The “impossible” role not even Viola Davis could master: “How do you move on from failure?”
It’s possible that outside the showbiz industry, not all that many people are aware of the exclusive club that Steven Spielberg joined this week and that numbers just 22, only ten more people than have walked on the moon, and includes the likes of Elton John, Mel Brooks and Viola Davis.
It is the EGOT, a recognition that someone is so prodigiously talented that in their career they have won an Emmy for TV, a Grammy for music, an Oscar for film and a Tony for theatre acting, and to say it is a tough four boxes to tick off would be putting it mildly. Davis picked up the first of those honours, a Tony Award back in 2001 for a Broadway play called King Hedley II and finally completed the set in 2023 with a Grammy for the audiobook Finding Me.
In between those years, Davis’ output and number of award wins and nominations is frankly staggering. Four Oscar nods, including her win in 2016, five Emmy nominations, six Golden Globes, one Grammy, three Tonys. And a partridge in a pear tree. OK, not that last one.
Safe to say she is one of the most decorated actors working in Hollywood today, but like anyone who has done a multitude of projects over a 25 year period, they’re not all going to be winners, and that has been the case for Davis on a few occasions, not least in last year’s spectacularly ill-advised action movie G20, which cost Amazon an awful lot of money to make (not that they’ll miss it) and should honestly never have got past the “hey, I’ve got an idea” stage.
Davis plays the President of the United States attending a G20 summit, which is then attacked by terrorists, resulting in her having to fend them off single-handedly with a machine gun. In a dress. If that sounds decent to you, then more power to you; enjoy. But I’m also going to be careful with what I say about it, because as Davis proved when she took some online flak for another performance, when she portrayed former White House wife Michelle Obama in the 2022 TV series The First Lady alongside Gillian Anderson, she can be quite… prickly.
Although Davis got some praise from industry critics for her part in the drama, some responses on social media were rather less than effusive, leading Davis to respond to the BBC, saying it is: “Incredibly hurtful when people say negative things about your work.”
While she acknowledged criticism was a part of the job, she added: “How do you move on from the hurt, from failure? But you have to. Not everything is going to be an awards-worthy performance.”
Which is fair enough, and true, even for someone who has made a habit of winning an award or at least being nominated, for every performance. But in case anyone were left in any doubt as to what Davis really thinks, she added: “Critics absolutely serve no purpose. And I’m not saying that to be nasty either. They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know.”
That being the case, I am going to pre-emptively state that all of Davis’ upcoming projects, including the action-adventure Children of Blood and Bone with Idris Elba, and the David Mamet-written thriller House of Games, are going to be absolutely brilliant, and she should probably get awards for them even before they’re released. Good, I’m probably safe now.
