Viola Davis On Growing Up Hungry: ‘I Have Jumped in Huge Garbage Bins With Maggots to Get Food’

Viola Davis is having the year of her life with her newest role in Shonda Rhimes‘ highly successful primetime show, How to Get Away With Murder. Yet, she hasn’t forgotten where she came from and how she was raised. The actress was recently acknowledged at the Variety’s annual Power of Women Luncheon in Los Angeles, where she used her time behind the podium to give insight on her life before Hollywood and how it was the extreme opposite. This wasn’t the first time she talked about her difficult upbringing but it was the first time she went into descriptive detail about her hunger experiences.

I didn’t join the hunger campaign to join the world. I joined the hunger campaign to save myself. You know they say, you’re never too old to have a happy childhood.

She did admit that she had lots of happy memories, but she also lived in “abject poverty.”

I was one of the 17 million kids in this country who didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, and I did everything to get food. I have stolen for food. I have jumped in huge garbage bins with maggots for food. I have befriended people in the neighborhood, who I knew had mothers who cooked three meals a day for food, and I sacrificed a childhood for food and grew up in immense shame.

Press play to watch her complete speech.