A vision in red: Viola Davis walks at a brisk pace, confident smile and deep gaze. Guest of Salma Hayek and of her talks of her to the female of her, she will be awarded the Women in Motion Award 2022 to the Cannes Film Festival, as a recognition of excellence in the audiovisual world. Not that surprising: in the history of the Oscars she is the African American artist with the most number of nominations (she won one for The Help). Looking forward to seeing you playing Michelle Obama in the series The First Ladyby the end of the year on Paramount +, wrote the memoir Finding Me in which he traces his own history from the beginning.
He also talks about it on the Croisette, in a sea view suite set up for the Kering event. On the French Riviera with her husband Julius Tennon, she jokes about her innate determination which, according to her, works on everything about her except her daughter Genesis, adopted in 2011: “You should have seen me trying to get the 11-year-old home to do their homework last night.”
This gorgeous 56-year-old doesn’t get intimidated easily, quite the contrary. «But I don’t want it to be said – she specifies – that it is“ despite the circumstances ”but thanks to them. When your heart is broken and over and over then you understand clearly what life is and you value it. I never took a clean pair of sheets or a working refrigerator for granted because I didn’t have such things when I grew up.“.
The very poor childhood, the alcoholic father and the discrimination were told in the autobiography with great clarity: “For me it was a cathartic process, during the pandemic, in the midst of an existential crisis. The world was falling apart, between Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 and discrimination against the LGBT + community… so I started to question everything I was doing ».
Every self-respecting story starts from the beginning and she, she remembers, at the time was “a black girl in a white community who heard “ugly N *** a” (he uses the word in full, ed.). I became good at embracing anxiety and fear but that didn’t stop me from moving forward and knowing that sooner or later I would find the world of Oz because I deserved it. “
From the outside it looks like that moment has arrived and that the nomination for the Academy Awards has relegated prejudices, discrimination and offenses to the past: «It all seems to be over there, when I went down the steps of the stage, because I received the same roles as before. I hit rock bottom and that familiar anger inside me kept stirring. I didn’t want to feel like this anymore, that’s why I founded a production company with my husband that would give me the possibility to do what I want. After all, whoever looks like me if he is not recognized as a public figure goes back to being invisible ».
Does Hollywood really leave you no choice? “It is not true that it is the actors who decide or select the roles. A lot of us don’t have any of them and I’ve gotten good shit roles trying to make them human and three-dimensional. Obviously I’d like to do an action with Tom Cruise, who wouldn’t want to? But those who say the opposite are lying, like those who swear to eat sweets in the middle of the night and do not get fat because they have a fast metabolism. But who do they want to give it to drink? And I say it as a good fork ».
The actress, who received the pop consecration of the public with the series The rules of the perfect crime by Shonda Rhimes, admits that a starring role for an African American artist in a thick story hasn’t become the norm in show business but remains an exception. “If I want to be the mother of a kid affiliated with gangs and then killed by other criminals then I find plenty of scripts but it never occurs to me to play a fifty-year-old who has a good time on the Riviera with a good number of men.the. And do you know why? Because in hearing this scenario, however, it does not reconcile with the widespread mental preconception. Everything would be easier if my skin was five shades lighter, even better if I were blonde with light eyes and a Caucasian nose. Instead we all have value and we don’t have to earn it by trying to adapt to shared standards. It’s time to say enough ».
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Source: Vanity Fair
