Viola Davis: over the fences

Against the backdrop of the ugliest and most polarising presidential election in recent American history, a small yet poignant body of counter-culture filmmaking has prevailed – in films such as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures and now Denzel Washington’s Fences. An adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1983 play, Fences is set in the mid 1950s and tells the story of Troy Maxson – a garbage collector and former baseball player consumed by the injustice of having been denied entry to the major leagues in his youth because of the colour barrier – and his friends and family, including his spirited, beleaguered wife Rose. 

Talk of a big-screen adaptation had been heard for years, with attempts apparently frustrated by studio resistance to Wilson’s insistence that a black director be hired. But now Wilson’s demand has been honoured – even if, having died in 2005, he did not live to see it. 

As well as lead actor and director Denzel Washington, the film boasts an ensemble cast of seasoned African American actors, among them Stephen McKinley Henderson, who plays Troy’s co-worker and old friend Bono; Mykelti Williamson, as Troy’s older brother, mentally impaired since sustaining a head injury in World War II; and Jovan Adepo as Troy’s son Cory. But standing out among the many magnificent performances is the film’s formidable leading lady, Viola Davis, who earned a Tony Award for her portrayal of Rose in the 2010 Broadway production alongside Washington, and who went on to take the Best Actress award at this year’s Golden Globes. She has since earned an Academy Award nod for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first black woman to be nominated for three Oscars. [She would go on to win the Academy Award.]

Davis breathes depth and compassion into the role. Visiting London in January, she spoke of what attracted her to Wilson’s play. “It’s something I don’t get to do a lot [as an actor] – sit with the characters’ pathology,” she explained. “You see them unravel. There’s not one time that you feel that they’re a social mouthpiece, that it’s didactic, and a lot of times that’s what they do to actors of colour. You’re just watching these relationships unfold and you begin to see the universal in the specific.”

“I don’t know how you’d turn down a role like this,” she continues. “To have a character who is so complete in her journey. Sometimes [as an actor] you’ve got to force a journey. I was so tired of making things work. On this, I didn’t have to do any of that. And to be with Denzel and the actors who did it on Broadway – which almost never happens. To shoot it in Pittsburgh… I wonder if people understand how different this is?” 

Where Washington’s Troy is verbose and loud, Rose is quietly determined, with Davis adding depth and nuance to her portrayal through her reactions to Troy’s monologues, as well as on the rather fewer occasions she gets to deliver more expansive dialogue. For Davis, Rose was fascinating for the way she represented the women of her times. “1957 had the highest rate of alcoholism and depression in women [in the United States],” she explains. “We were absolutely relegated to the kitchen. It’s like Betty Friedan said in The Feminine Mystique, we hid our pain behind perfectly applied lipstick and waxed floors. We smoked a lot – a lot of women died of lung cancer. So Rose is a reflection and an extension of her time. She’s also one generation removed from slavery – a very specific generation. By ignoring that and putting judgement on that, you’re dishonouring the character. Our job as artists is to expose, not to mask.”

Wilson’s story had strong personal resonances for Davis, pushing her to confront truths about her own background. In her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, she gave an emotional nod to her father, Dan Davis: “During the course of shooting Fences, it occurred to me that for the whole generation of men in Troy’s era, which included my father, who was born in 1936 – that is, at the height of Jim Crow laws in St Matthews, South Carolina – their stories need to be told. My dad died of pancreatic cancer; he could barely write, he was an alcoholic. He was a very complicated man, but it occurred to me when he was dying that I wanted to preserve his stories. In life, too often the only stories that are preserved are the people who somehow shifted the culture. The Martin Luther Kings, the Medgar Evers, or a great musician. But the average man, somehow their stories are forgotten – especially the average black man. Those are the stories that August Wilson preserves, because that average person is really the keeper of history. They’re the ones who let you know what was actually happening.”

Davis was born to Mary Alice and Dan Davis in South Carolina in August 1965, moving to Rhode Island shortly after she was born. By her own admission, her childhood was one marked by abject poverty. Her mother had no more than an eighth grade education, her father even less. Yet with limited literacy, he supported the family and worked grooming horses. Humble beginnings did little to temper Davis’s confidence, though – in fact, she credits her childhood with informing her intuition as an actor. “It’s about being a keen observer of life and being affected by the things that you do see,” she explains. “Actors walk through life almost like ghosts. They see all the stuff that people take for granted – the idiosyncrasies, the mess, the shortcomings. They soak it up. And that’s what I did in my life. I knew all the drug dealers. I knew the people who were the paedophiles, and I looked and I watched and I soaked it in. It really has been those kinds of observations that have informed my work much more than confidence.” Acting became a focus at high school, and Davis went on to win a place at New York’s Juilliard School, graduating in 1993.

A string of supporting roles came in quick succession in the late 1990s and early 2000s, during which Davis alternated stage and screen work (winning her first Tony Award in 2001), and established herself as a memorable presence in often fleeting parts, even if leading roles proved mostly to be elusive. To pick just a handful: she worked with Steven Soderbergh three times, on Out of Sight (1998), Traffic (2000) and Solaris (2002), and won particular notice for her performances in James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold (2001), Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher (2002) and Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002). Her reputation for stealing a film in supporting roles continues to this day, particularly when playing no-nonsense authority figures, as in the sci-fi adaptation Ender’s Game (2013), or Michael Mann’s Blackhat (2015), in which she played an FBI agent. Her breakthrough role, though, came with the Broadway adaptation Doubt in 2008, in which she played alongside Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. Although Davis had only one scene in the film, she made such an impression that she was nominated for a Golden Globe, an Academy Award and a Screen Actors Guild award.

Davis confirmed her status in the industry when she played 1960s domestic worker Aibileen Clark in The Help (2011) – a role criticised by many for sitting within a time-honoured tradition of limiting roles for black actresses, even as Davis brought far greater depth to the part, resulting in a second Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Academy Awards. Some critics saw The Help as typical of white America’s tendency to mythologise itself on screen, when compelled to reconcile race, class and the vestiges of slavery. “Nobody wants to stain the memory of that black woman who loved them probably more than their mothers loved them,” Davis says. “They want to preserve that memory of them being loving, and so they want to keep them pure. And so there was a constant battle that I had.”

Hollywood’s bias towards a Eurocentric standard of female beauty is a matter of historical fact, so the emergence of the dark-skinned Davis as a star, and as a beauty, is exceptional. Davis remains frank about the obstacles still faced by women of colour in her industry. “I always say that you step up when you’re forced to, when you have no other choice,” she says. “After The Help, I was just done with the aprons. I was done with what I felt was a gag order on my humanity and my sensuality and my womanhood. There’s a sense that black actors are not as technically proficient or not as good – that’s because we have a gag order on us! We are doing the best we can to give you the truth, but if the people who are in power are the people who don’t want to be indicted, who feel uncomfortable, they don’t allow you to do what you do to make you technically proficient.”

Davis is wise to the fact that change comes slowly in Hollywood, and so with business savvy, off-camera, she’s been producing work with her husband and business partner Julius Tennon. “It was after The Help that my husband and I started the production company [JuVee Productions]. There was something about going into these rooms and fighting for these narratives that forced me to be that woman. It forced me because I had to find my voice. I came to the realisation that there are specific narratives that I want for me and that would fulfil me as an artist. And I don’t apologise for it.”

JuVee has since sold seven shows to television, and has inked a lucrative development deal with ABC studios. Also in the pipeline is an HBO biopic on the life of Civil War-era activist Harriet Tubman, who helped hundreds of enslaved blacks escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad, and a feature based on the life of congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who in 1972 became the first African American woman from the Southern states to be elected to the House of Representatives.

What links these projects – and lies at the very heart of JuVee’s mission – is a determination to find stories that accurately reflect the diversity of American society. It’s a guiding principle Davis and her husband share with another successful African American producer of recent years, Shonda Rhimes, who along with show creator Peter Nowalk helped tailor what has perhaps been Davis’s defining role: as law professor Annalise Keating in the US television drama How to Get Away with Murder (2014-). Talking about the role, which she admits has been a career “game changer”, Davis says: “In the centre of that narrative is someone who looks like me. Someone whose sexuality, whose pathology does not have boundaries based on her colour. It’s almost a redefinition of a dark-skinned black woman of 51, and I want it to remain that way. I don’t want her to be pigeonholed. I don’t want to walk into an episode and go, ‘Annalise wouldn’t do that.’ I don’t know what Annalise would do. I don’t care if it’s screwed up, I don’t care if it’s all over the place!”

Davis says she has revelled in the imaginative freedoms offered by playing a razor-sharp black, female, ethically ruthless and arguably sociopathic character. She also rebukes society’s tendency to make actresses answer for such defiant roles. “I love every bit of it,” she admits. “I am aware it’s a soap opera, that it’s melodrama, that people don’t see it the same way as House of Cards [2013-]; but what [the character] allows me to do is play other adjectives: she’s sexualised, she’s sociopathic, she’s messy, she’s smart. She’s all those things, and the best part is, you can’t put your finger on her. I see Annalise Keating as a fantastic experiment. I always say, ‘Who on TV is like me?’ It’s interesting that I have so many interviews where people say, ‘Viola, do you have a problem playing someone so unlikeable?’ No. I don’t. And I don’t think that they would ask a man that question. They wouldn’t have asked James Gandolfini that. And also, no one’s going to ask a white woman that. No one’s going to ask Glenn Close or Robin Wright, ‘How does it feel to play someone so cold?’ They’re going to celebrate it. So I saw Annalise Keating as an opportunity to explore all of that. I just felt like I scored in How to Get Away with Murder.”

But even with the influence that Davis and several others have amassed, black actors and filmmakers still face undeniable hurdles. Nevertheless, Davis feels that the present moment does offer cause for optimism: “Movies like Hidden Figures and Fences were distributed in 2,000 theatres in the States, which is almost unheard of,” she notes. “You have people like [African American producer] Charles D. King’s Macro Films, which did most of the financing for Fences, which is really instrumental with black films. They’re going to be the game changers. You have [Selma director] Ava DuVernay, who does have a distribution company [Array]. We’re trying. Taraji P. Henson, Halle Berry, Kerry Washington, Octavia Spencer… we’re all trying. Because we are completely tired of waiting. Listen, I don’t like change. I’m a creature of habit, but I have a six-year-old daughter and she’s forcing me to change. The world is changing, and art has got to reflect that. The audience is going to demand it.”