PAPERBOAT MEDIA / INSPIRATION
Viola
Davis
AN ESSAY BY ROB URBAN
A whole person
deserves
the frame.
On the generosity of looking closely, and an artist who makes room for everything she finds.
Some performances protect a character by making her admirable. Viola Davis often does something harder. She protects the character’s right to be difficult.
That distinction matters because dignity is easily confused with tidiness. A person who has spent years being overlooked is finally placed at the center of a story, then handed the additional burden of representing everyone well. She must be resilient without being bitter, wounded without becoming inconvenient, strong without wanting anything unflattering.
Davis has built a career inside the more dangerous territory. Her characters can want, bargain, conceal, punish, grieve and make choices that refuse to cooperate with an audience’s need for a clean verdict. The achievement is not that every person she plays becomes likable. It is that likability stops being the entrance fee for being fully seen.
I admire the generosity inside that choice. Davis gives people room to contain more than an audience expects of them. There is relief in encountering a performance that can hold someone’s anger and tenderness without asking either to disappear.
FENCES / AUGUST WILSON
The woman
before
the wound.
When Davis spoke to NPR about playing Rose Maxson in Fences, she described the importance of the woman we meet before the marriage breaks open. Rose still smiles. She wears a little lipstick. She believes she is making her life work.
Those details matter because they give her something to lose. Davis wanted the audience to encounter a particular woman, with a life already in progress, before encountering her pain.
I find that an extraordinarily caring way to approach a role. If an actor begins with the wound, everything about the person can start to look like evidence for it. The smile becomes an omen. The ordinary afternoon becomes a warning. Davis describes protecting the life that exists before our knowledge of what will happen.
In her 2017 interview with Sight and Sound, she also spoke about the pleasure of Wilson’s fully developed characters and the freedom to let their relationships unfold. The writing gave her a woman whose journey she could inhabit.
That is part of what makes her work so moving to me. The person has a history beyond the scene we happen to be watching. We are being trusted to notice it.
A little less alone.
In 2017, while accepting Harvard’s Artist of the Year honor, Davis described a period at Juilliard when she felt her artistic voice was being constrained. TIME’s account of that speech reported the larger conclusion she drew about the work: acting could bring forward the experiences people hide as mess or shame, allowing them to feel seen and less alone.
That connection between acting and loneliness stays with me. Recognition can arrive through a feeling we would struggle to explain about ourselves. A character hesitates, changes the subject or answers too quickly, and something private becomes a little less solitary.
To expose shame without reducing a character to shame, an actor has to keep the whole person alive. The audience may enter through an argument, a betrayal or a terrible decision. The performance still has to preserve the person who existed before that scene and will have to live after it. Pain cannot become a personality shortcut.
Davis’s willingness to make room for those feelings is one reason I value her work. Her characters can be formidable, but the attention she gives them is patient. She takes their inner lives seriously.
GIVING VOICE
Someone is
finding their
way into
the words.
The 2020 documentary Giving Voice follows six young actors through the August Wilson Monologue Competition toward its Broadway final. Here, the attention turns to performers still discovering what they can do with words.
Netflix’s production announcement credits directors James D. Stern and Fernando Villena, with Davis and Julius Tennon among the executive producers. JuVee worked alongside several other production companies to help bring the film into being.
The form of the competition is useful to consider. A monologue asks an actor to make a whole life felt through a limited passage. The words are already written. The performer has to decide what the person wants from the listener, which thought needs time and where an apparent statement is doing the work of a question.
That is a demanding way to meet a character. An actor cannot get very far with a label such as strong, angry or inspiring. Those descriptions do not say what changes between the first sentence and the last. A playable choice has a direction: persuade, conceal, challenge, hold someone in the room.
I like the care implied by putting that process at the center of a film. A young actor is worth watching while learning. Their interpretation can matter before a famous career gives anyone a reason to pay attention.
For someone discovering their own voice, that is a generous example to have in the world.
The work before
the camera rolls.
Davis and Julius Tennon co-founded JuVee Productions. Its current team page identifies Davis as CEO and Tennon as president, and describes work across film, television, theater, interactive projects and digital media.
The company also names the people responsible for those different areas, including head of film Melanie N. Clark and head of TV Andrew Wang. The credits make the partnership concrete: projects need people to develop them, solve production problems and keep decisions moving.
I appreciate being able to see that team. A commitment to more expansive stories becomes practical through development, hiring and the daily work of keeping a project alive.
Those responsibilities sit upstream of a performance. A script needs development time. A role needs casting. A project needs a practical route from an idea to a finished work. An actor may bring a character into focus for an audience, but collaborators have to make the conditions for that performance possible.
Davis described finding her own voice as a producer in the Sight and Sound interview. Going into rooms to advocate for particular stories required her to say what she wanted to make.
There is something encouraging about an accomplished performer continuing to grow into a new kind of authority. Experience does not end the need for courage. It can give that courage a more specific purpose.
Stay long enough
to see more.
A performance can carry contradictory feelings without resolving them for the audience. Affection can survive inside an argument. A confident answer can hide a need for reassurance. A person can understand what should happen and still want something else.
Those tensions give an actor something to do. If the character arrives with a finished moral attached, the scene merely illustrates it. If the character is still choosing, the audience has a reason to pay attention to the next breath, answer or refusal.
What I admire in Davis is the conviction that this much attention is deserved. The woman on screen, the young performer working through a monologue and the writer with a story to develop all merit the time it takes to look closely.
Her work encourages a more generous kind of curiosity. We can stay with someone long enough for our first description of them to become inadequate. The person who seemed simply angry may also be frightened. The person who seemed certain may be making a difficult choice in front of us.
There is hope in that possibility. We are allowed to discover more about each other.
The character does not have to make us comfortable to deserve the center of the frame. She has to be allowed to arrive whole.
The work, the people, the details
Which character does Viola Davis play in Fences?
Davis plays Rose Maxson in the 2016 film directed by Denzel Washington, adapted from August Wilson’s play. She also played Rose opposite Washington in the 2010 Broadway revival.
What is Giving Voice about?
Giving Voice is a 2020 documentary following six young actors in the August Wilson Monologue Competition. James D. Stern and Fernando Villena directed it; Viola Davis and Julius Tennon are among its executive producers.
Who founded JuVee Productions?
Viola Davis and Julius Tennon co-founded JuVee Productions. The company’s team page identifies Davis as CEO and Tennon as president, with a team working across film, television and other storytelling forms.
Further reading: Davis in conversation with NPR and Sight and Sound; TIME’s account of her Harvard speech; Netflix’s Giving Voice credits; and JuVee’s own account of its team. Sources are linked in the essay.
I’m Rob Urban. These essays are part of my work as a writer and consultant. You can get to know that work here.