Viola Davis’ Inspirational Rise to Icon Status

Find your leaf pads

Davis is a longtime fan of Anne Lamott, 70, the author of bestselling books like Somehow: Thoughts on Love and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. She was particularly affected by a story that Lamott told once, a metaphor about a friend giving her a leaf pad, meaning a safe place to land. “That leaf pad was enough to carry her to the next leaf pad, and then carry her to the next leaf pad,” Davis remembers. “That’s how she moved through her life, through her pain, through everything, until she got to a landing. And that’s what it was for me.… When someone loves you, and sees more in you than you see in yourself, you cannot put a price on that. That was every single one of my teachers in high school, in the Upward Bound program, in Summer in the City. Those were my leaf pads.”

Embrace your imperfections

Like any of us, Davis can be self-critical — which can be especially easy to do when you’re under the constant spotlight of Hollywood. “I used to say the imperfections have to go,” she told us. “I would go to bed thinking of how I could change them, and would wake up and go through the whole cycle again. The other day I got on that dang old scale and it did not say what I wanted it to say. I tried to get another scale, but couldn’t find it.” But then Davis stopped herself and realized that she was beating herself up unnecessarily. “My inner therapist — which is the best — said, ‘You’re good exactly as you are.’ “

It’s OK to be unlikable

Davis hasn’t exactly appeared in a lot of fluff — check out some of her more memorable roles over the years — but she has portrayed a few characters that weren’t as richly complex as she’d prefer. “I’ve played warm and fuzzy to the point that it’s made me nauseous,” she told us. “We’re not always likable. Sometimes we’re mean, and we’re mean to the people we love.” She emphasized this point by putting her fingers together, as if in prayer. “I reserve the right to be a mess and completely unlikable.”

Leave the acrobatic sex to somebody else

Just when Davis thought she’d experienced it all, in 2015 she was cast in the hit ABC drama How to Get Away With Murder, and for the first time in her career, she was asked to do a sex scene. Davis told us that she’s not a fan of sex on-screen, insisting the scenes are “almost never realistic.” After shooting one, she made a pronouncement to her producers: “No more sex on walls! I was sore after that. I’m not 20 anymore, and, anyway, who does that?”