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Viola Davis: ‘Play the president? Hell yeah!’

The Oscar-winning actress stars in a new thriller, G20. She talks about filming action scenes at 59, her ‘damaging childhood’ and why it’s finally time for her to have fun on screen

A scene in the latter when Davis’s stoic Rose rails against her unfaithful husband, Troy, played by Denzel Washington (“I took all my wants and needs and dreams and buried them inside you”), is one of the most pulverising pieces of acting you will see. That’s not why mooted biopics in which she had planned to play Harriet Tubman, the slave turned abolitionist, and Barbara Jordan, the American politician, are no longer happening — the scripts just didn’t work, she says. “Denzel said, ‘I want you to walk down those stars and slap him.’ I said, ‘OK but then what?’ He said, ‘I dunno — let’s see what happens.’ It opened up a whole complicated world of grief and pain,” she says, not least chiming with her conflicted feelings about her own father; she made peace with him before he died in 2006.

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