Viola Davis thought up the 'How to Get Away With Murder' wig scene

It's a scene you've probably watched, regardless of whether you're a regular viewer of Shonda Rhimes' How To Get Away With Murder: the high-powered lawyer and professor Annalise Keating, played masterfully by Viola Davis, slowly taking off her wig, false eyelashes and makeup at the end of the day.



Davis explained the scene at a HTWAWM panel last week, and its backstory is illuminating: Davis insisted that Shonda Rhimes and the show's creators include a scene that exposed Annalise's vulnerabilities, and presented a more honest representation of beauty than the airbrushed, "classically beautiful" actresses we're used to seeing on-screen.

We'd pick out a few choice quotes for you, but it wouldn't feel right — Davis' entire speech is essential reading:

"Before I got the role, I said, 'Shonda, Pete, Betsy, I’m not gonna do this unless I can take my wig off.' It’s like Rosalind Russell said, acting is like stripping naked in front of an audience and turning around really slowly. One of the reasons I stopped watching TV was that I didn’t see myself on TV. I’m not just saying as a woman of color or a woman of 49, but just as a person. I see a lot of sexy women who are hard, cold, look like they have windswept hair and lip gloss and light makeup when they say it's no makeup. I work out five days a week, and I’m still not a size 2. So I wanted to see a real woman on TV.

There was something for me that I didn’t buy about Annalise in private. It felt like who she was in private had to be diametrically opposed to who she was in public. And so in order to do that, I felt like I had to physically take the wig off. I mean, I have no eyebrows. I have eyelashes that I put on, and there was something extremely vulnerable about that act — and I know it seems like a very simple act at the end of the day — but for me, that simple act really surmounted to something very powerful in the end, because what it was was someone being very, very private in public, which is absolutely the cornerstone of what we do as artists.

I didn’t just want to walk in heels like I was a supermodel. Who does that? That was how that scene came about. I didn’t want to wake up in bed thinking that this is how I really look. I wanted to woman up, and I wanted to actor up, too."

As if Davis couldn't get more inspiring, here you go.

http://sgtbxckybarnes.tumblr.com/post/109804678060/1x04-1x10