Viola Davis names the most important role of her career: “It meant everything”
With both an EGOT and a Triple Crown in Acting, Viola Davis has an embarrassment of influential and emotionally powerful roles to speak of. From her Academy and Tony Award-winning performance in Fences, on stage and screen, to her legendary supporting roles in the likes of Doubt, Davis could pick any one of her roles and make a case for its influence. However, there’s one role that Davis finds especially important.
In 2014, Davis was cast as Annalise Keating in the ABC legal drama thriller How to Get Away with Murder. The show followed Keating as a brilliant but troubled law professor at an Ivy League college, who gets wrapped up in a complex murder plot with five of her best students.
At the time, it was the third hit female-led show being aired by Shondaland, the production company of powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, along with Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy. Aired back-to-back, they provided a trifecta of surprisingly captivating drama. With Davis’ powerful performance as Keating and the plot’s melodramatic twists, How to Get Away with Murder was one of the shows on everybody’s mind at the time.
After six seasons, the show might not have met the expectations levelled at the beginning, but for Davis, it was life-changing. “It’s meant everything to me,” she told HollywoodLife. “She gave me permission to see all of my womanhood and to not apologize for it, to not apologize for being a certain size, a certain hue, for having a deep voice, dark skin, not being a so-called classic beauty, whatever that means.”
Despite the show’s reliance on twists and shocks, the character of Annalise Keating offered a complex study of womanhood, one that wasn’t perfect or morally pure. Okay, she might have been a tad unrealistic with the shenanigans she gets up to in the courtroom, but she was also powerful, nuanced and emotionally deep. In many ways, she embodied the magnetic antihero archetype that was usually reserved for men.
Prior to the show, Davis had often played characters we’d seen before – the black housemaid as imagined through the white lens, the dutiful working-class mother and wife in Fences – albeit with great talent, but Annalise Keating was a new kind of character. A Black leading woman with all the emotional complexity, confidence, beauty and depth that white leads had been allowed for decades. “She made me step into my truth and my authenticity without apology because oftentimes leading ladies are not played by actresses who look like me,” she explained. “That’s what she gave me permission to do and that’s what it’s meant to me, and then when I stepped into it, it changed the course of my career.”
Undoubtedly, How to Get Away with Murder made Davis a household name, and not only did it provide important representation for black women, but it also made actual history. When Davis won the Primetime Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series’, she became the first black woman ever to do so.
So, it’s unsurprising really that out of all her outstanding performances, Davis looks so fondly upon her time as Annalise Keating, as the role provided not only symbolic representation but real inspiration for women of colour in the industry.
