Viola Davis is riding high with the critical and ratings success of How To Get Away with Murder. She just won the SAG Award and HTGAWM is a ratings bonanza. But Viola still keeps it real. When she won the SAG, her speech was the best, because she referenced that “not so classically beautiful” NYT article, plus she spoke out for diversity everywhere. Viola was on The Ellen Show yesterday, talking about how scared she was to win the SAG because apparently her feet were lubed up with Crisco. She had a bunion! What other actress would not only confess to having a bunion, but confess to putting Crisco on said bunion?! Viola also gave a lengthy interview to Essence recently – go here to read. Some highlights:
How she’s able to play such a messy character on HTGAWM: “I did all my work beforehand and I think that served me well. My craft served me well. Then I just step into it. I always have a quiet time right beforehand. Some scenes are only about passing a bottle. They’re not all sexy or dark. I just feel very dedicated to her mess. I’m holding onto the mess and the reason I’m holding onto the mess is because I just feel in TV, that the characters that sometimes people connect to, are characters that even if they are complicated, we want to overly simplify them because we want to like them. We want to be like them. We want them to be the fantasy. And I think in essence, people are complicated and I don’t think you know who they are until they’re faced with a situation.”
Deciding to make the character “real”: “Like I told them, ‘I want to take my wig off.’ Because I’m not going to lie in the bed with full makeup and hair as a sexy character because what it’s going to force me to do as an actor, if I have to do that, is it’s going to force me to do really bad acting. I’m going to go – it’s like watching a Barbie episode – how can I pretend to be Barbie? Because that’s the only way to play sexy. That’s just not it. That’s not human. Human is, “I have to take this hair off at night.” African-American women, we wear a lot of wigs. We take our makeup off. We don’t walk great in shoes. We’re not necessarily likeable or always a size two. Some of us have deep voices and then you’re just going to have to deal with it. And you don’t always know who people are. You can’t get ahead of them.
Being able to play a sexual character: “It feels awesome. It really does. I love it. I went to Julliard in New York and I always tried to be the 90-pound White girl. Only because we did a lot of classical training and all of the ingénues in Shakespeare were very small women. So I tried to make myself small. Literally. I don’t know how I did that. I was like thinking, “Small. Light.” I would try to have a higher voice, which sounds ridiculous right? But I felt like there’s only one way to be sexy. It’s almost like I felt like I had to disappear. But it feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy or be my sexualized. To be my woman, you know? And it’s been the joy of my life. It really has and I think it found me at the right time of my life. When I really am very unapologetic for who I am. That helps other women, too. I think women want to see themselves on TV. I really do. I think we’re in the 21st century, I think we have to woman up. I think a lot of women have womaned up and we want to see ourselves and it feels great.”
Her SAG speech: “Part of it was off of the cuff but part of it I have to say I thought about it. I did think about some of it because I just wanted to show that with actors, everything starts with the material. You can’t shine if you have two lines in the background as a bus driver. You can only shine if you’re included in the narrative and narratives start when you put pen to paper and you use your imagination. You just tell a story. That’s all you do. You tell a story. You don’t put any boundaries on it. It’s infinite and that’s the only way we can do what we do is that people use their imaginations so that we can be included in it.”
I always say this about Viola, and I’ll say it again: SHE IS REAL. She seems like a real woman, living in the real world, with real disappointments and tragedies and hopes and dreams. She doesn’t put on airs, she doesn’t lie and tell people what they want to hear. Everything about her is so refreshing. And cool. And “I always tried to be the 90-pound White girl” – God, I feel her on that. How much time did I waste trying to be that?
Photos courtesy of WENN.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pLHLnpmirJOdxm%2BvzqZmbWhpbH9ye9WipqWZj5mut7XSmKOemaKjsqWr06iWqK%2BelLWmvr6bpp2xj56sorjWmrCsl6Sntqawvq2mmJqVlMGpsb5yZ2aon6q7pavWoaCtnY%2BctrO4jg%3D%3D