How Viola Davis Learned to Fully 'Embrace' Herself
Actress says role on "How to Get Away with Murder" found her at right time.
Feb. 5, 2015— -- For Viola Davis, playing the sexy, smart and ruthless Annalise in ABC's "How to Get Away with Murder," has been game-changing in more ways than one.
"It feels awesome. It really does. I love it," she told the latest issue of Essence about being able to play a role unlike any other she's had before.
"I went to Julliard in New York and I always tried to be the 90-pound white girl. Only because we did a lot of classical training and all of the ingénues in Shakespeare were very small women," she said. "So I tried to make myself small. Literally. I don’t know how I did that. I was like thinking, 'Small. Light.' I would try to have a higher voice, which sounds ridiculous right? But I felt like there’s only one way to be sexy. It’s almost like I felt like I had to disappear."
That changed with her new hit series.
"It feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy or be my sexualized [self]," the 49-year-old actress told Essence. "To be my woman, you know? And it’s been the joy of my life. It really has and I think it found me at the right time of my life. When I really am very unapologetic for who I am."
She added, "That helps other women, too. I think women want to see themselves on TV. I really do. I think we’re in the 21st century, I think we have to woman up. I think a lot of women have womaned up and we want to see ourselves and it feels great."
Davis recently took home the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series.
She thanked the show's creator and innovator Shonda Rhimes, among others, "for thinking that a sexualized, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old dark-skinned African-American woman who looks like me."
"And thank you to all the people who love me exactly how God made me," she added.