Viola Davis was recently honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award before last Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony. During her acceptance speech, Davis delivered a powerful speech about her journey from poverty to EGOT winner.
Viola Davis was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award before last week’s Golden Globes ceremony. The greatly acclaimed actress delivered an empowering speech about her journey going from living in poverty to EGOT winner. She reflected on the “magic” that got her to the place she is today.
The Cecil B. DeMille Award honors individuals who “have made outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment,” a title that suits Davis quite well considering the successes she’s had since the ‘90s.
As she approached the stage to receive her award, she thanked her presenter and close friend Meryl Streep, referring to the other powerhouse actor as “a great broad” before saying she felt like “someone just set [her] on fire” as she began her speech.
“This is my testimony. 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 continued on in her speech to say that she viewed life as a “big, fat f—ing dude with endless amounts of gold that is just falling down randomly.”
The gold Davis was talking about referred to the “blessings” that some people who don’t necessarily deserve it receive, as they didn’t work for it nearly as hard as others who worked towards the same goals.
Davis herself didn’t start life feeling blessed, she explained. “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. And on top of all that, all anyone ever said was that I wasn’t pretty.”
“By the way, what the hell is pretty? I wasn’t pretty. I just wanted to be somebody.”
Davis then talked about how she was able to get out of her circumstances, crediting it to “magic.”
“And you know what my magic was? That I could teleport. That I can take myself out of this worthless world and relieve myself of it at times,” she said.
“[I] 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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.’”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
