JuVee began as a strategic way for Davis to try to alter the public perception of African-American life, which hasn’t changed much since Zora Neale Hurston observed, in 1950, that “the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America.” Davis told me, “It’s hard for people to see us beyond narratives that are didactic. In 2011, Davis, with her husband, the actor Julius Tennon, formed JuVee Productions, a multimedia company that takes on everything from virtual reality to movies. There were a lot of things that people did not allow me to be until I got . . . “As an actress, I have been a great victim of that. Taking off her wig-that is the show’s most famous moment, and it is all hers.” He added, “I can never state too much how she elevated the character.” It was a spectacular exhibition of agency in a woman who is, as she puts it, “darker than a paper bag.” “Colorism and racism in this country are so powerful,” Davis told Entertainment Weekly last year. If you’re not doing that, you’re basically not doing anything.” Nowalk elaborated, “From our very first phone call, she said, ‘I want to be a woman who takes off her wig and wipes off her makeup, and you see who she is underneath.’ She made the character frankly more complex, more interesting. I see it as stepping up buck naked in front of a group of people that you don’t know. “I’m trying, within the confines of the narrative that I’ve been given, to show her pathology,” she told me. From the start, Davis pushed him to dramatize Annalise’s interior world and to show the private moments of this tough, brilliant professional, who has a difficult, and promiscuous, past. The show and her character were hatched in close collaboration with the series’ creator, Peter Nowalk. When Davis took on the role of Annalise Keating, a high-profile defense attorney and law professor, in the ABC legal-drama series “How to Get Away with Murder,” currently in its third season, she addressed this cultural trivialization directly. “There’s a limitation to how we are seen.” “I’ve played many best friends, crack-addicted mothers, next-door neighbors, or professionals with no personal lives,” she said. The lack of white curiosity about black life is something Davis is always tilting at. “No one had ever akst me what it felt like to be me,” Aibileen says at the end of the film. Not all her roles have been large or central to the narrative arc, but, as Aibileen Clark, the maid who helps expose the folly of the white Mississippi matrons she serves, in “The Help”(2011), she was a popular success and gained a second Academy Award nomination. Davis-“a newcomer at forty-five,” as Streep later joked-has made twenty-one films since then. When she got to Viola Davis-who had earned her first Academy Award nomination for her performance as the mother of an African-American boy a priest is accused of abusing-Streep saluted her colleague as “gigantically gifted,” then threw up her hands. Clutching her statuette, Streep gave a shout-out to the rest of the cast. On January 25, 2009, a jubilant Meryl Streep stood before a gala crowd at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, in Los Angeles, having just won an award for her role in “Doubt,” the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about sexual abuse, race, and the Catholic Church. Photograph by Awol Erizku for The New Yorker “I had a call to adventure, a call to live life bigger than myself,” Davis said.
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