YouSaid · the spoken record

Viola Davis

lines on the record: 33
first: 2023-04-19
most recent: 2023-04-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, we do. We come from that sort of history. We're coming from a history where black women were chattel. Yeah. And if you read Joyce DeGuy's post-traumatic slave syndrome, all of that is rooted in our past. They'll get over it. They're strong enough. They may have been traumatized in the past, but they're like animals. They just recover very, very fast. I'm sure that Ma that that was her everyday system that didn't recognize you as a human being. So then how do you evolve from that?”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know that it was something that was already in me. And there was something about putting on that padding and swishing my hips in the room and telling that band that it's what I say, what I say goes. And Ma listens to her heart. Ma listens to the voice inside of her. There's something about playing Ma that became an affirmation for Viola because I've always been the shy girl, but there is a feeling when you reach a certain position where I'm at that there is a power that you need to harness. And Ma helped me to harness the viola power, the feeling that I deserve to be in the room, the feeling that I deserve all that I have received in my life because I worked. For it.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, I have to say this. Just knowing my worth, I cannot stress that enough. You know, Brene Brown talks about it. I didn't know that you sort of come into the world worthy. I really didn't. I felt, you know, you have to, you know, get an education. You got to go to the top school. You have to look a certain way. And so.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely Don't cancel me The real part of an apology comes from a revelation that you've done wrong. You want to make amends. But I don't believe people understand that yet. They don't understand the depth and the scope of systemic racism and how it has metastasized into a cancer that permeates how you see me, your perception of me, your lack of perception, your microaggressions. That are so pervasive. So I don't know how an apology can come from that. I don't”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the thing about an apology, okay? And please take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt is. A lot of apologies are coming now because of the cancel culture. Nobody wants everything that they built to be completely erased, okay? So a lot of it, and I don't know which ones are coming from a place of not sincerity, but protection and survival.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I guess he apologized, and people are demanding more of an apology. I get that. My thing is. Where's my apology I've had a lot of interviews or reviews with people, especially during How to Get Away With Murder, she's ugly, she's not vulnerable enough, so I'm not gonna watch it. Like literally saying that in a review.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That still is escapes us. I mean, I see it even in movie making, in terms of the films that are made with women The only thing we have is strong black girl, black girl magic, which all of that doesn't really help you in your day-to-day mental health. We are way more vast than being strong, but a huge part of that has been put on us through history. We are vulnerable. There are times when, listen, I want to be protected. There are times I'm very hurt, you know, when people just are sort of okay with saying you're ugly. I've had reporters say that to me. I know Carrie Mulligan is out there now, which I absolutely love, by the way. If I see her, I will shake her hand and hug her. Well, after COVID, but was she a reporter from Variety, I guess in a review said she wasn't hot enough for promising young woman.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why received it? I received it. I received it only because it made me feel wonderful. You know, there's a part of that that's devastating to me with black women because I still feel very much feel with the intersectionality, even in feminism, that we're sort of still rendered invisible, that there is a part of us that's still sort of fighting to be accepted into that fold of womanhood. I'm not saying that we wake up every day saying, please, you know, um, validate us.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“irrelevant she is what Carrie Fisher said fame is nothing but obscurity waiting to happen. She's being overshadowed by people like Bessie Smith who she taught. She can't copyright her own material. She's with a manager who is bilking her out of money. She is a black woman living in America 1927. So when you look at that and you deal with that context, then you see the sheer depth and scope of who she is.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they are a tactic A tactic that is an extension of her maybe seeking love. Seeking some semblance of wholeness. And then it's hard to go back to just not liking them. Understand the whole human being. Now you as an actor, you have to understand that because you are the character. So you have to understand the motivating factor. You cannot just deal with the mask that the person puts on. And the mask that someone like Mar Rainey puts on, if you don't understand it, and that's another conversation I would love to have, but it gets into a different arena. But if you just looked at my reigning, you would just think Viva. Tesadeva. She's an Adiva. She's a person who very shortly after this is over is going to be rendered invisible.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every last one of those characters were fighting for their value in a culture that erased it. A past that erased it. And so how do you hustle for your value? What does it look like? For instance, if you walk into a room and you don't like someone because of their actions, say it's a woman who is very flirtatious. She's probably overtly sexual. She probably says things that are inappropriate. So you make a judgment based on those actions, right? And whatever that could be. A lot of times with women, we have a tendency with women like that to not like them. Okay. But if you sat down with them and they shared their story that she was sexually abused when she was a child. She talks about how traumatic that was. And she talks about how she, I don't know, feels dirty. Then all of a sudden you see those actions in a different context.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no language for it. And you know what? He did not like being famous, although I really, really believe that he was grateful. He's too much of a generous spirit to not understand that he was blessed. But I don't know if he liked it so much. And the thing about that is because you're serving sort of two masters. You're serving that image that is out there. And then you're serving you. And they are diametrically opposed. He wasn't interested in the famous image. That was not Chad's thing. He wasn't even interested. He had left Black Panther behind.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, to be authentic, you know, and like they say, courage is just fear said with prayers. I just felt that he was not interested in being a movie star as much as he was concerned with being a really great artist. There was a sense in Chadwick that there was some other force operating. Besides the earthly realm, there was something transcendent about him. Like he would play the Jimbe drum in his trailer and he carried that Jimbe drum with him everywhere. He said, Viola, and I do it just for me. I play it just for me. I don't care how well people think I play it. And you know what's called the talking drum. It takes on the spirit of whoever plays it. And so you would go to your trailer and you would hear him just playing it with everything that was in his body”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll remember about his legacy is his integrity. And I know that people say that so often, people say that to the point where it's ridiculous. I mean, they dole that out just like they dole out the word brilliant, but there's not a lot of integrity out there. There just isn't. I mean, I think it takes a lot of courage.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I felt like I was armed with all the tools to be able to morph into this character. I felt good about it, but you just never know how it's going to land. You just don't. Listen, you have more control on stage than you do on screen. You just do Because you're not looking at yourself. It's not predicated on what you thought you did and how it actually looks. But I'm really good with letting a character go. I really am. I just walk away from it. But I had a great, it was a perfect experience. It was just one of those experiences where all the artists came together in the most perfect way because it's not just on me. It's the makeup. It's the hair. It's the costumes. It's George Wolfe's direction. It's the other actors. It's everything coming together at once. It's the only collaborative art form.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I had just a couple of months to prepare, but I was still juggling how to get away with murder. It was the final season. It was the final episode. So there was a lot of juggling”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't. I did some of them. I really did. You know, in hindsight, I wish I had more time because I would have done the vocals. I had very little time because I was doing how to get away with murder.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to observe human life in order to morph into it. And the fact that I did not want to cover up my breasts as Ma, because I know that the women I knew who grew up, you know, and their breasts were hanging out, they just let him hang out. I never knew people who covered them. I didn't know those women. I actually didn't even know the people who even always mopped their sweat. After a while they mopped it or whatever and then they just let it drip.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They helped me believe that I was her. That's how it helped me. It helped me believe that I wasn't Biola anymore, that I could sort of disappear, that I sort of, you know, as an actor, you have to be an observer and a thief, right?”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And then to actually be there and to have people believe that I was who I was. I can't say more than that. It sort of was like Nirvana. And I'm a shy woman in general. I'm really introverted. So that was a lot for me to stand up in front of people and flirt with men in the audience. That's a lot for me. That's not me”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know the time period, what was going on. And so by the time those actors came into the tent, they had stepped into the scene, honestly, because here's the thing, Oprah. There is a resistance to specificity when it comes to black artists. There is sort of either a general notion of who we were or we exist in metaphor. But there's no exploring the absolute specificity of how they bought the tickets, of what they were eating when they were sitting in that theater, where they were coming from, how each of their hair”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you had to be there. That's the only thing I could say was absolutely, first of all, just going into that tent with the big bales of hay and the sort of little makeshift stadium seating and then hundreds of extras, black extras, dressed really specifically with their bags of popcorn. And they were all waiting for the show. I mean, they were all waiting. You know, it's like my makeup artist said. He said he got into this profession because he always wanted to experience time travel. And that's what it was. It was time travel. And then when I came out on the stage, the men screaming and sweating and saying, oh. They were there and Anro went to each and every one of those audience members and she explained their costumes. Material that they were made from.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had peanuts in it, too, by the way, salted peanuts. Oh man, I was eating the hell out of those peanuts too. I'm not gonna lie.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It was a hard thing to navigate. But I always hope that when people watch it, they understand the weight of Toledo saying we're the leftovers. Ma saying all they want is my voice. They don't care nothing about me, of the weight of her saying Irvin has been my manager for seven years and the only time he invited me into his home was to sing for his white friends. Just the weight and the value of that because I think from the moment you see her fur that she has wrapped around her neck, even though it's not cold, that everything is telling you that I'm worth it. You don't see me, but I am worth it. If I have to punch it into your face, if I have to use the Coca-Cola, if I have to yell at every band member, if I have to make people wait for me that”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's valuable because all the stories of insurrection, all the stories of my husband's mom, his grandmother, people who did speak up for themselves, people who didn't just bow their heads, people who did have moments of understanding their worth. They're sort of buried under there. I felt that Ma very much was a product of her time in understanding that there was limitations of where she could go with it. But at the same time, her voice was something made from... I don't know supernatural allies, supernatural forces. I mean, this is a woman who knew that she was the show from the moment she walked in the room.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And valuable and worthy. See, they all go hand in hand. And at the same time, she is famous, but that fame is not getting her the golden ticket into that school of worth. But she was very much a liberated woman because I feel that she did not fall prey to the traps of her time. She fought for herself. From the moment you see her, she is fighting for her worth. When she did eventually retire, she literally bought a theater in her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, and all of these artists who came through town performed in that theater, and she got a cut of the money. And here's the thing. I think that”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge part of it. This is during the Great Migration. This is during a time when there was great promise for black people. There was a hope of getting beyond your circumstances and sort of redefining yourself. You know, and this is a woman who was coming from the Deep South in Chitland Circuit shows, which is the only shows we were allowed to perform in. And then you add on to that, which it's something that I always want to interject into narratives even today, is that she's dark skin black woman. She is a woman who's not considered beautiful.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I loved my Aunt Joyce. Other than my mom, she was the first woman that I knew that was absolutely beautiful. She was a woman of a bigger size, but for me and my sisters, every time we knew she was coming, we sat by the door. She always wore the latest fashion. She was extraordinarily confident and extraordinarily flawed. She was with my uncle Red, who she always bossed around and she always tried to boss around my father. They would get into it. She would take her earrings off. And then she would, you know, take her shoes off. She would yell at my, I mean, I relied on what I know about life to sort of fill in the blanks with Ma.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, really, I had to start with the given circumstances. And, you know, unfortunately, Oprah, with so many, and I will say this, there's so many black people who have lived that have done extraordinary things and there's no information about them. There's very little. That's what I had to deal with first, and she had a mouthful of gold teeth. If someone says that about a human being, then that's who they are. And then after that, I ran out of information. There just is not a lot of information out there. So then I had to rely on what I know about life and what I know about women, the women that I know in my life, the black women in my life. And I started with my aunt Joyce. I'm not going to lie because...”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought about the fact that before this she did Coonface shows with her husband, Pa Rainey. And I thought to myself, what if the makeup is beautifully imperfect? Beautifully and perfect than theatrical. I remember when I started out as an actor, we had to get makeup boxes. They were Benai makeup boxes. And if you were an actor of color, you had to get the black makeup box. And the makeup was really heavy. It was called Dark Negro Light Negro Light Egyptian. It had names like that. So I imagine what that would look like, you know. And I actually thought when I saw it, I said, for me, that was something specific as opposed to. Just falling into the general notion of just wearing pretty makeup, just to wear pretty makeup.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the reasons why he didn't is see the thing about our profession is enacting, you have to study life. It's got to be about life. And we know, me and you know, that life is messy, right? And when studying Mulrainey, people who knew her said that her makeup under the lights looked like it was melting, looked like melted grease paint. And then I thought about the heat.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Well, that really is always my goal, but this character is probably further away from me in terms of just the look, in terms of everything about it. So that is a goal. You know, you have to become another human being is what you have to become. But, you know, it's like that opening scene, that opening shot, it took some time to make the decision in terms of the makeup and in terms of the look. It took a leap of faith on my part because I did not want the makeup to look pretty. I didn't.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what, Oprah, it's a combination of a great affirmation, but also a fear. Well, the imposter syndrome follows everyone. I don't care. I mean, I feel like it's sort of a false narrative if I said that, you know, every time I get an award, I just walk off the stage and I feel like the boss, I feel like it's affirmation, but real in reality, those three words keep playing over and over in my head, which is, and now what? You start the next job, you get on that set, and for a minute you feel like you're just starting all over again. They're going to be found out that you're not as good as people think you are. You have an added responsibility, an added visibility. It's fear. It's something that's deeply human, I think. But yes, it's an affirmation. I always have to.”
2023-04-19 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Viola Davis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source