Viola Davis is the most Oscar-nominated Black female actor in history. She is known for her powerhouse performances in films like Doubt, Fences and Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Though the Juilliard alum dreamed of acting since she was a child, growing up in abject poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, made her dreams seem almost impossible.
Over the years, Davis has been open about her career path and the prejudices and racism that she faced. However, she has never spoken about the abuse she endured as a child, nor the shame she felt due to food and housing insecurities. Now, ahead of the publication of her forthcoming memoir, Finding Me, Davis sits down with Oprah Winfrey in a conversation that sparks astonishing revelations, deep remembrance, understanding and forgiveness.
In Netflix’s Oprah + Viola: A Netflix Special Event, Davis lays herself bare. Pull up a chair to unpack five takeaways from the intimate discussion, including why the winner of the Triple Crown of Acting nearly gave up acting.
Davis was already in her 40s when she snagged a major film role in Doubt and her first Academy Award nomination. Yet that made fame no less of a challenge for her to navigate. “I believe that I was having a bad existential crisis,” she tells Oprah. “What’s happened with me probably over the last 12, 13 years is the accession to a level of fame, I think it’s safe to say. What happened was excitement at first and then that feeling of exhaustion, the feeling of really imposters in my life in terms of friendships, people overstepping their boundaries, people feeling like I was a commodity. Pressure. The pressure of unseen responsibility. All I know is that it wasn’t it. The only thing I could think to do was go back to my story’s beginning.”
In Oprah + Viola, Davis describes a life of deprivation. She recalls having no food, freezing during Rhode Island winters, a lack of plumbing, and being a bedwetter until she was 14. She would go to school smelling of urine and was chased home every day by boys who threw rocks and called her ugly. For many, the shame of poverty can be too much to overcome. But Davis used it as a motivator.
“I think that failure and hardship are interesting learning tools,” she explains. “Because I think that once you hit bottom, you either stay there or figure out how to rise up. And I think that that’s what happens with all of us, that you either survive or you don’t.”
Despite the abuse and bullying that she endured, Davis remembers that deciding to become an actor changed the trajectory of her life. “Fourteen was the age I decided that I was going to be an actress,” she says. “Fourteen was the age that I won a major art contest, and I thought I was slick really for doing that. Fourteen was the age I decided that I really wanted out, and I saw a way out. A hole had been blasted through this cave that I was in.”
Though she had adored performing since she was a child, past traumas almost scared Davis away from her dreams of acting. “When I first entered college, I said, ‘I can’t major in theater.’ That is not a profession that can pay the bills, and I really needed to pay my bills because I did not want to be on welfare. I did not want to be what I felt my parents were. I fell into a great depression in denying that creative spirit in me. Until my sister, Delores, said, ‘Why aren’t you majoring in theater, Viola?’ And I said, ‘Because I can’t make any money doing that, Delores.’ She said, ‘But that’s what you love to do; that’s who you are.’ And you know what? You begin to understand that whole Anne Lamott quote, ‘Courage is fear that has said its prayers.’ I understood that the fear was not going to go away. There is a huge chance it’s not going to land, and it’s not going to work, but dang on it, it’s worth the try.”
Davis has played countless roles throughout her career, including her forthcoming turn as first lady Michelle Obama in The First Lady miniseries. However, she says that her role in Shonda Rhimes’ How to Get Away with Murder has been the most liberating.
“Annalise Keating released in me the obstacles blocking me from realizing my worth and power as a woman,” she says. “If I were to mark the first time I fully used my voice, it was in How to Get Away with Murder... that role liberated me. She was all the things that people said that not only I wasn’t, but people who looked like me weren’t. You’re not sexual, no one will find you attractive and you’re probably not having sex because who would desire you? And that’s why it was liberating, because it absolutely is not true.”
