From her captivating colorful red carpet moments to her all-natural beauty remedies, Viola Davis is one of the most relatable actresses on our small screens every week. And now, the How To Get Away With Murder star is opening up about her sexuality in a recent interview, and we can’t help like her even more.
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Years before landing the lead role as sexy, intense Annalise Keating in How To Get Away With Murder, Davis attended Julliard, where she felt she had to be something she wasn’t in order to land roles. “I always tried to be the 90-lb. white girl. Only because we did a lot of classical training and all of the ingénues in Shakespeare were very small women,” she told Essence. “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.”
But now, the Screen Actors Guild award winner is thrilled to have the opportunity to embrace her sexuality on screen each week. “It feels really good to embrace exactly who I am and be my sexy or be my sexualized. To be my woman, you know?,” she said. “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.”
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Davis doesn’t take all the credit for her being able to share her sexuality with fans each week, though. The star looks to fellow TV stars who haven’t been afraid to be sexual in front of the cameras (yes, we’re talking about you, Olivia Pope!). “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,” she said. “And [Scandal] creator Shonda Rhimes, too, is the one who is fearless with it. You see it with Chandra Wilson, with Sandra Oh, Kerry Washington. She does it. She walks the walk.”
Do you watch Davis on How To Get Away With Murder? If not, will you now?
–Sarah Kinonen
