SAG: Viola Davis wants more realistic female characters

Viola Davis' career has been filled with incredible characters, and she was honored by SAG with the Best Female Actor in a Drama Series award for portraying the smart, dogged, and conflicted Annalise Keating on “How to Get Away with Murder.” But the Tony-winning, Oscar-nominated actress knows that there's still a need for more complex female characters in movies and film.

“The sexualized, messy, outwardly strong, inwardly vulnerable women I know in my life — they're anywhere from a size 0 to a size 24. They're the women who are usually marginalized on TV. They don't exist there. They don't exist sometimes in the movies. But they do exist in life,” Davis said in the SAG press room. “To me, that's where you can find the expansiveness of stories. You get real women up there. We want to see ourselves. We want to be inspired by that. We don't want to keep seeing these fictionalized versions of woman and feel bad about ourselves, really, at the end of the day.” 

She added, “I want to feel less alone when I look at TV and film.” 

Check out our video to see Davis discuss her acting idols and why, if she could, she'd stay 28 forever. 

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