korean first lady, while the male British prime minister radiates a familiar buffoonishness.

Davis is talking in the master bathroom of her house at Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, having her hair and make-up done before an event to publicise G20. She shares the house with her husband, actor Julius Tennon, and their adopted daughter, Genesis, and is also stepmother to Tennon’s two daughters from previous relationships.

She loved the fight scenes in G20, she says, “even though I sometimes complained about them ’cos I am a woman of a certain age”. The role reminded her of Get Christie Love!, a TV show she watched as a child in the 1970s, in which Teresa Graves played “a black detective who would beat the shit out of people. Whenever she arrested someone she would be like, ‘You’re under arrest, baby’ and she always had the beautiful outfits and the afro.

“The only two people you owe anything to are your six-year-old self and your 80-year-old self,” says Davis, who likes a self-help aphorism. When she had to trade blows with the hulking David James, who plays a terrorist, “six-year-old Viola squealed”. There was no special training regimen – she just carried on with the weightlifting she had done for The Woman King, the 2022 film in which she played a 19th-century African general.

“I’m not one of those women who is afraid to look muscular, and I don’t believe in losing a whole lot of weight so I can be magazine-ready – there’s still a part of me that wants to represent real life,” she says. “I wanted to look capable, a leader who’s willing to jump through the plate glass first.” Mission accomplished – give the woman a franchise.

Sutton’s political party is not identified, to avoid alienating Democrats or Republicans. “If you get down to the nitty gritty we just wanna reach people,” Davis says. She sidesteps a question about whether a terrorist saying that, for Sutton, “farmers in Africa are more important than Americans” is an echo of Donald Trump’s “America first” policy. Seeing a woman of colour in the Oval Office will give some viewers a pang of regret. “Probably in hindsight, but we created this movie before (Kamala Harris took on Trump in the 2024 election). I do not think it’s a suspension of disbelief to imagine someone who looks like me as the president.”

It’s more liberating to play fictional characters, says Davis, whose pouting portrayal of ­Michelle Obama in The First Lady miniseries received a rarity for her – poor reviews. “What’s challenging with real-life characters is the preciseness of it – and the scrutiny: ‘She didn’t hold her mouth that way, her eyes didn’t look like that.’ When you use your imagination you get Air Force One (the action movie in which Harrison Ford played a swashbuckling president) when they strapped on parachutes and jumped out of the plane as it was blowing up. Sparking the imagination is the cosmic carrot to waking you up inside.”

That’s not why mooted biopics in which she had planned to play Harriet Tubman, the slave turned abolitionist, and Barbara Jordan, the American politician, are no longer happening – the scripts just didn’t work, she says.

“It’s not that I’m not attracted to real-life stories, it’s just that they require a different level of commitment and ­expectation than if you’re playing Thor or Iron Man.”

(Left to right) Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in The Help.

Next up she is playing a seer called Mama Agba opposite Idris Elba and Cynthia Erivo in Children of Blood and Bone, a film of the fantasy novel by American author Tomi Adeyemi.

Davis was born in South Carolina, the second youngest of six children. Her father trained horses and her mother was a maid, factory worker and civil rights campaigner who was once briefly jailed for protesting, bringing Davis, then two, into the cell with her.

Soon after she was born her parents moved with her and two of her elder siblings to Rhode Island, leaving her other siblings with grandparents. Davis has described the family home as a “war zone”. They were dirt poor – rats ate the faces of her dolls and jumped on to her bed – and her father was an alcoholic who was violent towards her mother. Yet “Little Viola absolutely believed in herself in the midst of poverty”, she says. “Even though I look back and go, ‘Oh she was so damaged.’ ”

After small roles in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven and Solaris, Davis made her breakthrough with a nuanced turn in Doubt in 2008. Playing the mother of a boy who might have been abused by a Catholic priest, she caught the attention of critics despite having only 10 minutes on screen and received the first of four Oscar nominations.

Three years later she played a white family’s maid in the 1960s in The Help, seeing it as a way of honouring her mother’s profession and commitment to civil rights. She was nominated for another Oscar, but her views on the film have changed across the years. “There’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself and my people,” she said in 2020, adding that, although the film purported to be concerned with “the idea of what it means to be black”, it ultimately catered “to the white audience”.

Those comments were a response to critics of the film, she says, although she thinks that many of them “don’t understand the choices I had as a dark-skinned black actor with a wide nose and big lips. I don’t fit the mould of what many people feel a star would look like. It’s not like I have complete agency over how films are seen, but I get the brunt of it. I’ve done the best I could with what I’ve been given.”

Given the limited choice of roles she had earlier in her career, being cast as the lead in Widows (2018) felt sweet, she says. Her rounded character in Steve McQueen’s crime drama was married to Liam Neeson’s bank robber and actually got to have a love life.

“It’s about wanting to be seen fully as a woman. I’m sexual. I have a husband. I had boyfriends. It was Steve McQueen seeing that part of me.”

Widows was part of a run of films that established Davis as a leading woman. Fences (2016) is “the greatest memory of my acting life”, she says, recalling how Washington, who also directed the film, handled a scene in which her character’s son says he won’t go to his father’s funeral.

Viola Davis played criminal law professor Annalise Keating in "How to Get Away with Murder," and won an Emmy. Picture: ABC/Nicole Rivelli.

“Denzel said, ‘I want you to walk down those stairs and slap him.’ I said, ‘OK but then what?’ He said, ‘I dunno – let’s see what happens.’ It opened up a whole complicated world of grief and pain,” she says, not least chiming with her conflicted feelings about her own father; she made peace with him before he died in 2006.

In 2020 she played the title role, a headstrong blues singer, in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which like Fences was an adaptation of a play by August Wilson, who has been dubbed “theatre’s poet of black America”. It was the last film that Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther) made before dying of cancer in the same year.

None of the cast knew he was ill, says Davis, who remembers Boseman’s girlfriend and his make-up artist rubbing his back and playing meditative music. “There was a part of me that was a little judgmental – why do you need all that? Little did I know that they were doing it because he was dying.”

Those roles helped to convince Davis that she belonged at the top table. Despite surviving her brutal childhood, “there is something deep within you that doesn’t believe that you’re worth it”, she says, but becoming an EGOT felt “like pulling a rabbit out of a hat – that was a squeal moment”. Nobody could deny that she has achieved her aim of “leaving the world knowing that I took up some space”.

THE TIMES

G20 is on Prime Video from April 10