Viola Davis on stereotypes, achievement, and portraying a warrior

“I am not God.” What I am capable of doing, I will do. Virginia Davis Photo credit: Contour RA/Kirk McKoy

The actor, who was raised in poverty, has triumphed in Hollywood, taking home an Oscar, an Emmy, and two Tony trophies. The epic story of an elite female combat army in The Woman King, her passion project, has now been adapted for the big screen.

Davis is worn out. Let me just be honest, I’m weary,” she confesses at one point, with all the emotional emphasis of her Academy Award-winning eyes. But I also know because I’ve watched her most recent movie, and anybody would be exhausted after pulling that off. An all-female military force of the former Kingdom of Dahomy, which was located in what is now Benin, the Agojie is the subject of The Woman King, an action-packed historical epic set in the 1820s. As the Agojie general Nanisca, Davis delivers a performance of extraordinary physical and emotional strength. John Boyega from Star Wars plays King Ghezo, one of her co-stars, yet the ladies are out in gory fight while he spends much of the movie peacocking about the castle. The combat choreography is exciting, and Davis, who was 56 at the time, performed almost all of the feats alone.

In order to be ready, Davis and her other female cast members—including former 007 Lashana Lynch and Thuso Mbedu, who is quickly ascending to stardom in Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad—started an extraordinary time of rehearsing. Davis explains, “I mean, I’m a lady who works out, but not like five hours a day. She is dressed in a white pearlescent gown and presents herself today with a faultless complete face of makeup and a high ponytail. Only her personalized hotel slippers give away the fact that she is still recovering. Every day, Thuso and I would do choreography in which we had to engage 15 or more males. Even after they had traveled to the South African filming site, they continued to race, lift weights, and practice martial arts in the 30C heat. Davis continues, “Trust me, by the time I got to the last stunt, I definitely celebrated with a glass of pinotage,” with a throaty giggle.

The Woman King’s seven-year journey to the screen was just recently completed by this eight-month warrior training regimen. Davis, who served as one of the movie’s producers via her business JuVee Productions, describes the scene as “a fight.” “I refer to it as The Fight. Finding partners that share your vision and can give it the go-ahead is difficult. In addition, if the cast is mostly made up of Black women, there is no precedence that the film will succeed and return the investors’ money since Blacks haven’t dominated the worldwide box office. The main factor is money. It’s all about the money, not the cultural influence.

Even today, according to Davis, conveying the things she wants to tell is difficult. In 2016, she won the best supporting actress Oscar for her work with Denzel Washington in the 1950s drama Fences, completing the coveted “triple crown of acting” (an Academy Award, an acting category Emmy, and a Tony, or two in Davis’s case). She is the first and only Black actress to accomplish so to this point. She first gained widespread attention eight years earlier in the eight-minute, one-scene, Oscar-nominated performance she had with Meryl Streep in the 2008 movie Doubt. She continues, “I can’t just stroll into any room and make any movie, however. I’m genuinely rather confident, but I can’t pull it off.

However, she is used to battling for her objectives. Her successful book Finding Me, published in April, detailed the many obstacles she faced growing up.

Davis with Denzel Washington in Fences (2016), for which she won a best supporting actress Oscar. Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Allstar

Davis was the second youngest of six children who lived in a world of extreme poverty, racism, sexual assault, spousal abuse, and alcoholism. The sisters developed chronic bedwetting because they were too afraid to use the restroom at night while living in a rat-infested, dilapidated building. They had no means to clean themselves when the pipes froze over during the brutal Rhode Island winters, so they had to attend class smelling like urin and endure further taunting. According to Davis, she and all of her sisters were sexually assaulted by neighbors, babysitters, and relatives while their parents were too preoccupied with their own survival to provide any protection. (She later forgave them both and made peace.)

While their largely white hometown was “a minefield… where you were constantly trying to dodge little and big explosions that could level you,” she refers to her four sisters as “my platoon.” It makes sense why she has such a strong emotional connection to The Woman King. We and the Agojie are sisters, that’s the point. That is not the mindset of just hanging out, going shopping, and enjoying an aperitif. It has the spirit of going into combat, and you’re fighting for the love of one another. In other hands, a part like Nanisca may have been all high kicks and witty remarks, but Davis brings enough real passion to the role that she is already being mentioned as a potential winner of further accolades. She claims, “I don’t see Nanisca as an action hero.” She is a fighter who is a woman.

This comprehension leads to one of the film’s most moving scenes. The incident occurs when General Oba of the hostile Oyo Empire meets Nanisca and her forces at the slave market to receive what he believes to be a tribute payment. Instead, Nanisca ambushes him in an effort to start a conflict, but just before that irreversible moment, she briefly displays fear on her face. It is a tangible representation of a quotation by author Anne Lamott that Davis often uses, “Courage is fear said with prayers.”

According to Davis, “I was approaching the guy who sexually abused me every time I approached Oba. I wasn’t simply walking up to the opposition. The things that have broken the toughest people down have been horrific memories they were unable to overcome.

“I arrived in Hollywood having hopes and dreams for my career, but never quite having ownership or agency”

Does she have the method acting version of “me” in mind? Or is she relying just on her own experience? “I’m talking about Nanisca, but every day I also speak about Viola in terms of addressing my concerns. Every woman who has experienced sexual assault will immediately understand what I mean.

Viola Davis has developed a talent for showcasing the human behind the genre veneer. It was the scene when Davis’s character, law professor, adulteress, and potential psychopath Annalise Keating, arrives home after a long day of being feisty and magnificent, sits down, and takes her wig off in the six-season television drama How to Get Away With Murder. In the movie Fences, Rose ultimately vents her frustrations on her husband while still dripping with tears and snot.

Davis is less enthusiastic about her academic education but clearly has a great deal of regard for acting’s therapeutic possibilities. She calls her four years at the renowned Juilliard School of the Performing Arts in New York “Eurocentric… I believed I entered with the incorrect mindset. I was overweight. I was overly Black. I spoke in an overly deep voice. However, she also credits Juilliard with paying for her life-changing first journey to Africa in the 1990s.

Everything, according to Davis, came together when she saw a performance by the kaeleng, a group for childless women, in the Gambia. “They weren’t even trying to sing well; they were simply yelling. Making noise was the only goal, so God could hear it. She realized at that that moment what it meant to create art and how she would contribute: “If I don’t begin with the palette of what is Viola, then I’m doing nothing. I have no influence over how well it will be accepted by the general public. But I have some power over it.

Davis’s performance in Steve McQueen’s Widows (2018) earned her a Bafta nomination. Photograph: Photo Credit: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox/Film4/Allstar

In her book, Davies describes her personal experiences with infertility. She had a limited window of opportunity to get pregnant when she was a single lady in her early 30s and had surgery to remove fibroids from her womb. This culminated to an occasion when Viola Davis materialized her future spouse with kaeleng-like directness, which has since become part of her legend. “God, it’s been a while since I spoke to you. I recognize your amazement. Her dating wishlist included “ex-athlete,” “someone real country,” and someone who “had a wife before me and children already,” so there was no pressure to become pregnant. She then introduced herself as Viola Davis. After meeting Julius Tennon, an actor and producer, who was all of those qualities, three weeks later, they adopted Genesis in 2011.

Back to the present, however. Davis replies, “I’m 57 years old,” with all the weariness returning to her voice. “I don’t feel as enthusiastic as I did when I was 28 or younger. I thought, “Wow, I can be Miss Tyson” when I first saw Cicely Tyson. I can be a fantastic performer in both theater and film, and people will simply shower me with praise! At the age of 42, her performance in Doubt with Meryl Streep provided her a significant boost. I then said, “Oh my God! “I got it!” But it only lasts for around two seconds. Because of the disappointment and tiredness that follows… The struggle for achievement leaves one feeling empty. Davis claims that she now sees her job as her modest contribution to a broader fight for justice rather than simply a way to get out of poverty or feel good about herself. “At the same time, I am well aware of my limits as a person. The burden of the past is too much for me to bear. I am unable to carry out such action. I am not divine. I can only accomplish what I am capable of.

The Fight is also for Davis about breaking out of the constrictive on-screen box that women who resemble her now have to fit into. “I can influence change by demonstrating to people that dark-skinned women are more than the stereotype they have been given. That we are sexual, appealing, capable of intelligence, far more expansive, and that your sight does not define who we are. I am able to alter it. To some degree, I can alter how Black women are seen in the field.

In 2011, Davis received her second of four Academy Award nominations for her performance as a maid in the civil rights period movie The Help. Some have compared her to a modern-day Mammy. Impressive Black actresses made comprised the majority of the supporting ensemble, including Octavia Spencer, Davis’s friend who won an Oscar for the part, and her boyhood idol Cicely Tyson. Emma Stone, a white actress, played the major role as a well-intentioned journalist who sets out to uncover bigotry in her hometown. Davis expressed her remorse for shooting the movie in subsequent interviews, claiming that she felt she had “betrayed myself and my people.”

According to Davis, The Woman King seems like “a culmination of my career over the last 33 years” now that it has finally been released. She was essential to the creation of the movie, which marks her ascent to a whole new level. She explains, “I came to Hollywood with hopes and dreams for my career, but I never really felt like I had ownership or agency.” The Woman King appeared to be the best gift and source for giving me that power.

For many others as well, this is a much awaited “culmination” moment. It is for anyone who dared to dream that the success of Black Panther might transform Hollywood; for anyone who wants period dramas to tell diverse, untold tales that confront the legacy of colonialism; and also for anyone who has ever questioned why women in action movies typically look their 20s and wear high heels, but Liam Neeson still gets to punch through walls at the age of nearly 70.

Can Davis see making a similar turn toward more action-oriented roles? She makes this remark while sporting the mocking expression Annalise Keating saved for her most dimwitted law pupils. “Oh no. No. That’s not at all appealing to me. My body is now in such pain.

In theaters currently is The Woman King.

Thanks to Ellen E Jones at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.