How Viola Davis gets away with it

MANILA, Philippines - Media outlets, particularly in the US, are abuzz over Viola Davis getting her first high-profile lead role at the age of 49 in the new legal drama How To Get Away With Murder.

“It feels great! You know, there’s so much stigma attached to age, in our culture especially, when it comes to women. It’s great to be given a role that defies all of that stigma. It makes you feel that you’re so vital, that you still have it. So, I feel like all the great things in my life are just starting. But yes, it’s fabulous!” the Hollywood actress told The STAR during a tele-conference with other Asian reporters recently.

The TV series that’s reportedly raking in ratings sees Viola playing Annalise Keating, a Criminal Law professor and defense attorney for the most hardened of criminals. She is many things — brilliant, passionate, sexy and manipulative — and is unapologetic about it and unafraid to show it, be it in the courtroom or the classroom. She also seems to have it all, including a loving husband Sam (Tom Verica). Yet, her relationship with a local Philadelphia detective, Nate (Billy Brown), forces her to confront secrets about her life that she never saw coming.

When an incredulous reporter told Viola again during the phone chat that it was hard to believe that it’s her first major starring role, the two-time Oscar-nominated actress celebrated for her work in such movies as The Help and Doubt chalked it up to the dearth of roles written for women like her.

“There just aren’t a lot of lead roles in Hollywood films for women who are like me. A lot of the lead roles are very much geared towards the younger women. So, it’s not that I’ve been rejecting roles. They’re not just written for me. Usually written for an actress like me are supporting roles,” she said.

“It’s not even like I was given a chance at those (lead) roles, which is why I always want to reach a certain status in my career so that I have the power to go after roles or create roles on my own because that’s the only way I’m gonna get them, which I have,” added Viola who has started her own production company, JuVee Productions, the first project of which is the movie Lila & Eve with Jennifer Lopez.

According to her, there was no dramatic story to how she got cast in How To Get Away With Murder (“It kinda fell on my lap”). And while she jumped at the chance, she had to sit down with the executive producer Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal) and creator Peter Nowalk for an honest conversation on how she wanted to approach the character, which is “like a real woman and a real woman of color and a woman of a certain age. I wanted her to be grounded in reality.”

Viola understands certain “TV requirements” that it has to be tantalizing or sexualized or looking glossy and perfect. But, “for me, as an artist, I needed (my character) to be complicated.”

She explained, “I wanted her to deal with age, the fact that she wears a wig and has got to deal with her hair, that she has all these emotional issues, the fact that her marriage was breaking apart — I wanted her to deal with all that. I wanna make her a complicated human being. Because I feel there’s a whole section of women that has been marginalized. I think every time you see a woman onscreen, she’s overly sexual, she’s always walking in five-inch heels. All of that is fabulous, but I wanted to shake that up, and show that the women out there, the regular women who are sexualized, don’t always report in heels, don’t go to sleep in make-up. They also wear wigs and have issues with their hair, and I want to include that in Annalise’s narrative.”

When asked what she intends to achieve with the series, she said, “I just want to do great work and I don’t want to fall into the generic form of anything. I wanna be different because I feel I am different.”

That her character is also “completely different” from her personality is why Viola is having so much fun playing it. Yet, with Annalise not fitting into the regular molds of a TV heroine, there lies the challenging part for her because “I want people to receive my work and not reject it.”

There was an article in the New York Times that raised a howl across Twitterverse for describing Viola as “less classically beautiful” compared to other female TV leads. Her classically beautiful response then was: “I think that beauty is subjective. I’ve heard that statement my entire life, being a dark-skinned black woman… ‘Classically not beautiful’ is a fancy term of saying ugly… It worked when I was younger. It no longer works for me now.”

When asked about it during the interview, the actress said the article didn’t bother her that much, let alone shocked her. What surprised her though was the response on social media that chastised the comments and had #classicallybeautiful trending. “I was surprised with the response… It was them (people) saying that ‘you cannot tell me who I am. I’m going to define me.’ I loved it!”

When she’s not working, expect Viola to be happily spending her downtime with her four-year-old daughter and husband. “We do a lot of things together, (whether it’s just) going to the park and the mall... it’s playing with my daughter in general.”

The Julliard School graduate (who holds two honorary doctorates) is also a sought-after speaker, giving inspiration through her personal story about growing up in poverty, winning a scholarship for her theater interests and finding success. This is also the reason she is involved in various charities and campaigns, most recently is the Safeway Foundation and the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s Hunger Is, a collaborative program designed to raise awareness and funds to fight childhood hunger in the US.

(How To Get Away With Murder airs Wednesdays at 9:05 p.m. on the Sony Channel.)