Viola Davis graces the cover of InStyle, and inside, talks about Black Lives Matter, authenticity and how she’s grappling with the pandemic.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Davis says: “In terms of Black Lives Matter, I am who I always am. What’s happening is what has always been happening. We just decided to wake up. How have I been able to process it? I have days when I fail miserably. And that’s when I need my two or three glasses of wine. But I’m trying not to lose hope in humanity. The only thing I can control in life is what I put into it.”
She continues, “I think that lawyer and politician Barbara Jordan said it best. She said, ‘What people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.’ And the bottom line is that it is a system that’s been built on the dehumanization of Black and brown people. Everything from Jim Crow to the Black codes to incarceration to the millions and millions of lives lost in the Middle Passage. The trauma of that still reverberates to this day, and not just with the Black and brown people, but with the so-called oppressors, who are the white people. We all have been affected by the trauma.”
AUTHENTICITY
The Oscar-winner says: “I will say that I think my greatest source of strength is my authenticity. If I try to channel some other being, I get lost. That’s when my anxiety level goes up. Growing up in Central Falls R.I. as the only kinky-haired chocolate-brown girl, I always was trying to channel the girls who had the Farrah Fawcett look. It had disastrous results. So the only thing I can do is channel my authenticity. That is really a powerful tool because we spend our entire lives trying to get there. If you are projecting that, that’s what people are attracted to.”
CHADWICK BOSEMAN
The 55-year-old said of her late Get On Up co-star Chadwick Boseman: “He was a beautiful man and a great artist. It’s like what Issa Rae said: 'He was ours as African Americans.' He was someone who had a quality that very few have today, whether young or old, which is a total commitment to the art form of acting. Regardless of ego, regardless of any of it.”
“He was with the same agent he had when he started his career. And when you were with him on the set, he absolutely did not want celebrity treatment,” she recalls. “He hated that. He really did. We actually had a little discussion about that. He said, 'Viola, I don’t mind the work. I don’t mind all the hours. It’s the other stuff that exhausts me.' He hated the celebrity part.”