Viola Davis stands up for ‘regular’ women: ‘I didn’t want to be the Vogue woman’

How her role applies to real life:

My responsibility is not to create something that people like, that people want to sleep with. I don’t think that when women move through their life, they’re thinking every moment that, “I’m going to be who I am because I want you to sleep with me.” Now it may be that way when they go to a club, but I’m just saying 24/7. And I do feel as an artist that I want to do something that hasn’t been done before with women of color. We like women of color when they’re sassy, when they’re maternal, when they’re bold, when they are exactly who they are. You know, there’s no mystery about them. And I do feel a certain responsibility to be none of that.

How she felt about the wig scene:

Well, I didn’t want to be the Vogue woman. I didn’t want to be the woman who came in with the sexualized–I say sexualized, not sexy, because sexy is a certain self-consciousness to sexuality–I say that Annalise is sexual. Every time you see that sexual, mysterious, kind of cold woman, she always looks like she has that blow-dried hair and that dewy skin and, you know, those Double-Zero clothes. I did not want to be that woman because I don’t know that woman

How she feels about the ageism and sexism against women in entertainment:

I think that there’s a restriction when you label someone just in terms of their sex and their race. Because I think that there is an expectation of who you need to be within the confines of that. I just mentioned that with the black women, you gotta be sassy, you gotta be sexy, your hair has gotta be a certain way. It’s very iconic roles that have existed in the past for black women. Like I said, I don’t want to have any structure. I don’t want to have any kind of reins put on me. I want to be absolutely human in my role.

Click here to read the full interview.

By –@poisedstudios