Actor Viola Davis says that she’s going to miss her character Annalise Keating in How To Get Away With Murder for her womanhood and the way she portrayed what it’s like to be the leading lady. By Team Viva
How was your experience working on the series How to Get Away With Murder?
I think it was a huge turning point in my life to work for the show. Sometimes people have to give you permission to see yourself as better or more than what you are or what you think you are. This job gave me permission to see all of my womanhood. One needs to realise that my culture has hugely dictated who I am — a dark-skinned, Black woman with dark lips and a nose and a deep voice. So what I’ve been told all my life is what it means to be a woman.
So all of a sudden, Annalise Keating (her character) comes in like a whirling dervish and she is all of it! She is messy, almost sociopathic, sexual, mysterious, and highly intelligent. She’s a big personality and she’s all of those adjectives that are not associated to me in real life but I’ve got to play her.
Was the title How To Get Away with Murder since the beginning or did that come up later?
No, that came up later. Well, you know what, my ego, I said that the title is going to be the name of my character. And at that time, my name was Annalise Dewitt (in the initial Pilot script). I said I don’t seem like an Annalise Dewitt.
This is going to be the final season. What are you going to miss? How does it feel to reach the end of something beautiful?
I will miss Annalise Keating and I’ll miss the people I’ve worked with. I think that the best part of what we do are the relationships. You remember those bonds more than your work.
I’ll miss Annalise Keating because I don’t know if I’m going to meet someone like her again. I think that being a dark-skinned woman on a network TV in a lead role is the one that Shonda Rhimes had redefined and Annalise was exactly like that — the leading lady. I will miss that about her the most.
Nobody really understands TV scheduling unless you’re in it, especially being number one. There’s a part of me that says, ‘Oh, great, I am done! I have time for getting my life back. I can spend time with my daughter, my husband and sleep more.’ And then the other part inside me just says goodbye to a show that has really changed my career and also shifted the face of television. I think what I am the most proud of is that my character has redefined womanhood and how we see it on screen. It has usually been very thin, white women that we see leading on screen, of a certain age, but they had never been in a body like mine. And why not? Sometimes culture can inform the art and sometimes, art can inform the culture.
It has been six seasons so you get a chance to say goodbye as opposed to it being just a brook. And that’s always a great gift. And now that it has come, it sorts of creeps up on you. I thought I was ready for it. I don’t think we’re ever ready for a goodbye, especially when something has transformed your life in such a beautiful way.
What was the transition from stage to films like?
I always say that all you have to do in a film is to sustain a performance for 30 seconds. When you’re on stage, you can have a 12-page scene and there are no edit buttons. So it was much different. You initially like, ‘But I am Viola Davis’, ‘I’m good.’ But when you’re acting opposite to someone like Meryl Streep (in the film Doubt), well it;s like you’re thinking, ‘Oh my god, it’s Meryl Streep!’ And then it goes like, ‘cut, cut!’
Your Broadway debut was The Seven Guitars. How was your first experience at Broadway?
When I think about everything I believed an actor was — that was it. The Seven Guitars. My mom and dad in the audience and my dad crying. And I was like ‘This is it, I have arrived!’
What was your childhood like?
Well, it was like everyone’s childhood — filled with happy memories, playing with my sister, bicycling around. But it was also filled with some darkness. When you are poor, you have bad housing. We lived in condemned buildings in Rohde Island. And these were certainly the apartments infested with rats. The stigma of poverty, the feeling of being invisible and the lack of access — all of this comes with it. Which is why I talk about it all the time but it gets uncomfortable for me, it really is. I started acting when I was eight. We would write scripts and then rewrite. We would even have wardrobe budgets.
Do you have moments when you stop in your life and look back at the little girl from Rhode Island and then look at your present life and says, ‘I don’t know how I got here’?
(Laughs) Every single day! You know when do I think about that little girl the most? I think of her when I open my refrigerator, flush my toilet, put a robe on, lie in a tub of hot running water. She is with me every day to understand that every little thing in my life is to be celebrated.
(The sixth and final season of the series will air in India on August 1 and 2, 7 pm onwards, on Star World.)