How Viola Davis feeling like a “straight-up thug” left one of her co-stars pissed off
Usually, calling people names at work is a bad idea, as the likelihood is you’ll land yourself in a fair amount of hot water if you stroll over to Steve from marketing and call him a ‘fucking bellend’, but Hollywood, being the land of moviemaking magic, has different rules, and sometimes, as Viola Davis knows, you can even end up actively encouraged to do it.
Although Davis is known for doing lots of very serious acting in important dramas and scooping lots of awards in the process, she’s also not averse to doing the occasional blockbuster, although the less said about last year’s G20 when she played the US President having to shoot her way out of a climate conference, the better, to be honest.
She is very accomplished at doing the whole ‘stern faced authority figure turning up in a jeep to tell people off’ thing too, something she first showed as a CIA bigwig in 2005’s Syriana, then again as the Mayor in Law Abiding Citizen, then again but in space in Ender’s Game, and then again in 2016 in the first Suicide Squad, and it was on that movie that her pottymouth proved effective.
It wasn’t entirely her fault, however, and more that of the writer and director of the film, David Ayer, who wanted Davis to be manipulative like her character Amanda Waller, the government official who hands out orders to the assembled supervillains who make up the Suicide Squad.
Davis told EW at the time, “He would make me call [co-star] Joel Kinnaman a pussy at times. A bitch. It’s completely politically incorrect, but it caused a reaction in me. It made me feel like a straight-up thug, and it made [Kinnaman’s character] Rick Flag want to kick my ass. So David got what he wanted.”
It certainly had the desired effect on her colleagues, even if it didn’t help the movie much with the critics who panned it on release, but audiences went for it nonetheless, and it was a big box office success, with names like Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Jared Leto helping to pull the punters in around the globe.
Kinnaman, who was brought back by James Gunn for the confusingly titled 2021 sequel, The Suicide Squad, remembered Davis being horrible to him on set, but begrudgingly admitted to it being the right thing to do, saying, “Some of the stuff she said really pissed me off. And I felt really betrayed. And that’s exactly what David wanted me to feel… And now it’s in the movie. That’s some pretty high-level direction through manipulation.”
Davis also came back into the DC Comics fold for Gunn’s sequel, which, despite far better reviews than the 2016 movie, struggled to break even at the box office due to a combination of factors, key among which was the fact that hardly anyone was allowed to go to the cinema due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
She also appeared as Waller in the first two episodes of the spin-off series Peacemaker starring John Cena, and again in the Shazam! spin-off movie Black Adam starring Dwayne Johnson. Her character has proved so popular among fans of the DC Universe that she’s now filming her own series, titled simply Waller, which could hit screens before the end of the year.
