Viola Davis Exposes Hollywood’s Black Narrative Problem

Viola highlights a significant problem within the industry:

The issue Viola speaks of in the film is that there is a lack of stories of the human experience and that Hollywood is focused on telling stories of the black experience, however; most of those films are made for a predominantly white audience.

As she states, “Hollywood has been giving us a very academic view of what it means to be black. We go to the movie theater and we have all these conversations about the themes, the meaning, etc. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because we’re still fighting to define ourselves.”

Viola also expresses a concern of not having a platform to showcase an up-and-coming black actress. Therefore, when she had the opportunity to do her first film, she stated, “I was that young actress who wanted to make my mark.” After the success of the film, Davis said she didn’t get bombarded with film offers, so three years later she got hired by ABC for their show How to Get Away with Murder, which she continued to work on through the final season. As she mentioned, a lot of people questioned why she left successful film acting to act on a television show.

Davis addresses this question directly, and asks, “What movies? Which ones?” as a way to express the fact that there were few film opportunities. In addition to mentioning Widows, a 2018 female heist film, she stated, “If I only relied on Hollywood for employment… No, those type of opportunities don’t exist.”