Actress Viola Davis poses for a portrait during the Santa Barbara Film Festival in Santa Barbara, Calif. on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2009. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)
by Natalie Abrams | Entertainment Weekly
…from her childhood. In it she’s a kindergartner wearing a red, blue, and white jumper, with a ponytail sticking out from her head.
“That’s the little girl I remember,” recalls Davis, 49, who grew up in the tiny, predominantly white town of Central Falls, R.I. “She was hungry, she was poor, she was a bed wetter…she was all those things. But at the same time, she had a lot of guts. She’s always with me, always talking to me in good and bad ways.”
Even today, as the actress stands in a cliffside home on Kauai, Hawaii—a house that offers both a stunning view of the Pacific Ocean and a clear perspective on how far Davis has come—that same wisp of a girl still speaks to her. “There are times when I’m helping her along, telling her that we’re okay and we’re worthy,” explains Davis, who is on vacation with her husband, Julius, and their 4-year-old daughter, Genesis. “And there are times that she reminds me of how unbelievable my life is. Like when I go home, she reminds me, ‘I always wanted a spiral staircase!’ Or when I have a really good meal, she’ll go, ‘Wow, you get to eat three meals a day!’ Or she’ll say, ‘I always dreamed of being in a house by the ocean.’ She’s always guiding me, every single day.”
Just two weeks prior, Davis was busy filming not one but two endings for the finale of How to Get Away With Murder—a breakout thriller on ABC thanks to Davis’ fiery portrayal of Annalise Keating, a criminal-law professor who mentors a group of hyper-ambitious (and ultimately murderous) students. Only one version will air; the producers shot two to avoid spoilers. For Davis, the show’s first season already has the outcome she wanted. At a time when most middle-aged actresses of color are relegated to supporting roles like veteran cops and jaded government workers—assuming they’re even working at all—Davis is at the zenith of her nearly 30-year career. “I’m surprised at my life now, really,” admits the actress. “That’s different from feeling like I deserve it, and I feel like I do. But I’m still surprised by it…. All I wanted to be was really good at what I did.”
WHEN DAVIS ACCEPTED A SCREEN ACTORS GUILD award on Jan. 25, she fought back tears as she thanked ABC and Murder’s producers for casting her as Annalise and “thinking that a sexualized, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old dark-skinned African-American woman who looks like me.” The actress knows all too well how rare those opportunities are in Hollywood. For more than a decade, TV has been luring female film stars of a certain age with juicy roles that generate lots of awards love (see: Glenn Close, Kyra Sedgwick, and Robin Wright). But the medium has only recently begun to feature leading ladies with a different shade of skin, such as Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, and Octavia Spencer. Though they all earned critical acclaim—and some even Oscar attention—on the big screen, Davis and her peers generally only had a chance at headlining pictures aimed at black audiences.
“Film is much different. I think the foreign market has changed it,” explains Davis. “12 Years a Slave was sold overseas because Brad Pitt agreed to do eight days of work on it, even though it still had fantastic talent like [director] Steve McQueen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Lupita Nyong’o. People talk about the Oscar curse. There is no curse. The actor who is holding it has got to understand that you can’t just use that award and say, ‘I’m going to be Julia Roberts.’ That award is not about bankability. So by the time How to Get Away With Murder came along, I had my aha moment. I knew it would have a great time slot, and it was a lead in a TV show.”
Davis immersed herself in the life of a complicated working attorney who teaches criminal law at Middleton University, even coming up with character idiosyncrasies that never showed up on the page. Think Annalise looks awkward in high heels? That’s because Davis doesn’t believe her alter ego ever learned to walk in them. Wonder why Annalise shows off her guns in court so much? Davis has decided that Annalise would want to intimidate her opponents with her muscular biceps. “She sometimes will come up with ideas and shoot me an email in the middle of the night saying, ‘Maybe this could happen,’” relays creator Peter Nowalk. “They’re always really good ideas, which is rare…. I hear them from my mother, from whoever on the street: ‘This is what should happen!’ But Viola is so in tune with Annalise.” Davis’ extraordinary life helps to explain the dogged determination she displays at work. She was raised by her father, Dan, who groomed racehorses at Rhode Island’s Narragansett Park, and her mom, Mary Alice, who worked in a candy factory. Davis and her five siblings were so poor that she routinely uses the word abject to describe their meager existence. “People would look at me and go, ‘Oh, I know she’s poor,’” she told ABC News last year. “I would think, ‘Just give me some food
and I could take care of the rest.’”
Those tough circumstances only emboldened the young Davis to find a way out. A fan of TV—she remembers thinking how Esther Rolle of Good Times and Isabel Sanford of The Jeffersons were “real” actors because they straddled both the stage and the small screen—Davis became a theater geek at Central Falls High School. But she also joined other activities in case her acting dreams didn’t pan out. “I was in the glee club. I did model legislature. I ran cross-country. I think I even won a Daughters of the American Revolution award,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to be my mom, who was pregnant and married by 15. I wanted a great life, so I felt I had to do a lot of things. I had to be everything my mom was not.”
Fortunately for Davis, there were plenty of people who saw her potential. A teacher helped her earn a spot in the Arts Recognition and Talent Search competition. Davis was able to earn a bachelor’s degree from Rhode Island College thanks in part to the federal program Upward Bound. Four years at Juilliard came later (she paid for it by working at a Providence arts center and acting for the Trinity Repertory Company), which led to Tony wins for roles in plays including King Hedley II. But a few prized runs on stage didn’t exactly lead to fame and fortune. Like many of her African-American peers whose names don’t begin with Will or Denzel, Davis spent her 30s and early 40s doing one-off roles on TV shows like The Practice or in forgotten movies like The Architect. Some of her characters didn’t even have names—she was just
“mother in hospital.” After two Oscar nominations—the first for 11 minutes of work on Doubt in 2008, the second for playing Aibileen Clark in the 2011 film The Help—Davis still didn’t feel like she’d arrived.
“There’s the reality of being an actor, especially after two Academy Award nominations, and there’s the fantasy. People oversimplify it by saying, ‘Start a production company! Get your own stuff going!’ As if it’s that easy. I’ve had a production company for years; we have great projects coming up. But it’s been a battle. While you’re trying to get your projects done, you have to stay relevant. So as an actor, I said, Okay, [Peter] is going to write for me. I’m going to play a role that’s sexualized, messy, all those things I never get to play,” says Davis, who shot the first sex scenes of her career for Murder. “And at the same time I can be relevant.”
Buoyed by a Scandal lead-in, Murder became an instant hit for ABC, drawing 10.4 million viewers weekly. Fans flooded social media to compare theories—and to defend Davis after The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley infamously wrote that the actress was “less classically beautiful” than lighter-skinned African-American actors and was someone who “doesn’t look at all like the typical star of a network drama.” A month later, Davis defied conventions and stoked conversation again by removing her wig and makeup on screen before turning to her husband and asking, “Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone?”
“That was her idea,” insists Nowalk of Davis’ strip scene. “At the same time, that’s how pure of an actor she is, that she thinks that’s not a big deal.” Of course, Davis was only performing a task that millions of women do every night. But the idea that a middle-aged actress would dare to appear on TV without makeup was more shocking than any of Murder’s twists. “It was a stunning moment,” recalls executive producer Shonda Rhimes. “Watching any woman strip themselves bare in that way is very powerful for me. Viola always gets to your soul.”
Becoming TV’s latest “It” star definitely has its perks: The job pays north of $100,000 an episode and allows Davis time to pick up her daughter from preschool. But there are drawbacks, too. ABC would like the actress to tweet more—a practice that makes her so uncomfortable that she has to rely on a paid consultant. Still, she’s managed to amass more than 130,000 followers…even if the most she can muster are aw-shucks comments like “Thrilled to be presenting at the #Oscars on 2/22! Thanks @TheAcademy for having me.”
More important, Davis’ work on Murder has finally helped her achieve what she once thought was unattainable: bankability outside the U.S. “Murder is shown in 157 different [territories],” marvels Davis. She now has two big-screen projects in the works: She’s set to begin production on a movie called Custody from director James Lapine (Into the Woods), and she’ll appear opposite Will Smith and Jared Leto in the adaptation of the DC Comics title Suicide Squad next year. As for that production company she runs with her husband? They just sold a biopic to Fox Searchlight about Barbara Jordan—the first black woman elected to the Texas state senate—that was written by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, an old friend from Juilliard.
There are skeptics who think an Oscar-nominated actress like Davis won’t want to hang around on TV for long, forcing Murder to kill off its antihero sooner rather than later. Heresy! In fact, Davis has signed a standard seven-year contract and is definitely returning for season 2. “We’ve never talked about having to do an episode that she wouldn’t be in,” Nowalk says. “She’s the heart and soul of the show. I can’t picture it without her.” Neither can Davis, who revels in the fact that just five years ago she couldn’t have imagined headlining a buzzy show on TV, learning the ways of social media, or even sitting on a private deck in Kauai. “You have to navigate your way through failure and disappointment,” muses Davis, “and find some semblance of joy.”