Viola Davis is no stranger to television, having appeared in episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Traveler and United States of Tara. It wasn't until she was cast as the lead in ABC's How to Get Away With Murder, however, that the 49-year-old actress began to receive the acclaim she deserved.
Davis had worked with some of the biggest directors and actors in Hollywood on stage and screen, but many times, she felt marginalized as a nonwhite actor in film. When Shonda Rhimes and Peter Norwalk came calling, the star jumped at the chance to play a mysterious law professor named Annalise Keating.
"There was absolutely no precedent for it. I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualized role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualized woman. I was the prototype of the 'mommified" role," Davis said in The Hollywood Reporter's Drama Actresses Roundtable issue. Davis—joined by Masters of Sex's Lizzy Caplan, The Honorable Woman's Maggie Gyllenhaal, Empire's Taraji P. Henson, American Horror Story: Freak Show's Jessica Lange and The Affair's Ruth Wilson—said she couldn't believe a role like this existed.
"All of a sudden, this part came, and fear would be an understatement. When I saw myself for the first time in the pilot episode, I was mortified. I saw the fake eyelashes and, 'Are you kidding me? Who is going to believe this?'" she said. "Then I thought: "OK, this is your moment to not typecast yourself, to play a woman who is sexualized and do your investigative work to find out who this woman is and put a real woman on TV who's smack-dab in the midst of this pop fiction.'"
Gyllenhaal praised Davis' thinking, saying, "Isn't it so much hotter to see a woman on TV who looks like an actual woman, someone whose arms aren't perfect?"
Lange argued, "Except your arms are perfect!"
"I was talking about mine!" Gyllenhaal said with a laugh.
"The thing I had to get used to with TV was the likability factor," Davis said. "People have to like you. People have to think you're pretty. I was going to have to face a fact that people were going to look at me and say: 'I have no idea why they cast her in a role like this. She just doesn't fit. It should have been someone like Halle Berry. It's her voice, and she doesn't walk like a supermodel in those heels.' And people do say that. They do. But what I say to that is the women in my life who are sexualized are anywhere from a size zero to a size 24. They don't walk like supermodels in heels. They take their wig and makeup off at night. So this role was my way of saying, 'Welcome to womanhood!' It's also healed me and shown a lot of little dark-skinned girls with curly hair a physical manifestation of themselves."
Davis is proud to play a complex character who resembles something other than what the TV landscape currently has to offer. "I refuse to drink a smoothie for breakfast to get down to a size 2. It's just not going to happen with me. I've done a couple of sex scenes in How to Get Away With Murder, even one where was I thrown up against the wall, and I'm like, 'I really don't want to get thrown up against the wall anymore.' I threw my back out!" she said, making the panel laugh. "I had to just allow myself to be uncomfortable. I'm not going to stand in front of a mirror, or else Viola will kick in and go, "'OK, my titties are saggy and I have stretch marks.'"