In January 2023, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Cate Blanchett presented the Chairman’s Award to Viola Davis for The Woman King. Blanchett’s speech made the room laugh; Davis answered with a speech about the work of a Black actress in Hollywood.
"Not a speech, an audition"
Cate Blanchett said she wasn't giving a speech but auditioning, for co-star, supporting actress or personal assistant, in any Viola Davis project. She even knows how Davis takes her coffee. Then the list: one of 24 actors to hold the Triple Crown of Acting and the only African American among them, a memoir just published, and JuVee Productions, founded in 2011 with her husband Julius Tennon. Blanchett stressed what those achievements cost. There was no "Viola Davis-shaped hole" in the industry, so Davis had to make room for herself and for others, knowing that failure weighs more on a Black actor. Her greatest gift, Blanchett said, is empathy: she takes the audience by the hand and brings it with her.
The hammer and the chisel
Viola Davis began with something a Juilliard teacher once told her: most people don't understand what actors do. There is the business (box office, test screenings, billing, pay) and there is the work, which means digging through your own trauma and memories. She compared it to Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption, chipping at a wall for years with a small hammer and chisel. For Black actors, she said, that wall is an industry that says you can't carry a global box office, you're not pretty enough, not light-skinned enough. She and her husband founded their company "out of necessity". The Woman King, she said, is simply a great story, one that shows Black women in a different light.
She quoted a plaque she found on Martha's Vineyard: the warrior does not fight because she hates what is in front of her, but because she loves what she left behind. At 57, she trained five hours a day for eight months for the role. She thanked director Gina Prince-Bythewood, her husband and the producers, and ended with a wish: that actors of colour thrive because of the business, not in spite of it.