Researching Viola Davis ahead of our interview, I stumble upon a video called “Lessons of Worth”, part of a series featuring she and other L’Oreal ambassadors including Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren and Andie MacDowell. “You’re worth it,” Davis intones. “Three words we have all heard at least a thousand times, right? But do you really understand what that means?”
The video is only two minutes long, but by the end of it, I’ve teared up. It’s one thing to bring meaning to a finely nuanced character in a Hollywood film. It takes another level of skill entirely to make a beauty ad feel heavy with meaning.
Davis has been called one of her generation’s greatest actors, and every film is vastly improved by her presence. Whether it’s her Oscar-winning role in Fences (2016), her Oscar-nominated performance in 2011’s The Help (a role she later regretted taking, saying “I betrayed myself and my people” because the film catered to a white audience) or her innumerable stage performances (she’s only the 18th person ever to achieve EGOT status, the “grand slam” of American show business that defines those who’ve won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), Davis brings deeply felt emotion and mesmerising gravitas to every part.
“Hello Viola, my queen” is too simultaneously obsequious yet casual a greeting for such a legend, but she takes it in her stride. She’s speaking from Paris, shortly before she walks in L’Oreal’s Le Defile Paris Fashion Week show alongside fellow ambassadors Jane Fonda, Kendall Jenner and Cara Delevingne.
Understandably, beauty is on her mind. And unsurprisingly, her routine is far more focused on products than any preventative surgery. “Every day, I like to steam my face,” she smiles. “Then, I always wash it with a Shu Uemura oil cleanser, followed by L’Oreal’s Midnight Serum. And now that I’m a woman of a beautiful age – a perfect 59 – I use an oil moisturiser.”
Nor is she sparing. “I overly moisturise. I moisturise to the point where I look greasy. It’s probably sacrilege, but then on top of that, I’m not going to lie, I put on SKII skin conditioner. I slap it on. You shine, but I’m telling you, within a very short period of time, your skin has soaked it all up.”
Davis has been married to the actor Julius Tennon since 2003. Does he ever pass comment on how shiny she looks? “Oh no, he does not. Because guess what? He’s doing the same thing! In fact, I do it for him, because then everyone tells him how pretty he looks. It makes him so happy when people tell him he looks pretty.”
She says her mindset will always be more important than the products she uses. “They’re just an extension. Everything else in your life is an extension of your definition of beauty, and mine is that beauty is within. Beauty is parallel to the radical love affair you have with yourself – your ability to set boundaries, your ability to say no, your ability to love yourself and feel like you’re worthy even when you made the biggest mistake in your life. Your ability to disappoint other people, to avoid disappointing yourself. All of those things make you beautiful. It surpasses age. It surpasses everything.”
She agrees that as a society, we’re obsessed with the idea of chasing youth. “It’s benign focus, is what it is. It doesn’t even touch the surface of what it means to live a life, because at some point, you have to make peace with the fact that ageing is a privilege. Not everyone gets to age. If you’re privileged enough to get to 59, and you have more life behind you than ahead of you, then you know your mortality is staring you in the face. No one will have ‘beautiful whoever’ on a gravestone.”
She says she feels most beautiful when she’s with her husband and daughter. “My husband makes me feel beautiful. I sometimes have to see myself through his eyes. And my daughter makes me feel beautiful. The other day, I was with her at the swimming pool, and I was like ‘oh, man’. I was under a certain light, lamenting my thighs. She said ‘Mama, stop. Your thighs are beautiful.’”
Her daughter, Genesis, is 14, and embarking on her own beauty journey. What advice would she pass on? “I’d tell her that she is the love of her life. I’d tell her you have to have a radical, fierce, passionate love affair with yourself. You don’t have to smile all the time. You definitely don’t have to be perfect, because you’re not going to be. Even if you make the biggest mistake of your life, and even when you’re in a lot of pain, we have to understand that the one person we really need in life is us. When I discovered the love that I had for myself is when everything else started to become beautiful. It started to serve me, because I knew what I did not deserve and what I did deserve, and I migrated towards that.”
As the second youngest of six children born to an activist mother and horse trainer father in South Carolina, Davis grew up in extreme poverty, witnessing her father’s violence towards her mother and first intervening at the age of 14. At the same age, she was encouraged to take part in an acting program for low-income school pupils, showing such talent that her drama teacher encouraged her to act professionally. She believes that too many women doubt themselves because they’ve been taught to.
“We’ve been taught only to invest in the external, and in the parts of ourselves that are in service to others. When we cannot achieve those things, we denigrate ourselves. In the coming years, I would like us to achieve autonomy. I would like us to define ourselves on our own terms. A lot of women, when they were 25, they’d walk in the room and all the men looked at them. Now they’re 60, and no one’s looking at them. You can see women becoming unplugged, when in fact, we’re [still] worth it – not just yesterday, but now.”
Not without reason has Davis amassed 12.3m followers on Instagram, thanks to a compelling mix of posts that run the gamut from passionate activism to hilarious memes to rousing motivational quotes. Everything she says makes you want to nod sagely in agreement. “What stops people is fear,” she continues. “Not fear of anything specifically – just fear in and of itself. That’s where anxiety comes from. Everything that you could ever want in life is on the other side of fear, but we have to walk through it. We have to be in our pain. The cure for the pain is in the pain. That’s when we rise like a phoenix from the ashes.”
Viola’s favourite products
Ultim8 Sublime Beauty Cleansing Oil, £117, Shu Uemura
SKII skin conditioner, £136.79, SKII
L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Cell Renew Day Cream, £29.99, Boots
L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Cell Renew Midnight Serum, £35, available from Boots
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