Viola Davis on Her ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ Role and Showing the Audience ‘All the Piss and the Poop and the Private Moments’

variety.com:

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Viola Davis said that probably her proudest achievement was the creation of her game-changing character Annalise Keating in legal drama thriller “How to Get Away With Murder,” during an onstage interview Thursday at the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where many in the ecstatic audience had greeted her by declaring, “I love you, Viola.” She also spoke of the bravery that was required to stand up to the orthodoxy that held sway in network TV when the show launched 10 years ago.

Variety publishes, below, an edited excerpt from the interview, which was as refreshing in its honesty as the actor’s performances. “As a character [as originally envisaged], she made absolutely no sense,” she said, eliciting laughter and applause in the audience. “I mean, you have to be honest with it: a lot of characters on television, they just don’t make sense.

They’re a Mr. Potato Head of an audience’s desires. They want them to walk like supermodels and they want them to look beautiful in the costumes and in the courtroom scenes, whether they’re wearing Alexander McQueen or Armani.

They talk really fast in Shondaland, you know, faster than what people actually speak. You don’t really see people as talking and listening, and, I mean … I don’t want to sound like I’m ragging. “And then you go into the sexuality thing, and maybe there is a plethora of women out there who have 15 sexual partners in a day, but what is missing from all of it is: the why. “And so, I was given the character … her name was Annalise DeWitt when I first started, and I was like, DeWitt?