Viola Davis’ mixed feelings on becoming a meme: “I did not find it funny at the beginning”
Since the dawn of social media, pictures or videos of anyone posted publicly are now at risk of being memed. It’s not something anyone thought they’d have to worry about, but now you’ve got innocent Facebook posts turned into recognisable internet currency, while out of context clips from movies are made into GIFs to be circulated across Whatsapp groups and work chats.
You can’t escape memes if you have access to the internet – even the most serious topics, like war or addiction, are turned into humorous memes, the more ridiculous the better. Many actors have seen themselves become memes, sometimes reluctantly, from Leonardo DiCaprio pointing or crying and Keanu Reeves being sad to Christian Bale channeling his inner psycho.
Is there aything more depressing than accidentally becoming a meme? Viola Davis found out what it’s like firsthand when clips of her as Annalise Keating in How To Get Away With Murder started to become popular on Twitter, usually in the form of a GIF. Packing her handbag up and clearing the room, she provided a perfect final message to send. Davis also gifted the internet a gift with a delfated scene form The Help.
When Davis started to see these memes circulating, she was initially confused. Was she being made fun of? Talking to Shonaland, she explained, “Oh, yeah. I mean, they’re funny to me now only because I don’t feel like they were laughing at me. I’m cool. I’m tough. But I feel that people fell in love with Annalise, and there was something about her they felt connected to, even the walk. I continue to go back to why I wanted to be an actor, and that’s because I wanted people to feel less alone.”
There was a time when she worried that these memes were just a way to take the piss out of her, but as she became more familiar with that ever-confusing spiral of internet culture that one so often gets sucked down, Davis knew that these memes were more of a celebration rather than mockery.
“I did not find it funny at the beginning only because there were so many voices saying I was wrong for the role. But in what way am I wrong for Annalise Keating?,” she explained.
Davis is just one of many actors who have had their faces widely circulated through meme format, plastered across the internet for all to see. It truly makes you realise how much humanity has changed in the past few decades – can you imagine if memes existed back in the days of Orson Welles making Citizen Kane? Would people be making The Wizard of Oz-themed memes the way people do with Wicked? Perhaps Pepe the Frog would appear in some right-wing memes alongside John Wayne. What have we become?
These days, memes and cinema seem to go hand-in-hand, even impacting a movie’s ability to excel at the box office, no matter the brain-rotting experience they provided. The memes that plagued the release of Wicked and The Minecraft Movie, for example, certainly catapulted the movies to even greater box office success. It’s a strange time for cinema, but it seems like Davis thinks you should just take memes in your stride. That’s just the world we’re living in.
