Chapter no 17 – There She Is

Finding Me

“You can either leave something for people or you can leave something in people.”

—ANNE LAMONT

Doubt, the movie based on John Patrick Shanley’s parable, came out in 2008, several years after Daddy’s death, and although it was only two weeks of work, it marked my transition from stage actor to film/Hollywood actor. On the stage, you reach for the Tonys. Doubt catapulted me to an Oscar nomination. I was forty-two years old when I got the role in Doubt.

When I heard that the stage play was going to be turned into a movie, I said to my agent, “I would really love to do that role. Meryl Streep. My God.” I read the play and auditioned for the movie in LA, at Warner Brothers. After that, I got the call from my agent that they wanted to fly me to New York to do a screen test. It was my first actual screen test ever. I flew to New York, they put me in a hotel, I signed in, got a call sheet. Every day when you shoot TV or a movie, you get a call sheet with all the actors’ names, all the crew, what the weather is going to be that day, and a list of the work for the day. Beside your name is a number that indicates your place in the cast and the time that you have to be in makeup and on set.

I got nervous about the screen test for Doubt when I saw the six actresses on the call sheet and our times to be on set. We were each in forty- five-minute time slots: Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan, Taraji P. Henson, Sophie Okonido, and Adriane Lenox who had played the role on Broadway and won the Tony for it. Some of these actresses were already in New York and some of us were flown in from LA. A car came to pick us up. We got to the set, and each of us had to put on a wig and hat. Six Mrs. Millers were

walking around the set. You could hear each audition and people clapping after the audition. They all sounded wonderful.

I knew I had gotten the role because I left my audition knowing it went really well. After I went back to get my head fitted for the wig, I returned to my hotel room and fell asleep. My hotel room phone rang and it was my manager, Estelle, saying, “Viola, you got it.” No words describe those moments of winning the audition lottery. The luck of the draw is what it feels like. Talent and preparation play a huge part of it, but luck also plays a huge part.

I knew this was it. If the Tony Award nomination for Seven Guitars and winning for King Hedley II were my stage coming-out, this was my coming-out movie role. This was a busting-through-everything role. This was the game-changing role—Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, with John Patrick Shanley directing. It was absolutely set up for awards. And I love all the actors. I was so excited. I was jumping up and down.

I put the phone down and then it rang again. It was the assistant director (AD) who organizes everything. She said, “Okay, Viola, congratulations. You have a rehearsal tomorrow with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams, but just Meryl first.” I fell apart. This is what I did. I got two yellow cans of homeopathic stress relief tablets from the health food store and downed one can in less than an hour. I was that nervous, terrified. There’s a part of me that knows that she would hate me saying this. She is as humble as she is talented and she is as kind as she is absolutely, 100 percent NOT intimidating. She simply is seen as the best, and acting opposite her agitates the biggest beast that lives within every actor . . . the impostor syndrome.

The next day I got to rehearsal probably half an hour early and just sat there and stared at the front door, waiting. She came through the door and said, “Hi, Viola, I’m Meryl.” I froze. She had to go to the bathroom and I said, “You know what? I have to go to the bathroom too,” and followed her although I didn’t really need to go. I went because she was going. I acted stupid at first, but we broke out of that.

We weren’t filming yet, only rehearsing, and there was a break in rehearsal because of the Thanksgiving holiday. That was one of the best Thanksgivings because I went home to Rhode Island knowing I had that job. I took the train there and Julius flew to Rhode Island to meet me.

When I went back to New York, Meryl and I were to film in the Bronx, in a housing unit. Amy, Philip, and Meryl were one of the greatest casts I ever worked with because it was absolutely, completely void of ego. Everybody was trying to figure out the work. We had great discussions during rehearsal: what it’s like to be on top with the impostor syndrome constantly chasing you and making you feel ostracized because you were the chosen one. Meryl said something wonderful that helped me let go of the impostor feeling. “Yeah, Viola, we know the truth.” What she was saying is we know the truth of what it means to be in this position. It doesn’t puff up your walk if you love what you do. It’s a great responsibility. That’s constantly overlooked and misunderstood.

If there were a poster of actors who had the impostor syndrome, always working to do better, we had poster children in that room, constantly trying to figure out the characters we were to portray, not focusing on anything, anyone else. We rolled in there, carrying the script, tearing it apart, focusing on being there 100 percent with each other, absolutely putting ourselves to task. Philip was always saying, “Oh my God, bring in Brían F. O’Byrne,” who did it on Broadway and was so fantastic. Philip was fabulous because he had such respect for other actors, he pushed himself, and was always self-judgmental about his work. This was the best room to be in. When you’re in a room full of great actors, you want to step up.

I couldn’t figure out Mrs. Miller. The character wasn’t working for me. I didn’t understand her. I didn’t get her, in my opinion. We were in that sacred space of the artistic process, and I could tell, the other actors would listen to me. You try to problem-solve. You try to figure it out. Nobody gives you any answers. These are actors who absolutely respect your process. Everybody’s talking and, although I was the least known of the group, you would never have known it. Every one of us was on the same playing field. I was given my space and time. Everybody stepped aside. Meryl was given her own space. It was an absolute ensemble.

Still, I felt I had to go back to LA and work on the script before I shot it because I couldn’t figure this woman out. What made Mrs. Miller tick?

Because of my Juilliard training, I knew my task as an actor was to figure out what was driving this character. I was using everything in my arsenal and I couldn’t figure out a mom who would allow her son, who she believes is gay, to be with priests who could be molesting him. I didn’t get it. I saw it as an incredibly dynamic scene, but in reality, I didn’t get it. The

read-throughs had been really wonderful. Meryl’s was the greatest read- through I have ever heard. When we finally did a read-through with the producers, everybody was happy, but for me, for my pace, for my standard, I knew I didn’t have Mrs. Miller figured out.

After the three weeks of rehearsal and before filming, I was excited to go back to LA and work on it more. I did a hundred-page bio on the character. I finally figured Mrs. Miller out when a college professor I talked to said, “She doesn’t have a choice, Viola. She’s doing the only thing she knows to do.” That opened up the whole Mrs. Miller character to me. She didn’t have a choice.

When we shot in the Bronx, my scenes were with Meryl. Oh my God, was I nervous. I’m one of those people who finds it hard to make small talk. If you’re working with only one actress that day, between scenes you just sit with them and talk. I didn’t have anything to say. I just sat there, smiling.

“How are you, sweetheart?” she asked. “Really good, Meryl. How are you?” “I am so good.”

Meryl sat reading a paper or knitting. She’s a good conversationalist. Not me. I just sat. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, I asked, “Do you want some tea? I’m going to craft services. I’ll get you some tea.” That’s the only thing I could come up with.

We shot the interior of the scene first. No words describe working with a great actor. You don’t ever have to worry about her not passing you the ball. You don’t ever have to worry about her giving it her all when she’s on camera. Meryl was 100 percent there with me. The exterior part of the scene took most of the time because it kept raining. It would stop and we would do the scene again. While it rained, we would sit together. She’d always say, “Oh, come sit with me. Let’s talk. Sit with me.”

Eventually, we had the best conversations. About life, about her kids, and about the work. It was perfection. After a while I could lean forward and say, “Let me ask you about this or that. Did you ever? Do you ever do this with a role?” I was now sharing the screen with Meryl Streep who I’d seen onscreen for so many years in so many different roles. There’s no word to describe it. In between scenes, she’d share a chocolate with me. We ate a lot of chocolate.

We finished the work and it was an awesome experience. Later, I went in to do looping work, which is additional voiceover work to fix a line that

is hard to hear because of background noise. When I returned home to LA, I lay on my couch for a week, eating bread, every kind of food I could imagine, thinking, Oh my God, I look a mess. We were in the new house during the filming of Doubt and Julius finally asked me: “Why are you lying around like that? Eating all that food?”

“I don’t like my work in Doubt.” “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s just not working. It just didn’t look right.” “What was Meryl doing in the scene?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at Meryl. Meryl? Meryl. She was great.

I’m not looking at her. I was looking at me.”

Julius said, “You need to get your behind up! Get your ass off that couch! I don’t want to hear this anymore! Let’s get in the Jacuzzi.”

When the movie was about to come out, I was named one of the ten most promising artists, the ten artists to watch, and invited to the awards event at the Hollywood Film Festival, 2008. The day before the ceremony, dresses were delivered to the house for me to try on. I was so excited. But I was having cramps. I didn’t know what was going on and told Julius, “I’m having cramps.” I was trying on dresses to see which one I was going to wear, and nagging cramps continued. As I tried on dresses, looking in the mirror, the cramps got worse, so bad that I told Julius, “I’m going to try on dresses later on,” and went upstairs to lie down.

“Do you want something to help you with the pain?”

I said, yes, Julius got me some Tylenol, and I lay down. After an hour, the cramps were worse. I didn’t have my period and wondered where this pain was coming from. Pilar, my old friend from Julliard and roomie in that eight-person house in Brooklyn, called me to chat, and when I answered, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I have really bad cramps.”

By then, I was on my hands and knees. Pilar’s sister is a doctor, so she’s always hyperalert. She said, “Have Julius take you to the emergency room.” “No, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s just my fibroids.” My whole family

has fibroid issues. Deloris, Dianne, Anita, my mom, all of us had fibroid issues.

“Have. Julius. Take you. To. The emergency room!”

Julius was already in the room by then and had decided to take me to the ER.

I had an abscessed fallopian tube. The doctor came in with the diagnosis and said, “We have to operate immediately.” I had already had two surgeries for fibroids. I had nine fibroids surgically removed when I was about thirty years old. Later, I had another surgery where thirty-three fibroids were removed. Now it was a fallopian tube. My sisters Dianne and Deloris both almost bled to death after giving birth and each had to get a complete hysterectomy. Anita had three children and never had surgery, but she has bad periods. It felt like a generational curse. I was anemic. I constantly had issues with my reproductive organs.

I didn’t want to continue to be in and out of hospitals, bleeding during my periods for extended periods of time, sometimes for a month straight. I thought of what that was doing to my life with Julius, my career. I felt I had to make a Sophie’s choice, a transformative decision. I was done with the suffering. As I was about to go under, I said to the surgeon, “I’m going to tell you something right now: I’m not going through this anymore. I’m not doing this anymore. When I wake up, I don’t want my uterus to be there. I want a hysterectomy.”

The doctor began reciting the rhetoric— “I’m electing to do this.”

“Well, what if—”

He was a very nice doctor, but I said, “Let me tell you something, if I wake up and my uterus is still here, I’m going to kick your ass. Okay? Kick your motherfucking ass.”

The doctor was terrified and said, “Oh, okay. Ms. Davis. Okay. Ms.

Davis. All right.”

Julius was laughing.

Later, my doctor would tell us that when they opened me up, I had many adhesions, much scar tissue, but my uterus actually looked good and they probably could have kept it intact. But keeping an intact uterus and fertility are two different beasts. As the surgical team went back and forth, he said he reminded them, “I’m telling you she is going to kick my ass!”

The next day was the ten artists to watch Hollywood Film Festival event. I missed it. I went into surgery in horrific pain from that abscess on one of my fallopian tubes, had a partial hysterectomy, and was in the hospital for eight days with an infection they drained through a tube in my stomach.

When Doubt came out, the accolades propelled me to a whole other lane. It was more than I could possibly have imagined.

Julius and I attended the Golden Globe Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. At the Screen Actors Guild event, we didn’t think Doubt was going to win anything, because we were nominated for all the awards that season, but we were not winning anything at that point. We thought, This is a table where all of us got nominated, but we were not going to win anything. When Meryl won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Doubt, we went nuts. And then it was like someone set us on fire.

Then came the Oscars. My first Oscar nomination in 2009. My first time feeling like the chosen one. That first Oscar nomination was extremely exciting. There are no words to express what the life journey of an actor is, the bumps in the road, the struggle, the unemployment. An Oscar nomination washes it away. In interviews, all that is skimmed over. My life was as a journeyman actor, taking the bus for three, four hours to get to the theater in the Newton, Massachusetts, church basement and working for

$300 a week. Oscar nomination means you’ve become a success. Then people forget all that and see your life backward.

More than twenty Black women have been nominated for that award since Hattie McDaniel first won it in 1939 for Gone with the Wind. Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Hudson had won it by the time I was nominated in 2009.

Two years after my surgery and Oscar nomination, we adopted Genesis. We started the adoption process because of Lorraine Toussaint, a fantastic actress I know. She told me that she decided to adopt her child because she didn’t want “series regular” to be written on her tombstone. Denzel always said, “There’s no U-Haul in the back of a hearse.” I wanted my life to be about something more than work.

The process of adopting Genesis was long. It lasted almost a year. Seven social workers, classes, evaluations, home inspections. One social worker ran the water in our sink and stood there for fifteen to twenty minutes with a hand under the faucet making sure the hot water didn’t go past a certain temperature. We put a fence around our swimming pool, covers on all the fireplaces, child safety latches on cabinets, preparing for a baby in the house.

There are no words to describe the paperwork, hundreds of pages in which you revisit how you were raised, what your home environment was

like as a child. Were you abused? What was the effect of the abuse? How do you feel about having children? How are you going to discipline? We sat for hours and talked to a social worker about all that. It’s all something that every prospective parent should probably do, but when you are adopting you have to explore whether you are fit to have a child in your life.

I felt more comfortable with the social services in Rhode Island than any place else because so many of my friends were social workers and I had nieces and nephews who had been in the social services system. I was comfortable navigating that system. It took more time to adopt, but I knew what the process was. I didn’t care about it being hard, in the same way that I didn’t care about acting being hard. Hard was relative to me.

Growing up food insecure, washing my clothes by hand in cold water the night before I had to go to school, hanging them up and if they were still wet the next morning, wearing those wet clothes even if I’d pissed the bed

—everything had been hard for me. I had mastered hard. Now I wanted joy. That joy came from adopting a child, and joy was worth more than the sacrifice.

I visited Genesis in foster care in Rhode Island and would take her for the day. We would go everywhere together. I would take her to the zoo. She always cried. I would count how long she cried and it was always the same amount of time. By the time I got to twenty-five seconds, she would stop crying and was having the best time. In foster care, you don’t often have a choice, but I identified her. I met her for the first time when she was about five months old. I had to do a lot of paperwork before I could even see her. As soon as she saw me, the smile on her face was like she was inviting me to be her mommy, had accepted me. Every single visit I had with her, she fell asleep in my arms, held on to me and fell asleep.

When I was finally able to take her home to LA from Rhode Island, in 2011, it was awesome watching her running around the house, fearlessly, exhibiting a huge personality. Stacey Snider, one of the producers from The Help, gave a beautiful shower for me at our home, where cutie pie Genesis just held court. Genesis was and is everything to me.

While working with Kerry Washington on the Scandal/How to Get Away with Murder merging show, she asked me if I had read the book The Conscious Parent. She said, “Basically, Viola, the book is about your child coming into your life to teach YOU a lesson. They’re completely different from you and act as a mirror.”

I was doing August Wilson’s play Fences when I auditioned for The Help. At that time, I remember people talking about Kathryn Stockett’s novel and that they were going to make it into a movie. I remember picking up the book and thinking it was good, but there was a huge disconnect between what white people thought was great and what Black people thought was great. And I’m one of those people. I already knew what the backlash was going to be. I had a party at my house and a friend of ours told me that a friend of his was looking for me because he wanted me to be in The Help. I said, “I don’t know if I want to do that.” I remember thinking, Oh, but you know what, it’s going to be a big movie. Maybe I can make it work.

I just thought, It’s going to be wonderful with great actors in it. I’d already worked with Octavia and we were all going to live in Greenwood, Mississippi, for three months. Plus, the love and trust I had for the actors and Tate Taylor was enough for me to move forward. Every job becomes about the collaborators involved.

We flew down to Greenwood, Mississippi, and had the greatest bonding experience I’ve ever had. It was pretty much similar to the bonding experiences I had with August Wilson movies Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The Help was spectacular because we all had our own houses or apartments in Greenwood and we would visit one another. We didn’t know anyone else in the town; all we had was each other. It was like living in a small town with family members. We’d go to each other’s homes to eat and drink. Tate Taylor (The Help’s director) wanted us all to look like Elsie women, so we were given permission to eat as much as possible. He didn’t want that Hollywood look. That was all he needed to say. We ate our asses off. That first day in Greenwood, Mississippi, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, and I had what must have been a four- to five-hour lunch before we even started filming.

I cannot tell you how much food we ordered. I know we ordered at the very least four or five different desserts. I lost track of how many entrees we had. We never laughed so hard in our lives.

Octavia is absolutely hysterical. We were underneath the table laughing. We relaxed, laughed, ate, laughed, ordered more food, and when we said, “Okay, it’s about time to leave,” we ordered more food. I gained so much weight. I have fantastic memories of going out to the Crystal Grill to get a

lemon pie and caramel cake. I would keep saying, “I don’t eat like this. I’m a workout girl.” And before I knew it, I’d eat another slice. Octavia would call me on the phone. “I’m at Crystal’s getting a hamburger.” All of us ate the jalapeño fried chicken on the set, the mac and cheese, the moonshine, which we drank because we were in Mississippi. There wasn’t a lot to do— go to Walmart or hang out at each other’s houses.

Tate is probably the best person in the business in creating a family environment. His home is always open. He leaves that door open. He cooks for you. Everybody feels like they’re part of it. You’re going to other people’s house next, and they’re cooking for you. You’re cooking for them. It’s naturally what happened. You feel part of a family, not just a group of actors.

New friendships were made and old ones rekindled, friendships so strong that to this day whenever I see Emma, Bryce, Jessica, Octavia, Allison, Sissy, it’s absolute love and support. We were a group of women, all together, no egos, no jealousy. Being with that group of women who so easily gave up their vanity and just went for it was a huge learning curve for me. Everyone had each other’s backs especially because we were in a place shooting a movie that was conjuring up a part of history when that was not happening. Right where there was separation and pain, the filming of The Help contributed a huge level of joy. It was a piece that demanded that we trust one another. I could not have been with better artists. Everyone was fantastic. Once again, no egos. I felt blessed to have another situation like that.

That beautiful time was juxtaposed with being in Greenwood, one of the hotbeds of the KKK, and seven miles down the road was Indianola, the birthplace of the White Citizens’ Council. And Greenwood is where they found Emmett Till’s body. My apartment was right there at the Tallahatchie River, the murkiest river you’d ever want to see. Ghosts of the past were still so palpable. They were another character in the film, not just the landscape of Mississippi, the history we still felt and saw.

So much poverty in the nearby town of Baptist Town compared to the rest of Greenwood. Baptist Town was the oldest Black community in Mississippi, but it hadn’t had a single high school graduate in five years when we filmed The Help and the unemployment rate was close to 86 percent while the rest of Greenwood, Mississippi, was 16 percent. The conditions were beyond anything that I could speak about, even having

grown up in poverty. Spirits called me throughout the entire filming, demanding that I honor them, the same way that young Viola demanded me to honor her.

We were housed in a fabulous apartment in Greenwood, but Julius was very nervous that something would happen to us in Mississippi while shooting. It was ghosts of history, maybe the heat, but he was so nervous about safety that he booby-trapped our front door. He set chairs underneath the doorknob. He kept a baseball bat and big piece of wood in the bedroom, so if someone broke open the door, you would hear them because of the chair underneath the door knob and we would have enough time to get up and bash somebody’s head in with the bat and wood, or at least that was the plan.

Tate was great, too, because he was open to script changes, completely open to the monologue I suggested in the movie where my character talked about her son. Tate was open to it. He said, we’re going to do it, Viola. And I sat with him and he’s just one of those great collaborators and we wrote it. Unfortunately, The Help is a movie our culture, our country was not ready for. Jack Nicholson’s quote in A Few Good Men describes it best,

“You can’t handle the truth.”

Another narrative took place in The Help that was not explored. That had absolutely nothing to do with the artists involved. It had to do with history and indictments and the fact that Aibileen was a maid. I didn’t have a problem playing a maid; I don’t care about someone’s occupation. My misgiving was playing a character who was unexplored.

I wanted to hear how Aibileen felt about working for racist white women and about the person asking the questions—a young white woman who’s coming to visit at night. Aibileen’s life is on the line. Aibileen is literally almost sacrificing her life to talk to her about what it feels like to be Black in 1963, working for a white household where you can’t even use the bathroom.

My other issue was when Aibileen and the others were offered money and we refused it because we were so honorable; we felt it was more important for us to tell the story than take the money. I disagree. We would have taken the money. Being honorable is fantasy. Survival and how it brings out our nature is human.

Kathryn Stockett did a wonderful job with so many aspects in the book. Aibileen was food insecure. The only food she had in her house was the

preserves that her next-door neighbor gave her. If Skeeter offered her $38 and said, “I know you’re putting your life on the line, but I need to know how you really feel,” Aibileen is going to take the money. She’s hungry. The fact that they didn’t take the money, the fact that, nowhere in the course of the movie or in private, did they call any of those people a white motherfucker or anything—well, it would be how we would talk in private under those sorts of extreme circumstances.

I felt that our voices were being tethered in speaking to press. Two different, even opposing, viewpoints can be aired at the same time. I can speak my truth and so can the other side. One of my best pieces of work was in The Help; even the local actors who were in that scene where all the maids give their testimonies were fantastic. You can’t work with better producers or actors or directors.

I loved working again with Tate in Get on Up. He’s fantastic. Criticism of The Help has nothing to do with the people involved in it. It has to do with everything that has gone on, even now, with conscious/unconscious bias and microaggressions. This is the stuff we don’t talk about but is threaded throughout time. I didn’t know that those thoughts, feelings, and messiness weren’t marketable.

I was nominated for an Oscar again in 2012, this time for best actress in The Help. My nomination had been for supporting actress in Doubt. The Help best actress nomination has tattooed itself in my mind because there was so much controversy coming at me after playing a maid and for being in a movie where the white gaze was so prevalent. With that nomination, I felt like I was being pitted against one of my favorites, Meryl Streep, for her role in Iron Lady and everyone was saying, “Let’s see who wins.” Very exciting for the audience. Not so much on my end.

By the time it was time for the red carpet for the The Help Oscars award ceremony, I had gotten shingles twice. I was that stressed out, no sleep. Not stressed out because I wanted to win, I didn’t really have any feelings about that—it was stress about the pressure I felt to win.

After The Help Oscar nomination for female lead, I was not getting leading lady roles. I was offered five days of work on Ender’s Game. I had ten days of work as a friend/maid in Beautiful Creatures and eight days of work in Prisoners. No one was offering me lead roles. I’m not complaining. Not at all. I was able to make a fantastic living. I’m grateful for work. I emphasize what I’ve already said: 95 percent of actors do not work and less

than 1 percent make $50,000 or more a year. So I’m very grateful. But even after two Oscar nominations, one for best lead actress, I was not getting the same roles as my white or even some of my Black counterparts.

My career mirrored my childhood. My Blackness was as much an issue on the stage and screen as it was in my childhood. It became apparent to me that all those things that were within me still needed healing, and it also became frighteningly obvious that God was using me to be a leader in the area where I very much felt a victim.

In 2011, Julius and I formed JuVee Productions, a production company to develop film, television, and digital media. The next year, 2012, TIME magazine named me one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and Glamour picked me as the Film Actress of the Year. Still, nobody was offering me lead roles. Except Shondaland.

I won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for How to Get Away with Murder in 2014, the first African American actress to receive this award, blah, blah, blah. It’s more than that. A lot more. I was forty-seven when I got How to Get Away with Murder.

I am a dark-skinned woman. Culturally, there is a spoken and unspoken narrative rooted in Jim Crow. It tells us that dark-skinned women are simply not desirable. All the attributes that are attached to being a woman— desirable, vulnerable, needing to be rescued—don’t apply to us. In the past we’ve been used as chattel, fodder for inhumane experimentation, and it has evolved into invisibility. How it plays out in entertainment is that we are relegated to best friends, to strong, loudmouth, sassy lawyers, and doctors.

We are there as eye-rolling, ambiguous sidekicks. It sends a clear message that we, as a society, believe the lie that has been fed to us. A lot of Black female actors hired for certain roles, as one of my agents said, look “interchangeable” so that if you put their features on a white actress, there would be no indication that they are Black. They have to be the perfect shade of Black; not too dark to be considered ugly, but not too light that you can’t tell that they are Black. I’ve heard these comments throughout my entire career.

As much as I hate to admit it, despite the awards, I felt cursed. I felt invisible. My healing balm came when Pete Nowalk and Shonda Rhimes offered me the role of Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder. Everything changed.

I felt a great deal of fear. It was a leading lady role on network television. She was described as a sexual, smart, vulnerable, possibly sociopathic, highly astute, criminal defense attorney. And she had a husband, and a boyfriend. I never saw anyone on network TV who looked like me playing a role like this. It was one of those moments that I always prayed for, but suddenly it was forcing me to confront my own shortcomings. It’s like the saying goes—that you have to see it to believe it. I didn’t see it.

On TV and in general, womanhood is defined by how “classically” pretty you are, how dainty you are, how close to white you are. Kerry Washington was Olivia Pope, the first Black female lead actor since Diahann Carroll in Julia in 1967. I was not Kerry Washington. I know it’s just a side effect of what we absorbed from systemic racism, but the bottom line is I absolutely was not the definition of a female lead on television, especially to play a character described by all these adjectives—sexualized, sociopathic, smart.

A friend of mine was acting in a play in New York. She is Black and the cast had a lot of Black males, other Black females, and whites. It was a mixed cast. When word got out that I would play Annalise Keating, she called me. She was happy for me, but she shared the backstage conversation about my news. Many of the Black males and Black females in the cast were saying, “There’s no way that show is going to work with Viola Davis in the lead. There’s no way that it’s going to work. She’s not pretty enough. She’s not feminine enough. She does not turn me on.”

It is a widely held belief that dark-skinned women just don’t do it for a lot of Black men. It’s a mentality rooted in both racism and misogyny, that you have no value as a woman if you do not turn them on, if you are not desirable to them. It’s ingrained thinking, dictated by oppression.

That eight-year-old girl in me ached in pain when my friend called. I already knew you either have to be a Black female version of a white ideal or you have to be white to play a leading lady on network television. It certainly helped that in every scene, this fictitious character named Annalise Keating found herself unapologetically standing against oppression. Still, I knew the media would say I was miscast. That beautiful moment of finding out that I got the lead role in How to Get Away . . . was mixed with a fucked-up moment of feeling that I didn’t deserve it. Until I remembered the teachings of Sanford Meisner, who said the most important question an

actor can ask is “Why?” I asked myself: Why can’t I be sexualized? Why can’t I be vulnerable? Why can’t I have a husband and a boyfriend? Why can’t I be a leading lady? As I continued to ask myself the question Why? I reached a dead end that asked me Why not?

An actor’s work is to be an observer of life. My job is not to study other actors, because that is not studying life. As much as I can, I study people. If you’re my audience, it’s not my job to give you a fantasy. It is my job to give you yourself. In people there is an infinite box of different types, different situations, different behaviors. Those types contradict perceptions. They tear down preconceived notions. They are as complicated and vast as the galaxy itself. In life, I exist. We, dark-skinned women, exist. My mom had me. My mom is dark-skinned. My mom had boyfriends. My mom got married to my dad. My mom had six kids, so she obviously had sex. Someone wanted her. There are 327 million people in this country and only blond, petite, white girls are sexual?

As soon as I opened myself to the possibility of playing Annalise Keating, and using myself as the palette, I created a different character for television, and I slayed the demons within myself. At Shondaland, and on How to Get Away with Murder, I found my tribe. I let myself feel the fear, face the pain of my eight-year-old-ugly-girl self, but I didn’t let it rule me. I used it as fuel, because, after all, you bring everything you are into a character. You bring memory, you bring triumphs, you bring pain, you bring insecurity. That is what makes a character human.

So I arrived on television in a leading actress role. Please note the word I used to describe Annalise: sexualized. Not sexy. There’s a difference. I hate the word sexy, because sexy is a mask that you put on. It lives in women becoming a symbol of male desirability. It’s not authentic. It’s self- conscious. Sexualized is just another facet of you. It’s a part of your self- actualization, maybe even part of your DNA. Black women who look like me are not usually allowed to be sexualized because “we don’t think you’re attractive.”

And if we don’t think you’re attractive, then you aren’t an innately sexual being, you don’t have any anatomical sexual organs. We want to see you strong. We want to see you curse someone out. We want to see you holding a baby. Maybe you can commit a crime. We can see other values in you, but we don’t see your vulnerability and we definitely don’t see you as a woman. That view is perpetuated in our culture, and therefore, it

metastasizes in our art. It is a lie, one that I have told in my life when I constantly apologized for my looks, by walking differently (I have very flat feet and a bunion I recently got worked on), by trying to make myself look different with wigs and lashes.

The eight-year-old girl who had never been told “You’re worthy; you’re beautiful” suddenly found herself as a leading lady, and a mouthpiece for all the women who looked like her. I had no weapons to slay those naysayers, to change culture itself. The obstacle blocking me was a four-hundred-year- old racist system of oppression and my own feeling of utter aloneness. My art, in this instance, was the best healing tool to resolve my past, the best weapon that I had to conquer my present, and my gift to the future.

Annalise Keating released in me the obstacles blocking me from realizing my worth and power as a woman. Before that, I created a story. Sometimes stories are straight-up lies that you make up because you want what you remember to be different. Sometimes a story is simply how YOU saw that event, how you internalized it. And sometimes the truth simply is. Simply straight-up fact. I was erasing that made-up story. I decided it was time to tell my story, as I remember it, my truth.

I said yes to the role. I answered the call to adventure, and I was on the journey and in many ways, I was on Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, redefining the world’s view of Black women in America. I said a big hearty yes to this adventure. Until Annalise, I had never been complicated in movies or TV. I always tried to be more dimensional, but there wasn’t enough on the page to catapult it.

In the first season of How to Get Away with Murder, Annalise faced off against Ophelia (Cicely Tyson’s character), accusing her of failing to protect her from being molested by her uncle. It was a thrill to shoot the scene with Cicely Tyson, who turned ninety the day our scene was shot. I was working to convey all this history of sexual assault, the pain. I will never forget Miss Tyson’s face when she gave her response: “It happened to all the women, that’s our curse,” she said with ease. “It happened to my mother. It happened to her mother.” Her look revealed all the sexual assault that she’d witnessed. It was in her eyes, her demeanor. Miss Tyson showed a specific deep history that no one can teach you in school. It was exactly why I wanted to become an actor. The depth of the emotional life she was able to convey is what I have to work on.

If I were to mark the first time I fully used my voice it was in How to Get Away with Murder. Shonda Rhimes; Betsy Beers; my manager, Estelle; and Pete Nowalk were all on the phone making the offer. I listened to them pitch this character who was complicated: married but had a lover, could or could not be sociopathic. Her name at the time was Annalise DeWitt. I thought, That doesn’t sound like a Black woman’s name. I knew that it hadn’t been written specifically for any ethnicity. It was the one time where the enormity of the job didn’t restrict my voice or my needs.

I had experienced all the above in considering the role. It strengthened my character, gave me the impetus to advocate for myself. What did I advocate? “You have to allow me to take my wig off in the first season.” I knew that if I asked them to write a human being, it could go either way. The TV and film business is saturated with people who think they’re writing something human when it’s really a gimmick. But if I took the wig off in a brutal, private moment and took off the makeup, it would force them to write for THAT woman. Taking off the wig in HTGAWM was my duty to honor Black women by not showing an image that is palatable to the oppressor, to people who have tarnished, punished the image of Black womanhood for so long. It said all of who we are is beautiful. Even our imperfections. With How to Get Away with Murder, I became an artist in the truest sense of the word.

We began filming the pilot episode in freezing cold Philadelphia in 2014. After years of playing authoritarian cops, FBI agents, ambiguous lawyers, drug addicts, it’s hard to play just a woman. I hadn’t been given permission. Hell, I had seldom been given that permission in life, let alone onscreen. Every image was loud and clear and emphasized how I simply don’t look or sound like a woman. I’m baffled by those who are annoyed that I should even care. Of course, I care. Our level of dreaming, of self- love and acceptance, is equal to the love, support, and permission of the images around us.

Now I was Annalise DeWitt and I was not fitting into the role of Annalise DeWitt. The second big choice or ask was the change of her name. They changed it in Philadelphia to Annalise Keating. That was better but still didn’t fit right. I thought that any woman trying so hard to wear the mask had probably always worn it, especially navigating a white, male- driven world. Maybe she had changed her name? My mom had changed

hers. Once again, the woman I tried so hard not to be was the muse sitting on my shoulder.

My choice was that Annalise was probably Anna Mae. That choice of Anna Mae changing her name to Annalise began to shape her for me as a woman always morphing to “fit in.” The extent to which she morphed to fit in was character revealing to me. Why work so hard? A dark-skinned woman operating in a primarily good-ole-white-boy world has to have day- to-day battles, but I knew from my own life that it always starts at home. What memories was she running from?

Annalise had a husband and a boyfriend. I’m always fascinated by sex and the impunity of sex onscreen. Especially when perpetrated by a woman. Women enjoy sex and are sexual, yet it is still one of the most unexplored terrains in my business. The engine behind our sexuality is vastly different from men. Unfortunately, as portrayed on TV and in film, female sexuality is used to tantalize. The lie that they tell actresses is that it’s liberating, but the truth is that it is rarely specific and character revealing.

Here I am, as Annalise, with boyfriend, Nate Lahey, aka Billy Brown, who I would always joke with that he looked genetically modified. He was a character who I allegedly had sex with in a bar. I had to make her human. I had to somehow make this fictitious character have some semblance of realness. Most of the women I know, unfortunately, sadly, have been sexually abused. Her probable dissociative disorder could stem from that because it is prevalent in most sex abuse survivors.

Every character you play forces you to explore your brokenness. Growing up, I experienced a frightening level of different forms of sexual abuse. It was a basic understanding that your lot in life was to fight off sexual predators—including babysitters and neighbors, even before you knew the term. It was a side effect of poverty, of parents too busy with brutal survival to protect us 100 percent. “Ugly Black nigger” allowed these predators to see me as not human, not a child. I was a sexual fetish, a shameful stain that they couldn’t admit to themselves or the world. I used that for Annalise. That brokenness, mixed with her intelligence and strength and success, felt right. Her marrying white, sleeping Black, along with being bisexual, made her, for me, complicated.

Some roles come along that expose your vulnerability. Annalise Keating was one of them. I had to make peace with who I was. I was a dark-skinned woman, close to fifty years old, in a leading role on network television. And

the chattering was already starting about me playing this role. Who’s going to believe her in this role? Who would believe, not just her in this role, but anyone who even looks like her? That’s what I heard.

I felt like I had two choices: either apologize for who I was and try to alter how I looked to meet their standards and try to fit in to what the masses were saying; or I could stay true to myself and make Annalise me, what I look like, what I sound like. I was at the point in my life where I chose me. That was a huge busting-out moment. I achieved on a different level than awards. I was finding me.

I’m aware of what my presence out there means to Black women. And how important it is to speak my truth. Because here’s the thing you can’t take away or replace: You can’t replace my authentic story with a racist one. So who I am at the end of the day is absolutely in stark contrast with what society dictated I am. At the beginning of my career I didn’t have much power, but now I do. Or for instance, if I presented Annalise Keating as just a strong, no-holds-barred, nonsexual, invulnerable woman who was just kick-ass in the courtroom, then that would be very inauthentic for me. Because that’s not who we are as Black women. As Black women, we are complicated. We are feminine. We are sexual. We are beautiful. We’re pretty. There are people out there who desire us. We are deserving. So that’s why I’m very aware of what my presence means. And that’s why I’m also aware of why I need to be emotionally healthy. Because that’s a lot of responsibility. Because you’re coming up against a four-hundred-year-old narrative.

During How to Get Away with Murder, Julius and I renewed our vows. Everyone came out—my mom, sisters, Gayle King, Phylicia Rashad, Debbie Allen, and so many people Julius and I love were there, 130 people, maybe more. It was a very different wedding than the first two. I planned everything again myself. We held it at Casa Del Mar, a hotel in Santa Monica by the ocean. I had a designer, Carmen Marc Valvo, who designed beautiful dresses for me, my mom, my sisters, and Genesis.

How to Get Away with Murder was where my radical transformation took place. In the course of playing Annalise, I understood that I was no longer and never was that ugly Black nigga. The role liberated me. I said to myself: All I’ve got is me. And that is enough.

Because I had started finding me in How to Get Away with Murder, the making of the film Fences was perfect. Perfect material for the screen based

on the play by August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted ordinary people. To me, the original Troy was my father Dan Davis, born in 1936, who groomed horses, had a fifth-grade education, didn’t know how to read until he was fifteen years old. These characters in Fences were real to me, they were my life. August’s material is great because he lets us bleed and he lets us talk. Rose was a fully realized character. You don’t get characters like that as an actress of color. Black actresses don’t often get roles where their pathology and womanhood are fully explored. We’re the fourth, fifth, ninth lead. We come on and say a few powerful and sassy words and then your ass is gone and that’s your only contribution. But Fences was a well-made narrative, with the right director to pull it all together.

Denzel is that actor’s director. He knows how to use one word or make you add in one gesture that can unlock your performance. If you are confused, he knows it. He discerns when you’re not in your body. He knows when a moment does not ring true and he will stop it if he doesn’t believe it. He forced me to go deeper as Rose in the film by saying something very powerful, “Remember the love. . . . Don’t play the pain and betrayal, play the woman fighting hard to restore the love.”

In ten cycles of plays that August Wilson wrote (often referred to as his Century Cycle), he portrayed Black American life in every decade in the twentieth century. So, you get a history lesson, but you also get to sit with us as human beings and see how that time period affected us. In Fences, Rose is a housewife who just wants to keep her family together. She is an absolute product of the 1950s, suppressing her own dreams, even being cheated on after she gives her whole life to her family.

In the play Fences I never hit that final scene. Onstage, I always felt that it never worked. It’s an occupational hazard: sometimes you just have emotional blocks that affect your ability to be able to fully play out a scene truthfully. In the scene, Cory comes home after being estranged from his father for ten years or more. Their relationship was always broken, Cory had always been haunted by feelings of never being loved or liked by his father. So the final scene is him coming back for his father’s burial. And the scene starts with him saying, “Mom, I’m not going to Daddy’s funeral.”

I just never know how to make a choice in this scene and how to respond to Cory’s statement and his pain. When I did it onstage, I was not a mother yet, but when we filmed Fences I was. In the film it was my chance to hit that final scene. The complexity of healing and forgiveness suddenly

materialized for me. And I realized that your depth of understanding of yourself is equal to the depth of understanding a character. We are after all observers of life. We are after all a conduit, a channeler of people. What you haven’t resolved in your life can absolutely become an obstacle in the work that you do. Denzel’s advice to me to unlock the scene was to start the scene by slapping Cory. I froze. I said, “I can’t do that. No way!”

Denzel pushed me, “He is a big guy. He can take it. Go ahead and slap him.”

I said, “No way!” and he replied, “Do it and see where the scene goes.” I froze. Then, I slapped Cory.

Denzel egged me on, “Slap him again.”

So I slapped him again. And again. Suddenly, Rose’s anger with Cory’s announcement that he was not attending his father’s funeral mixed with both of their pain and reconciling with the resentment and fractured relationships within the family. All that culminated into forgiveness. It was so suddenly released. It started with that slap. And with each slap, as God would have it, I thought of my mom. I thought of the difficulty of motherhood. Reconciling your pain. Fulfilling your needs and at the same time sacrificing, juggling the huge task of binding the family together. Shelving your dreams and hopes. I felt her. Fully . . . and it was beautiful.

Denzel will guide you to the truth. Sometimes, lovingly brutal, he will force you to be simpler. Perhaps that is the reason that this scene worked beautifully in the film. In terms of the ensemble, except for Jovan Adepo and Saniyya Sydney, I filmed Fences with the same group of actors I performed with on Broadway—Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby, and Stephen McKinley Henderson—the most wonderful artists I’ve ever worked with. Shooting in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, the birthplace of August Wilson and the setting of all his plays, the protectiveness of the community made me feel safe.

I haven’t had a lot of princess moments in my life. I’ve never been comfortable in princess moments because I never felt like a princess. For the first time, I experienced what it feels like to know you deserve something. Not the feeling that you’re the best, not at all. Rather, like your hard work over the years meant something and amalgamated into this “perfect” moment.

I had a goal. I saw it. I worked for it. I achieved it. It’s not so much about getting the Oscar for Fences but rather for shooting a movie that gave

me so much joy. It almost was like a fireworks display. Even if the Oscar had never happened, it would have still been a defining moment. It was an overflow of blessings that I could not even possibly have imagined for myself.

What I have realized since is that those moments of feeling alive are part of a continuum. You find that moment. You bask in it. Then as soon as it passes, life becomes about chasing the next moment. I now understand that life, and living it, is more about being present. I’m now aware that the not-so-happy memories lie in wait; but the hope and the joy also lie in wait.

The filming of Fences took six weeks. The Oscar campaigning in award season lasted for five months. It was almost six months of an awesome ride, not even a year in my life, yet it was an incredible marker. I’m not just talking about a marker in terms of holding the award but getting to a mindset of believing that I deserved the moment of joy and feeling worthy of a real experience that had only existed in my dreams. “A perfect moment in my imperfect story,” a moment in my life that I can remember feeling alive.

Everything—history and activism as well as the perfect material, cast, and director—had culminated to create that Cinderella moment when I strode to the podium to accept the Oscar. It was perfect. The entire evening was a perfect memory.

Memory is powerful. Powerful hardships as well as powerful successes make up a life fully lived . . . my life. My dearest joy is the joyful moments and memories of loving and being present in my daughter’s growth and development, the special relationship and memories of pure joy just loving my husband, cherishing the life that we continue to build, and moments and memories of my life as a working actor.

There’s the factual part of memory that has to do with details, timeline, but the other part of memory is abstract. How did I feel when this was happening? What did I want at that time? If the memory is bad, you try to forget it. Or you change the memory in order to survive. I am surprised that one of my most powerful memories involves me getting on my knees. It’s what happens when there are no answers in this world and no access to getting the answers.

My friend Edwina once asked me how I managed to rise from poverty to where I am today. That question always leaves me puzzled, as I often feel it comes down to mere luck.

But on that particular day, without a moment’s hesitation, I shared a story from when I was nine years old. It came out of me as if driven by an unseen force.

In the dead of night, I witnessed my father violently attacking my mother, trying to break her legs. She fled the house and took refuge in a wooded area at the end of our street, hoping my father would calm down. When she attempted to return, he was waiting for her in our front yard with a heavy wooden stick and began to beat her mercilessly on her legs. Her screams were raw and animalistic. Despite our frantic attempts, no one came to help, and no one even peered out their windows in our tightly packed neighborhood. I let out a primal, gut-wrenching scream, desperate for the violence to stop, but my cries had no effect. My sister Dianne shook me, shouting, “Stop screaming!” but I couldn’t. My other sisters tried to quiet me, but I remained uncontrollable in my distress. Finally, Dianne ordered me to go inside the house, so I ran in, still screaming.

I bolted into the bathroom, my usual refuge, and slammed the door behind me. Collapsing to my knees in front of the toilet, I screamed, “God, if you love me, take me away from this place! I don’t want to be here anymore! I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten. When I open them, I better be gone, or I’ll know you don’t exist! One. Two. Three…” I kept my eyes tightly shut, fully believing that God would rescue me. “…Eight. Nine. TEN!” I opened my eyes to find only silence and the stark reality of my solitude. Softly, I whispered, “I knew you didn’t exist.”

Edwina stood staring at me. Holding her breath. I didn’t know why I was being led by some invisible force to tell this story.

“God did take me,” I said.

We stood there. Her a believer in God and his power. Me? A believer but . . . not a believer in my worthiness. But this magical alchemy of her presence and the power of that question was forcing me to acknowledge this big boulder of truth.

“He took me on his terms, Edwina,” I said as if discovering it for the first time.

I supplicated like the Kanyala women in The Gambia, screaming, laughing, singing out to God so that he can hear them. Screaming to make my heart known . . . to be saved. Everything that transpired in my life after that was a mixture of magic, hope, mentors, lovers, friendships, gifts that were like leap pads that carried me.

After that bathroom incident there was no more escaping. No escape routes. My spirit was plucked but my body was kept right in the same place because it was the only way that, when I gained vision and strength and forgiveness, I could remember what being in trauma means. I could remember what it means to be a child who is hungry. I could remember poverty, alcoholism, abuse. I could remember what it feels like to be a child who dreams and sees no physical manifestation of it. I could see it and be amazed by my power to survive it. I lived it! I was there! And that has been my biggest gift in understanding the act of serving and my biggest gift in embodying other human beings.

The question still echoes, how did I claw my way out? There is no out. Every painful memory, every mentor, every friend and foe served as a chisel, a leap pad that has shaped “ME!” The imperfect but blessed sculpture that is Viola is still growing and still being chiseled. My elixir? I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people—the way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve, and their silence— in a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom. I have a great deal of compassion for other people, but mostly for myself. That would not be the case if I did not reconcile that little eight-year-old girl and FIND ME.

I’m holding her now. My eight-year-old self. Holding her tight. She is squealing and reminding me, “Don’t worry! I’m here to beat anybody’s ass who messes with our joy! Viola, I got this.”

Photo Section‌

My daddy at our Parker Street house.

My dad and my baby sister, Danielle. They spent so much time together when she was little.

My mom and dad at the racetrack after a win. The groom of the horse was always in a photograph. My dad wanted my mom beside him this night.

I seriously don’t know if this is ninth grade or senior year. I just love my

smile. At the time, I couldn’t even look at pictures of myself.

Me at my ninth-grade Freshman Frolic. I went with Bill Martel who was a senior. I had a big crush on him. My mom curled my hair with one of those iron curlers. I had the BEST time, but my hair smelled like smoke.

I’m mortified by the description of me in my high school yearbook. My only defense is that I was young. But . . . I manifested being a professional actress.

All of my siblings together for my Rhode Island College graduation. They were all so happy for me, and I felt proud.

My first headshot after graduating from Juilliard. I took this picture on the same day I found out I was pregnant.

My first Broadway production, Seven Guitars. Here I am in a scene with the terrific Keith David.

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

Me and the great Julie Kavner in God’s Heart by Craig Lucas at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. I played a woman dying from breast cancer. I went through the entire dying process onstage.

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

Me playing Ruth Younger in A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Awesome cast! Kimberly Elise, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Gloria Foster. It was at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

RICHARD FELDMAN