Viola Davis Talks Still Regretting Role In “The Help” And The Mistreatment Of Dark-Skinned Black Woman In Hollywood: “There’s A Real Absence Of Dark-Skinned Women”

Viola Davis opens up about being overlooked as a Black woman, still regretting taking her role in “The Help,” her difficult upbringing, and how her entire life has been a protest.

Davis, 54, graced the cover of Vanity Fair, the magazine’s first cover to be shot by a Black photographer Dario Calmese, and the actress-producer didn’t hold anything back while chatting with journalist Sonia Saraiya for her cover story. From an Oscar, Tony, Emmy, and more, there isn’t much that you can tell Davis; her resume speaks for itself. However, as Davis would reveal, her journey to stardom was filled with roadblocks of racism and sexism and her insecurity issues that were fostered by a systemically oppressive and unfair society.

“When I was younger. I did not exert my voice because I did not feel worthy of having a voice,” said Davis. The actress is the fifth of six kids who grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Davis grew up in a family that dealt with financial hardship, and she said she wet the bed until she was 14. She revealed that her father was an alcoholic who sometimes was violent, Vanity Fair reports. She said it’s her family that saved her from believing the world’s lies.

“[They] looked at me and said I was pretty,” she said, referring to her sisters, Deloris, Diane, and Anita, and her mother, Mae Alice. “Who’s telling a dark-skinned girl that she’s pretty? Nobody says it. I’m telling you, Sonia, nobody says it. The dark-skinned Black woman’s voice is so steeped in slavery and our history. If we did speak up, it would cost us our lives. Somewhere in my cellular memory was still that feeling—that I do not have the right to speak up about how I’m being treated, that somehow I deserve it. I did not find my worth on my own.” After graduating from Rhode Island College in 1998, she attended Julliard, where she says it was much different than it is today. “It was a very Eurocentric training. It was the type of school that did not acknowledge my presence in the world.” While in school, Davis said she took up a lot of reading, mostly of Black scholars, writers, and activists, including James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Nikki Giovanni, and Malcolm X.

The Black actress’s experience and talent is often glossed over and blatantly ignored, and as a result, Davis said she feels for the up and coming Black actresses fighting for their shot. “There’s not enough opportunities out there to bring that unknown, faceless Black actress to the ranks of the known. To pop her!” She continued, saying all the “fabulous white actresses” who have had “a wonderful role for each stage of their lives that brought them to the stage they are now. We can’t say that for many actors of color.” Some of the white actresses she named were #ReeseWitherspoon, #KristenStewart, and #EmmaStone.

The urge to “pop” is the reason behind Davis taking her role as “Aibileen” in the film “The Help.” “I was that journeyman actor, trying to get in,” she said. However, the film was widely criticized for its tone-deaf portrayal of peace relations; in 2018, Davis told the New York Times that she regretted taking the role. Now, two years later, she maintains that same feeling. “I cannot tell you the love I have for these women, and the love they have for me,” she says. “But with any movie—are people ready for the truth?” Davis says Black stories and the experience as a Black person are often portrayed rather than Black humanity. “Not a lot of narratives are also invested in our humanity,” she said. “They’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black, but …it’s catering to the white audience. The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the movie theater, and they talk about what it meant. They’re not moved by who we were.”
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Davis also called out the tiresome white savior trope that has been portrayed in films about Black experiences throughout history. “Atticus Finch was the hero. Tom Robinson was slaughtered and killed in a prison for something he did not do!” Davis proclaimed. “He’s not the hero,” she added. “There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help. But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth],” Davis said. She explained that The Help, like many others, was “created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism.” Despite The Help being a box-office success, it still did not open up more opportunities for her.

Davis also talked about her experience as a woman during the #MeToo movement and how women are often criticized for being direct and assertive. But she noted that the tolerance for a woman of color, specifically a Black woman speaking her, is much lower. “We know as women when you speak up; you’re labeled a bitch—immediately. Unruly—immediately. Just as a woman. As a woman of color, there is very, very, very little you have to do. All you have to do is maybe roll your eyes, and that’s it.” In moments like that, she feels that post-traumatic slave syndrome once again: “Negro, you do as I say, when I tell you to do it.”

One of her last thoughts were on the racially-biased history of the magazine she is currently on the cover page for. “They’ve had a problem in the past with putting Black women on the covers,” she explained. “But that’s a lot of magazines, that’s a lot of beauty campaigns. There’s a real absence of dark-skinned Black women. When you couple that with what’s going on in our culture, and how they treat Black women, you have a double whammy. You are putting us in a complete cloak of invisibility.”