Viola Davis shares her powerful ‘testimony’ in her Cecil B. DeMille Award acceptance speech
Jan 07, 2025
(CNN) — Viola Davis shared her journey from poverty to being an EGOT winner, leaning into the “magic” that helped her earn the Cecil B. DeMille Award ahead of Sunday’s Golden Globes.The acclaimed actress said she felt like “someone just set me on fire” when she took to the stage to accept award, which honors those who have made “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.” She thanked her friend and presenter, Meryl Streep, whom she called “a great broad” before launching into her speech.“This is my testimony,” she said. “I think I decided to be an actor because acting was just a cosmic carrot for a much higher journey. A journey into finding me, finding a sense of belonging, finding my worth.”Davis said she saw life as “a big, fat f**king dude” who had “endless amounts of gold that is just falling down randomly.”Gold she saw as blessing to some people “who don’t deserve it” and didn’t work for it and others who actually worked for it. Such a blessed life was not how Davis started.“I was born into a life that just simply did not make sense. I didn’t fit in. I was born into abject poverty. I was mischievous. I was imaginative,” she said. “I was rambunctious. I was poor going up in a house with alcoholism and infested with rats everywhere.”As if such poverty wasn’t bad enough, Davis said, “And on top of all that, all anyone ever said was that I wasn’t pretty.”“By the way, what the hell is pretty?,” she asked. “I wasn’t pretty. I just wanted be somebody.”The now 59-year-old actress was able to escape her circumstances because of “magic.”“And you know what my magic was? That I could teleport,” she said. “That I can take myself out of this worthless world and relieve myself of it at times.”Davis admitted that early in her career she “took a lot of jobs because of the money.”“Because sometimes for a dark-skinned Black woman with a wide nose and big lips, that’s all there is out there,” she said. “If I waited for a role that was written for me, well-crafted, I wouldn’t be standing up here. So I took it for the money.”The “How To Get Away With Murder” star noted that she did not find “any nobility in poverty,” which for her included being a child who wet the bed and went to school in urine soaked clothes.“They say that the only two people you owe anything to is your 6-year-old self and your 80-year-old self and 6-year-old Viola, sometimes I have to rely on to give me perspective of even this moment,” Davis said. “Otherwise, it’s too big for me to imagine only from bedwetting and poverty and despair and wrongness to this. And little Viola is squealing.”“Little Viola,” she noted, was “powerful.”“So little Viola is squealing. She’s standing behind me now and she’s pulling on my dress and she’s wearing the same red rubber boots as she wore rain or shine because they made her feel pretty,” Davis concluded her speech. “She’s squealing and she’s saying one thing. She says, ‘Make them hear this.’ And what she’s whispering is, ‘I told you I was a magician.’”The post Viola Davis shares her powerful ‘testimony’ in her Cecil B. DeMille Award acceptance speech appeared first on The Atlanta Voice.