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Viola Davis: How to get away with getting real

Viola Davis in 'How to Get Away with Murder' (©2014 ABC Studios)

Tony winner and Academy award nominee Viola Davis is nothing like her character Annalise Keating in the brash new mystery drama, “How to Get Away with Murder” airing Wednesday nights on the rebranded Sony Channel on Philippine cable TV.

“I couldn’t be any different from Annalise.” the 49-year-old actress said in a recent phone interview about the strong, flawed and brilliant law professor she plays in the TV series.

“That’s not how I life my life. I don’t believe in secrets…. and I definitely have a happy marriage and a happy home life,” she added, having been married to actor Julius Tennon since 2003.


Empathy

But she does empathize with her character, seeing her toughness as a guise to cope with the slings and arrows of everyday life.

“You feel like you have to leave your vulnerability at home because it can be seen a little bit as weakness,” she said.

“That’s certainly the feeling I have as a 21st century woman: that I’ve got to be really hard to face the world out there, that I gotta be a bulldog.”


Davis plays law professor Annalise Keating. (©2014 ABC Studios)
Davis plays law professor Annalise Keating. (©2014 ABC Studios)


‘Abject poverty’

If there’s someone who understands how tough life can be, it’s Davis.

She grew up in what she has described as “abject poverty,” the second to the youngest of six children born to a dad who was a horse trainer and a mom who was a maid, a factory worker and civil rights activist.

As a child, Davis did “everything to get food,” she recalled, including jumping “in huge garbage bins with maggots” for something she could eat.

Viola Davis stars in 'How to Get Away with Murder' (©2014 ABC Studios)
Viola Davis stars in 'How to Get Away with Murder' (©2014 ABC Studios)


Never bitter

“I sacrificed my childhood for food, and grew up in immense shame,” she said in a stirring speech when she was honored at Variety’s Power of Women event last October.

But, she said during the phoner, “I really internalized my childhood in a way, but I never remember being bitter.”

Nor was she angry. “Just kind of sad about it…. I’m one of those people that just feels that everybody carries their past with them in good ways and bad ways? We carry our memories whether they deal with personal relationships with men, women, our mothers and fathers and it makes us who we are.”


Scholarships

It certainly appears to have informed her immense talent.

Plucked out of her circumstance by being, in her words, “a geek,” Davis got a scholarship at Rhode Island College, where she earned a Theater degree, before enrolling at the famed Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York City.

Since then, she has won two Tony awards and a Screen Actors Guild award for her work in the 2011 movie “The Help,” for which she was also nominated for the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.


How she got away with the ‘role of a lifetime’

Although she’s said elsewhere that working on a TV series is exhausting for the long hours it demands, she couldn’t pass up the offer to star in “How to Get Away with Murder.”

“This was a role I never played in my career. Ever,” she said during the phoner.

“People have seen me as Aibileen Clark in ‘The Help.’ Those are the types of roles that have come to me: best friends, maids, cops. I’ve never fully, solely played a… messy woman, a complicated woman and that’s all I needed to sign up for the role. I knew that an opportunity like this only really comes once in a lifetime.”



Real life

It was also important for her to “reflect life as it is” insofar as representing diversity and fearlessness on the small screen.

“I think it’s much more liberating for real women to see a real woman on the screen,” she said. “I know what that would’ve meant to me as a young girl to see someone like me on the TV.”

Which is why also she agreed to shed her wig, rip off her false eyelashes and wipe off her makeup during a pivotal scene in a recent episode.

Tom Verica as San Keating, the professor's husband.  ©2014 ABC Studios)
Tom Verica as San Keating, the professor's husband.  ©2014 ABC Studios)




Vulnerable

“It was very vulnerable to do that. People don’t understand that there are actions that (make you) very vulnerable,” she admitted.

As an African-American woman, “there’s a huge implication in taking off your hair and revealing your natural hair underneath,” she said.

“What will people think I look like, I can’t let anyone see my hair, I won’t look attractive…,” she recalled of the worries that beset her.


No apologies

It was an issue she had worked out within herself when she went to the 2012 Oscars.

"I took my wig off because I no longer wanted to apologize for who I am,” she had said then.

It was also one of the many lessons she learned since she began her career.


The plot thickens... (©2014 ABC Studios)
The plot thickens... (©2014 ABC Studios)


Biggest lesson

“I would go to auditions with the right kind of clothes, the right kind of hair—it would take me forever to find the right clothes to wear—and then I would go to the audition and not get the part because I was trying to be someone that I wasn’t,” she said.

“It was almost like denying me,” she realized.

“And the thing I know about showbiz is that the only thing you have when you walk into a room is you! That’s it! You can’t be a generic form of yourself. That’s my biggest lesson.”