Actress Viola Davis has been in several TV shows and movies over the last decade, but her role in “The Role” benefited was recently bought back up in an interview.
“There’s no one who’s not entertained by ‘The Help,’” Davis said during an interview with Vanity Fair. “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]. ‘The Help,‘ like so many other movies, was created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism.”
The 2011 film, which was based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel of the same name, is about Black maids working for white families in Jackson, MS in 1963.
Davis character played Aibileen Clark alongside co-star Octavia Spencer who played Minny Jackson. Both characters received horrible and racist treatment throughout the film.
Although the movie does touch on racism that happened during the 1960s in Mississippi, it doesn’t go into detail about the actual horrors Black people faced at that time. However, the film was written as a feel-good story.
“The Help” was trending after the death of George Floyd, as a film that people should watch to better understand racism. The film proceeded to increase in streaming views online.
Davis said the only reason she accepted the role was that she “was that journeyman actor, trying to get in” and understood why it was written to entertain instead of educating.
“Not a lot of narratives are also invested in our humanity,” Davis explained. “They’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black, but … it’s catering to the white audience. 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.”
Davis talked about regretting her role in the film two years during another interview with Vanity Fair interview in 2018.
“I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,” Davis said. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. 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.”
Donate $1 To Keep The Black Detour Alive
10 Historical Photos From The Civil Rights Movement
Link to original source