The Many Lives of Viola Davis

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before Viola Davis (How to Get Away with Murder) became an EGOT-winning actor, she was an observer. Her work takes the human experience and transmutes it, offering a mirror and a window into ourselves.

Today, we sit to unpack her recent, liberating projects in The Woman King (4:24) and G20 (4:50), the formative years she spent growing up in Rhode Island (13:52), and how she captured those familial memories in her 2022 memoir Finding Me (17:12). Then, we talk about Viola’s start as a performer (23:40), what she learned attending Juilliard (31:57), and the quagmire she faced as a Black actor emerging on Broadway and in Hollywood post-graduation (35:10).

On the back-half, Davis reflects on a scene from August Wilson’s play Seven Guitars (37:50), her singular experience acting alongside Meryl Streep in Doubt (47:25), and the ways her life transformed during Shonda Rhymes’ How to Get Away with Murder and Steve McQueen’s Widows (53:00). To close, Viola shares her views on legacy (1:01:05) and how she finds her way back home, each and every day (1:05:20).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Lemonada
0:02.0	Lemonada
0:04.0	This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam for Goso. Welcome to the show.
0:42.4	Today, actor and producer, Viola Davis.
0:48.0	She's one of 21 people with an egot, an Emmy for How to Get Away with Murder,
0:53.5	a Grammy for her memoir, Finding Me, an Oscar for her supporting turn and fences, and a Tony Award for the same play
0:55.9	written by August Wilson. But before she was an award winner, she was just an observer. And as the
1:03.6	first black family to live in Central Falls, Rhode Island, Davis saw everything. There was a lot to
1:10.7	observe. Love, pain, poverty, abuse, addiction, joy. Like a Viola Davis performance itself, her upbringing had a lot of notes and shades. It was not one thing. Maybe it never is. Davis's work is equally hard to pin down.
1:31.9	How do you articulate greatness anyway? How do you explain what she does in films like
1:37.3	Doubt or Widows or The Woman King? You can't and so I won't. But I will give you her words. They weren't about herself,
1:46.7	but Merrill Streep, who at the time was receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Golden
1:52.2	Globes. She sees you, said Davis, describing Merrill, and like a high-powered scanning machine,
1:59.1	she's recording you.
2:04.5	She is an observer and a thief.
2:10.9	She waits to share what she has stolen on that sacred place which is the screen.
2:24.0	She makes the most heroic characters vulnerable, the most known, familiar, the most despised, relatable, Dame Streep. Her artistry reminds us of the impact of what it means to be an artist, which is to make
2:30.2	us feel less alone.
2:33.8	Hearing that again, that's about as good of a description of what Davis does as I could come up with.
2:40.2	An observer and a thief who takes human experience and then transmutes it,
2:47.4	offering a mirror and a window into ourselves. And so today, Viola and I talk through her creative process,
2:55.8	which is invariably informed by lived experience, both hers and others. We also get into her latest
	...

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