Viola Davis Quotes
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I look back at pictures of myself and I remember thinking, "I was so fat when I was growing up. I was 165 pounds when I graduated from high school. I was a mess".
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When Denzel [Washington] first called me on the phone after we'd just done a reading of the film ["Fences"]. He said, "Oh Viola it was so good, wasn't it?! I'm gonna tell Russell [Hornsby] to lose a little bit of weight and..." I was just sitting there thinking, why is he calling me? And I told him, "Denzel don't you tell me to lose weight!" He said, "I'm not telling you to lose weight! I can't believe you would say that."
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I don't think most people understand acting, even the people who call themselves savvy, even actors.
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I would love to star in a remake of Thelma and Louise. Yep, that's the one I'd be interested in redoing.
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I didn't see myself any different from my white counterparts in school. I just didn't! I thought I could do what they did. And what I didn't do well, I thought people were going to give me the opportunity to do well, because maybe they saw my talent, so they would give me a chance. I had no idea that they would see me completely different.
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I am the mother of a 6-year-old now, so that's changed my entire perspective.
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I am not a glam woman - this definitely is a mask I put on for the public.
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I had to invest in the love and understand that with the love comes the pain. So when he tells me that, the monologue is already there. Does that make sense?
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And "classically not beautiful" is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.
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When you see what the deficit is, then you have to do something about it.
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Now, a lot of people may be surprised at that, but I'm very dedicated to working out. Usually, it's running. It clears my mind, totally. I get on the treadmill, which I just bought, and I run on that for about 40-45 minutes.
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I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish.
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I have a lot of spiritual books that I read that I really, really love - everything from the Bible to Joseph Campbell, who I love. He wrote The Hero of a Thousand Faces. It's about exploring what is heroic in you. It helps me a lot.
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You see all the young girls, and they're so skinny. I actually don't even twirl anymore. They say, "Twirl, let us see your back." I just tell 'em, "I do not twirl. If you want to see my back, when I walk away, you can take a picture of it. I'm not twirling." You know, I twirled once, and I almost fell. It looks ridiculous. So I said I'm not twirling anymore.
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Every artist, true artist, struggles with an overwhelming sense of feeling like you're not worthy.
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People are just not impressed by me at home.
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Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.
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[I listen to] "Uptown Funk", Bruno Mars, sometimes even Nina Simone and Adele. Whatever comes up, whatever floats my boat, whatever makes me tap into something in me to just decompress - I listen to that.
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I love Wal-Mart. You can put that down. I love Wal-Mart. My husband and I hang out there.
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When you shoot a scene, you remember every moment. You remember when your head went down, your head went up. You don't see little quirks, little eye movements, little lip movements. Once again, you become completely vain when you're watching it in a way that you weren't when you were shooting it. And the vanity, what it makes you focus on are everything that has nothing to do with the scene and everything to do with your own ego.
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I felt that there could be some anger. There could be some frustration that he has the tendency to take over the room, but I wanted all of those things to show in the grays of her hair and the fact that her hips are much wider than they probably were when she met him. I wanted it to show in the fact that her hair is not done up all the time. I wanted it to be a part of that every day that wasn't in your face. Because then for me, that's overacting. To me, that's not "being." I wanted Rose [in "Fences"] to be many things.
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Tyler Perry's 'Madea Goes to Jail!' Which, I have to tell you, of everything that I've ever done in my career, that's the only thing that's perked up the ears of my nieces and nephews. That is it, that's done it for them. That made me a bona fide star in their eyes!
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For me, that was a hard scene [in "Fences"] to do twenty-something times, which (laughing), I counted. That was difficult, but once I did it, I felt like I could do anything.
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You absolutely feel, as a black actress, that you've got to ride the wave because there's just so few roles. I hate to play that card, but it's the truth. There's not a lot of roles.