Viola Davis says she feels like she ‘betrayed’ herself by being in The Help

Viola Davis says a part of her feels like she ‘betrayed’ herself by starring in The Help.

The Academy Award-winner explained her mixed feelings about the 2011 film in a profile for the August issue of Vanity Fair,  telling the magazine while ‘there’s no one who’s not entertained’ by the movie, it was created ‘catering to a white audience.’

Viola, 54, said she has regrets about being in the movie because it ‘wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth]’ about racism.   

The film follows the story of two Black working as maids for a white family in Mississippi in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and has been critiqued for having an oversimplified take on race relations .

Others have called The Help out as a ‘white savior’ story for the ways it centers on the feelings of its white characters more than the struggles of the Black leads. 

But Viola said The Help was the right part for her at that point in her career.

‘I was that journeyman actor, trying to get in,’ she explained. 

And Davis relished working with the powerful female-focused cast of Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain lead by writer-director Tate Taylor.

‘I cannot tell you the love I have for these women, and the love they have for me,’ she says. ‘But with any movie—are people ready for the truth?’ 

Still, she was discouraged by the oversimplified way the film dealt with racism and the inner lives of the Black characters.

‘Not a lot of narratives are also invested in our humanity,’ said Davis. ‘They’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black, but…it’s catering to the white audience.

She went on: ‘The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the movie theater and they talk about what it meant. They’re not moved by who we were.’

‘There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help. But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth],’ Viola admitted.

In this way, Viola said that The Help was ‘created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism’ that pervades society. 

This isn’t the first time Viola’s been frank about her work on The Help.

In 2018 she told The New York Times: ‘I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny [Jackson]. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom.’

‘And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.’

Since, the How To Get Away With Murder actress said she’s seen her entire career as an exercise in liberation.

‘I feel like my entire life has been a protest,’ Viola – the first Black woman to win an Emmy for lead actress in a drama – revealed

‘My production company is my protest. Me not wearing a wig at the Oscars in 2012 was my protest. It is a part of my voice, just like introducing myself to you and saying, “Hello, my name is Viola Davis.”‘