A pivotal presence

As a working actress, Viola Davis would like to get something off her chest: There are such things as small roles. “Sometimes, you just have to come in and deliver the pizza,” she says. “Because I’m a firm believer that you have to fit into the grand scheme of the movie. It is your role, but you also play a part in the scheme of the whole picture, and you have to understand what your role is in that.”

The 37-year-old Juilliard-trained actor knows whereof she speaks. Last year, for example, Davis won a Tony Award for her performance as a disenfranchised pregnant woman in August Wilson’s “King Hedley II.” Davis has done four plays with Wilson, not to mention numerous other Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theater productions since she graduated from the New York drama school in 1993.

Hollywood success, however, has eluded her. The same year she won the Tony, she had one scene in a movie as Policewoman in “Kate & Leopold,” berating Hugh Jackman to clean up after his dog. “I got my first film job in 1995,” she recalls. “I got the role of a nurse in ‘The Substance of Fire’ and it paid like $500. I had to get my SAG card, which was like $1,300. I was begging, borrowing and stealing for the money.”

But there are small parts and then there are pivotal parts, of which Davis has three in high-profile movies this season. As Sybil, Julianne Moore’s trustworthy maid in “Far From Heaven,” Davis has minimal dialogue, but her presence is keenly felt as she watches her employer’s domestic dream life evaporate when she finds herself drawn to her black gardener.

In one look, we see Sybil’s tacit disapproval of their tentative but evolving interracial courtship. The character is a composite of African American women who stood on the sidelines in such ‘50s melodramas as “Imitation of Life” and “The Reckless Moment.” True to form, we never see Sybil anywhere but within the house she cleans.

“In ‘Imitation of Life,’ there’s that great moment when Lana Turner’s maid, Annie, who’s dying, tells her she wants to have a funeral with all her friends,” says “Heaven” director Todd Haynes. “Lana Turner says, ‘Annie, I didn’t know you had any friends.’ And Annie says, ‘Well, Miss Laura, you never asked.’ What’s so amazing about that scene is it implicates the viewer. We never asked what Annie’s life is like on her own terms. It took an actress with security and a real sense of understanding history to play that.”

Davis contends that taking on the role was a challenge; initially, she did think, “Not the maid role again for a black woman,” but she also thought it was the best script she had ever read. “Todd Haynes is making a human statement to me that not a lot of filmmakers are making,” she says. Moore’s character “doesn’t know what’s going on with Sybil. No one knows what’s going on with Sybil. And that’s the most insidious part of racism, that we don’t know each other. You know what I think is interesting? The film takes place in 1958, but we’re still uncomfortable in 2002.”

Hollywood and beauty

Throughout the course of this interview at a Greek restaurant full predominantly of white patrons in Larchmont Village, Davis takes glee in obliterating what she calls “the lie of political correctness.” She grew up in a poor family of six kids in the all-white city of Central Falls, R.I. She says the only black actors she saw were on TV sitcoms: Ted Lange in “That’s My Mama” and Redd Foxx and LaWanda Page on “Sanford and Son.”

She’s all too aware of what Hollywood makes of her as a dark-skinned black actress -- a point hammered home when she joined Steven Bochco’s TV show “City of Angels,” which made headlines in 2000 for being the first hourlong drama with an all-black cast. Despite the talent on board (Blair Underwood, Vivica A. Fox, “Saturday Night Live’s” Maya Rudolph), the show didn’t last even a season. (Something lasting did come out of it -- her fiance, actor Julius Tennon, who played a recurring role as an anesthesiologist.)

“Those characters in ‘City of Angels’ were people with lives,” she says. “They were doctors and nurses, but they were also people with senses of humor, girlfriends, boyfriends, shortcomings.” Davis says she’s tired of seeing black women on screen as nameless nurses, judges and public defenders.

“I feel like with white women, there are different kinds of beauty,” she says. “You have the pre-Raphaelite beauty, then you have the girl next door, then you have the geek princess like Janeane Garofalo. So you have them playing the different kinds of roles. With black women, you’re either beautiful or you’re not. I’m not even just talking pretty. If you’re not a classical beauty, you’re nothing. And what happens at the end of the day is you don’t want to carry that home with you. You don’t want to believe that’s what the world actually sees and believes about you. That’s my thing.”

Despite the double standards, Davis is also a firm believer that good things come to those who wait. She says that everything about acting is standing in line. “Sometimes, it’s not just about being good,” she says. “It’s about just staying in the line long enough for people to understand you’re not leaving.”

On screen, the first director to really notice Davis was Steven Soderbergh. In 1998, he cast her in a bit part in “Out of Sight”; in 2000, she played a social worker to Michael Douglas’ drug-addict daughter in “Traffic.” Now, she has her biggest screen role to date in Soderbergh’s film “Solaris,” opposite George Clooney in a part that was written for her.

“I find her to be one of those actors you cannot take your eyes off,” Soderbergh says. “She has such strength and integrity on screen that I’m just gonna keep shoehorning her in as many films as I can.” Davis’ sense of gravity comes in handy in this metaphysical adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s heady, existentialist sci-fi novel. She plays Helen Gordon, a scientist on a remote space station who clashes in a battle of wills with psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney). She’s extremely wary of the manifestations emanating from the planet Solaris, even though they take human form, including one in the form of Kelvin’s dead wife.

“It’s about the implications of what human beings do when faced with their past, with their shame; how much it drives their lives,” Davis says. “And just figuring out what this planet is. Is it God?”

In addition to relishing the film’s philosophical questions, she also confesses to enjoying the perks of a big Hollywood movie. “We filmed it on the Warner Bros. lot. They built a space shuttle, and I was so excited. I was always poking things on the space shuttle set, pushing buttons. And George Clooney. I think he’s my favorite. I love George Clooney.”

‘She holds on’

Her last role this season is in Denzel Washington’s directorial debut, “Antwone Fisher,” a true story about an angry young sailor who must confront his harrowing past to get beyond it. As Eva, the crack-addict birth mother with whom he’s finally reunited, Davis didn’t have to look far to draw inspiration; two of her five siblings are cocaine addicts whose children are being raised by her parents. “So, I understand Eva as a woman with a different set of circumstances,” she says. “My sister, my brother, they love their children. They struggle with it every day. So, I was an actor in what I did. I took it from the perspective that she’s a human being with an objective, with obstacles in her path. I didn’t just play the addict.”

In the film, Davis has one scene with three lines of dialogue. It lasts all of five minutes, but it’s the emotional climax of the film. After telling her about his life, Antwone hugs and kisses Eva. Then she breaks down. “You know what was nice about that?” says Washington. “She holds on and holds on and holds on. Until he leaves and then [you see] with one tear, you feel for her, that it hurts her. The fact of the matter is that his mother had a very tough life too.” Davis, he adds, was “just brilliant. We shot that scene in one day, and she never broke character.”

When asked how she got to that tear, Davis makes it sound easy. “You just have to do the work and give up your vanity,” she says. “Play the character for what she is. Just do that and kind of stay within the parameters. And breathe. That will get you very far.”