Courtesy of Prime Video/IIze Kitshoff
One of the greatest actors alive talks to GQ about going throwback-John McClane mode in her new film about a commander in chief with a special set of skills.
Rhetorical question: Is there anything Viola Davis can’t do? She has two Tony Awards, an Emmy, and an Oscar. She achieved EGOT status by winning a Grammy for reading the audiobook of her bestselling memoir. She’s done August Wilson on Broadway, and she’s worked with every auteur from Steven Soderbergh to Tyler Perry. Unless you count her appearances in the DC Universe as the Suicide Squad’s boss Amanda Waller, the one thing she’s never done is a full-blown action movie—but that’s about to change.
This April, in the Amazon Studios film G20, Davis stars as Danielle Sutton, a war hero turned U.S. President who draws on old battlefield instincts to save the day when terrorists take the rest of the world’s leaders (and Sutton’s family) hostage during a summit meeting in Cape Town. It’s a new spin on the time-honored smug-villains-versus-the-one-guy-they-didn’t-factor-in ’90s action-film scenario—students of this sort of thing will recall Harrison Ford as a two-fisted chief executive in Air Force One, wrassling a Kazakh thug played by Gary Oldman and inviting him to deplane. Director Patricia Riggen says Ford’s nuanced character work within the stunt-y set pieces of The Fugitive was also a touchstone: “That was what I always told the writers—it’s not Rambo, it’s Richard Kimble, first and foremost.”
The difference here, of course, is Davis, who Riggen says brought the same level of emotional truth to a movie about the president of the United States getting into close-quarters elevator fights that she brings to all her work. “Even in a Hollywood extravaganza like this, it's infused with that depth and that realism,” Riggen says. “And that's Viola.”
We’ve got your first look at the trailer right here; it’s followed by our Q&A with Davis, in which the living legend reveals what it was like to branch out into action at the tender age of 59.
GQ: Madame President.
Viola Davis: Hello.
Hello. So: You’re a government official in the DC Universe. You were the CIA director in Syriana. You also, I believe, ran the CIA in Knight and Day.
Yep.
And of course, you’ve played the First Lady Michelle Obama. But what’s it like to finally be the president of the United States?
It was an interesting challenge. I would say that. I mean, you never think that playing a role like the president is going to inform your work so much and inform your choices. I found myself, in so many situations, saying, "I can't do that—I'm the president." It's that tenuous area, where you have to be very much human—a mom, a wife, and a human being with fragility, with emotions, with mess—but at the same time, you're the president of the United States, which then dictates is a certain behavior, all the time, that you have to funnel your emotions through. All the things that I wanted to do, that I love seeing on screen, I said, "I don't know. I mean, how many people can I kill in one scene?" I'm sure that probably a lot of people who are president have to toe that line, and it's a very difficult line to toe.
What is President Sutton's backstory when we meet her? What was her political career like? Was it a hard-fought campaign to make it to the White House?
I think it was hard-fought throughout. She’s a woman. She’s Black. I saw her as a senator first, really wanting to make a difference, just taking a chance. Operating on a local level even before being a senator, in local politics.
I didn't want to get too much into the weeds of that—we're doing a movie where you really have to suspend your disbelief in certain areas. But yes, her political career was fraught with a lot of pushback also, which is why when she finally is president, people are trying to take her down in terms of how she's mothering, how she's handling her business, asking her questions they probably wouldn't ask her male counterparts. But at the end of the day, it's fiction. It's a movie.
Right. You didn’t get hung up figuring out how she won Pennsylvania.
No.
You’ve done some action here and there in your career. I think of that amazing fight in The Woman King where you take off a chunk of that dude’s ear. But obviously the action focus here is beyond anything you’ve done in the past. Was doing a big action film a bucket-list item for you?
Oh, yeah. I love action movies, and I love women in action movies. I love when women harness their power, and we don't see that woman running through the woods who sprains her ankle and then can't get up and just cries and just sort of is completely defeated and brings everyone down with her or looks to the man and says, "How can we get out of this situation?"
I like when women use their physical power, because it's something that people tell us that we can't do. We automatically negate ourselves in that area. We already know that men are more powerful. They're going to overtake you every time you're in a situation, whether it's an elevator or on the side of a road with a flat tire, that there's some bogeyman out there that can beat you down.
So it's really great—even if it's just your imagination, even if it's just fantasy—to really see women in movies harnessing that physical power and seeing that their bodies can work for them, that it's not just adornment, that you can really protect yourself. Even if it's just make-believe, it's wonderful to just explore that notion.
Yeah, so I love action movies. I love all Angelina Jolie movies. I love Zoe Saldana in Colombiana. I mean, I could keep going. And Sigourney Weaver, of course. Loved her. And Angela Bassett in Strange Days. Really awesome. So yeah, I love it.
Turning that around a little bit; How does this character, this woman, approach this situation differently than, say, a Gerard Butler-type character? Is there something unique to her that comes out in these moments, that maybe one of those guys wouldn’t be able to access?
Well, I think because she's a woman, there's a beautiful sort of alchemy. There's a beautiful connection of both intelligence, empathy, and brawn. She uses her strength when she absolutely has to, and she doesn't question it. At the same time, she still takes a higher road and protects the people that need protection. She’s very heroic in that sense, and in the other sense of really using her intelligence. All three are operating at full tilt.
I would always say when we were shooting that it's in those moments, when push comes to shove, that you see those leadership skills, and why she was elected president. That beautiful sort of combination of caring about the least of these, protecting the least of these, using her intelligence, and at the same time doing whatever she physically can to protect herself, the people that she's trying to protect, and her family. It's a beautiful combination of all of that. I don't always see that with movies with men.
There’s this cliché that men are obsessed with “situational awareness,” with “knowing their exits," with how they would handle themselves in a scenario like this. Do you think that’s a specifically male-brained thing?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not male brain. That's me every day.
Really?
Even if I go to the mall, if I go to the grocery store, if I go to a restaurant, I always know where the exit is. I always have an exit plan. I don't like to have my back to the door, especially in the gym. I don't like that. Gyms and hotels. So I very much am safety conscious. That's because I have a 14-year-old daughter also.
I have a 14-year-old, too. How's that going for you?
Oh, my God. It's a lot. She's beautiful, but it's a lot.
Never a dull moment. But I love that you’re ready for anything. “This is how I’d hold it down if they take the Oscars hostage.” God forbid—but you’re ready.
Yeah. I play out every situation. Even in my house, I play out every situation, and it's constant. It's 24/7.
I like that there seems to be an in-story explanation for why President Sutton isn’t stuck fighting in high heels this whole movie. She’s in sneakers. Because this is GQ: Can we get an ID on the shoes?
An ID on the what?
On the sneakers you’re wearing in the movie.
Are you serious?
Everybody’s going to want to know.
I think they're Adidas. You’d have to ask Patricia [Riggen]. [Per an Amazon Studios representative, they're actually Under Armour.]
There was a time when a movie like this one would have been about terrorists threatening the world with a biological weapon. Before that, it would have been a nuclear weapon. And once upon a time, you’d have Goldfinger trying to break into Fort Knox and steal the U.S. treasury or whatever. This one is about cryptocurrency and deepfakes and the way the information environment has been weaponized. Obviously it’s a fun action movie first and foremost, but was that something you wanted people to think about? Did you want to sound a note of concern about those things?
Well, really, I just wanted a formidable villain. I wanted a formidable villain who posed a threat that everybody could relate to. If you're poor, if you're middle class, if you're wealthy, wherever you live in the world—some level of threat that was going to be meaningful to everyone and on the zeitgeist. But more importantly, too, [I wanted] a villain that really sort of walks the line between good or bad, someone that could be uber-attractive, but at the same time, uber-dangerous.
And the whole idea of cryptocurrency—it feels like we don't have enough money to live, we don't have enough money for our future, we don't have enough money for food, for whatever, so there's a part of [the villain’s] ideology that would appeal to the masses in a weird kind of paradoxical way.
He’s a dangerous guy. He's coming out of Afghanistan. He's coming out of being in a war where he obviously has some level of PTSD. And so the mixture of that made him a very interesting, complicated villain that you could humanize, even in a psychopathic way, as opposed to just a twirling-mustache villain who says, "I have a bomb and I'm going to blow up the world." I wanted him to be very human, if that makes any sense. So I would say, with the movie, that took the most time.
Dialing in that character?
Yeah. We wanted to give him some colors, and we wanted it to be on the pulse of the zeitgeist.
You’re hanging off a helicopter in this. You’re doing close-up fights where they can’t use a double. Was there anything you had to do in this movie that made you go, “What am I doing?” Like, “I went to Julliard—how did I end up here?”
I would say everything. Everything—but probably the fight with Csongers [played by actor David James], when he comes out of the elevator. That one was difficult—I had to use my body a little more. Woman King was about preciseness—we choreographed all of those fights before even got to [the set in] South Africa. A lot of these fights were choreographed in the moment.
So that was the most difficult, especially because even though it's make believe, when a big dude is coming at you, your body doesn't understand that it's in a movie, that this is an actor coming at you, and they're not going to hurt you. You don't recognize that. You just see a big guy coming at you with a gun who wants to kill you. That's what your body says, and that's what my body said with Csongers.
First of all, [James] is a huge actor—and the sweetest guy, by the way. The villains are always the sweetest people. But him coming out of that elevator and grabbing me—and of course it was very, very safe, but that, for me, was the most challenging.
Because you're still having that evolutionary kind of fight-or-flight thing happening in your brain.
The evolutionary thing of fight or flight, of being terrified, using my body, using my legs, picking up found weapons. I picked up a wooden plank at one point. It was one of those breakable planks, and then I had a gun at the same time. So, the gun, the wooden plank, the found material, using my legs, throwing punches at the right time, him picking me up at one point. A lot of moving parts.
And then at the same time, there’s that sort of inner voice in you that feels like, “Can I do this? Can I actually take this dude down?” Even in make believe, you still have to retrain your mind and 50-some-odd years of thinking that you're not capable, thinking, This is too violent, and, This is too mean. Asking, “Are you okay?” Everything I’ve ever been trained about being a girl. That feeling of being nice, which has nothing to do with the scene. The scene is about survival.
Just the preciseness of having people believe the scene, believe that I could do it. It was just challenging. Every time I would knock him over the head with the wooden plank, I'd always apologize and say, “Are you okay?” So there you go. That was the most difficult.
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