She has an Academy Award, two Tonys and an Emmy, with more nominations to come for her new film role as the blues singer Ma Rainey. But awards aren't what she needs to live, she insists.
Where to start with Viola Davis? First, she is just a great actress, who Meryl Streep said had "carved a place for herself on the Mount Rushmore of the 21st century". Some praise. She has won the Triple Crown, which means she has an Oscar (Fences, playing a patient mother), two Tonys (the stage version of Fences; King Hedley II) and an Emmy (for How to Get Away with Murder, a hugely watched TV thriller in which she plays a no-nonsense lawyer). She was also Oscar-nominated for The Help (where she was a vengeful maid) and the eight minutes she was in the 2008 nun drama Doubt, full of awkwardness and strength as a conflicted mother of a boy who is possibly being abused at his church school. She makes a quick impact.
Next up is Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, for which she will receive yet another Academy nomination. Davis once said she would never add a Grammy to make the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) because, well, she cannot sing. However, as the blues singer Ma Rainey in this excellent new film, she does sing — and well. She laughs. "I can sing!" she protests. "But I can't sing like… Aretha Franklin." Honestly, that does not rule out a Grammy — an awards show with 84 categories — but, either way, she is not interested in talking about her accolades.
Fine, but where does she display her Triple Crown? "It's my husband!" she protests. "If it were not for my husband, they'd probably be in a box somewhere. But he puts them in our office. And it's funny — that's the room I'm in the least."
She speaks to me via Zoom, from her living room in Los Angeles. She has, of course, spent a lot of time at home this year, during the pandemic. How did she get through it? "Oh God — wine?" she says. "Wine. I have a ten-year-old daughter, doing remote learning. It's hard. I've been going on walks — we have a new puppy." She laughs when I compliment a painting behind her. "It's a Picasso reproduction," she says. She is relaxed — it is morning, her time, and she is in her dressing gown, with her "head rag" covering up her hair.
If this is Davis at her most unadorned, then Ma Rainey is the actress at her most unhinged. Both modes exude confidence. On screen as the interwar blues singer Ma — the title is that of the song she is recording in the August Wilson play on which the film is based — Davis has wild eyes, rolls of fat round her waist and a mouth full of metal teeth. A while back Davis said she felt pressure to be pretty in her work, but it's fair to say that is not a concern here. Something changed — so where was she getting this idea of what pretty is from? "America. Society. The business," she says. She has a theatrical tendency to rasp out each word like a performance; each reply like a key monologue.
"Pretty is your value as a woman," she continues. "What they put out there. When you become an actor, you feel that doesn't have much to do with it. It's just the work! Then you get into the business, and people think looks are a prerequisite for acting. That it has something to do with it. And it really doesn't. It really doesn't have anything to do with your value, even, but when you get to Hollywood, you see how much that leads the conversation."
"But the glorious thing that happens, when you get older, is you begin to run your own race," she adds. "You have more challenges, where you have to dig deep and find tools in you to slay these dragons. Then, gradually, you begin to wake up, every day a little different. You become more of who you are — and that is beauty. And it surpasses opinions."
Strength and confidence, though, surely came from her success? "You know, I'm 55," she says with a shrug. "I've been doing this for 33 years and did not come into real public prominence until How to Get Away With Murder. I was in my late forties. Instead, it's a gradual transformation. Also, confidence is built through a parent dying. Becoming a mother. Turning 50. I'm an actor when I'm on set, but right now I've got my head rag and robe on. I'm at home. That Oscar can't replace good health. Or the dying of my dad of pancreatic cancer. Cannot parent my ten-year-old. What happens is you begin to really figure out what you need, in order to live in any semblance of peace."
She is not your average actor. Davis was born into poverty in South Carolina before, two months later, moving to Central Falls in Rhode Island — further north; still very poor. Years later, she got to the prestigious Juilliard acting school, before embarking on a lengthy theatre career ahead of Hollywood calling. There were lean years, but she looks on such times as a lesson and also as a sign of how lucky some are. Acting, she says, is an industry with 95 per cent unemployment in which only 0.04 per cent are famous, and so she has grown tired of actors talking about how, in their teens, they would not get out of bed unless a role was right.
"Listen, that is a great testimony," she says, before a big dramatic pause. "But it's a privileged testimony," she continues. "And people need to be aware of that. Now, you don't trade in your integrity, yet there are roles that may not be the most fabulous but are enough to get you health insurance. You take them. Then, back in the unemployment line. You figure out how to pay rent. You struggle. And, somewhere in there you learn life lessons, and it gives you perspective. It means something to have it hard."
When Davis was younger, she worked with Gloria Foster. She was, she says, a great black actress, whom many people don't know. "A lot of us die in obscurity." Foster, however, told Davis that their industry was better for the new generation. First, a lot of them had homes and, second, the only black actor Foster knew with an agent was Sidney Poitier, because there was not enough work for black actors and no agent wanted someone with no work. And a lot of the work wasn't good. Indeed, Davis says a "tremendous lack of imagination" was the norm when people wrote black characters.
"The blackness permeates everything," she says. "Behaviour, complexity — it's all they talk about. You become a walking social statement, and you have to trick people into writing you as a human being. I will make a blanket statement…" She pauses. "If I were to allow people to write for me without me having any input, they would just write my persona. I don't bring it home, but my persona is: 'She's really inspiring! She always knows what to say! She's so grounded!' Then that's all you get. But, you know, that's not a human being."
That has partly changed and from Michaela Coel to the US super-producer Shonda Rhimes, who made How to Get Away with Murder, Davis eagerly lists the black writers working today. The very mainstream Rhimes, according to Davis, has had far more impact than any of the clearly more lauded and awards-bait projects she herself has long been involved in.
"We have to understand," says Davis, "that what we have given the label of prestige to can't touch what Shonda created. We talk #diversity and #oscarssowhite and #whatever. But what Shonda has been able to create with How to Get Away with Murder or Grey's Anatomy is the most culturally diverse entertainment in TV and movies — ever."
She is also grateful to Steve McQueen, who cast her in the brilliant Widows as wife to Liam Neeson. The opening scene is of the interracial couple cavorting in bed — which is a big deal, considering Hollywood code didn't even allow black and white actors to kiss on screen.
"Also, there is a tendency not to sexualise black women, not to make us vulnerable," she says. "Not to invite us into that club that is womanhood. So it's not just the interracial kiss — it's what it meant. If you did see that on screen, you would only see it with black women who looked a certain way. Not me. There is a tethered quality to our femininity. We're overly strong. Almost emasculated. So I appreciated in Widows that that scene was allowed to breathe, because I wouldn't have been considered for a role like that in the past. The fact my big black lips could touch any man's body. And be sexualised."
Has she been in touch with Neeson since he made some comments about revenge and black men? "No, I haven't been in contact with him," says Davis. "You know, my circle is so small." She laughs, we continue.
The problem, though, with films and TV, she says, is that "a lot of people in power are white and male" and, therefore, will only green-light black stories they believe will be palatable to white critics and, eventually, viewers. "And the frustrating part is that there are things so culturally specific," Davis says. "But if the white audience does not get it, they can be erased. [A black film like] Black Panther was always going to be successful. It's a superhero Stan Lee created. But it gets more difficult when you do movies that are not in any way in the context of the white world, a movie that doesn't even explore political ideas white America can wrap their minds around."
"My biggest issues, sometimes with black narratives, is that a lot of the ones that get through are written metaphorically, so people can leave a cinema and go, 'What do you think that meant?' And they go with their little glasses of whisky and have intellectual discussions. But any piece of art has to be a human event, and, without that, I don't care what social issues it is exploring. It gets difficult when a movie is not white-centric but just about us, and we invite you in, to look. Like foreign movies." She pauses. "We have to rely on you to get us," she says, looking right at me. She rasps that out.
Ma Rainey was the real deal. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong were in her band, and Bob Dylan referenced her in Tombstone Blues. "She was the person who tattooed the blues in our culture," says Davis, and this film, based on an August Wilson play, shows Rainey at the end of her career, when an upstart called Levee is threatening her status and sound.
("I'm doing an interview," says Davis calmly. "Sorry," says a young voice off-screen. "Hello, person on interview!" Davis's daughter, Genesis, leans in, waves, before heading off. It's nice to know Zoom interruptions can happen to anyone.)
Levee is played by Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther actor who died in August. His wife fully deserves the posthumous Oscar she will surely collect on his behalf next year, because, as the haunted trumpeter Levee, Boseman, who knew he was dying, puts every ounce of his soul into his last role. Davis nods along as I mention that Clarke Peters, another former co-star of his, told me Boseman was a "hero soul". She likes that a lot.
"He would play the role of a hero," says Davis. "But it wouldn't be a tragedy. I would be downplaying him and his contributions on this earth if I just spoke about his death. He shows you the power of influence is not just in people who live to 90. Because here he was at 43, and here I am at 55, and he meant something to me. It goes to show you the power of one's life."
On Instagram last August, when Davis visited the house on an old plantation where she was born, she wrote: "May you live long enough to know why you were born." It is a Cherokee blessing, and I ask if she yet knows why she was born.
"I absolutely know I was born to lead a life of significance," she says. "A life that means something to somebody. But what I live for are not the golden statues in my office. It has to do with leaving my truth to my daughter, so when she finds herself in any kind of situation, she has tools to live better. And she will find herself in those situations, because life is wonderful, but it really sucks at the same time. It's also loving my husband, honouring my mum, trying to inspire hope. It's leaving the world a tiny bit shifted, because of your presence."
Very few people talk like this. Even actors. But, then, very few people have led a life like Davis's. From birth on a former plantation to poverty in ratty flats, to an Oscar and more is the sort of story producers should throw out for being too cheesy but would make anyway, albeit in the style of The Blind Side, in which a white person is responsible for black success.
"Or parts of my life would be left out?" she suggests. "Poverty would be explored, but not boyfriends. Not the sex. That would be left out. Me navigating college? That would be left behind. There is a reluctance to explore our pathology. If I played out my childhood in Central Falls, it could be a huge indictment to white people. And when people want to be entertained, they don't want to be indicted. Then, overall, the trap you fall into is pleasing the audience, but that's not art. Art is telling the stone-cold hard truth. Straight, no chaser."
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is on Netflix from December 18.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London