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"We would be at lunch putting fried chicken on our plate, and she'd say, 'I've got to talk to you,'" says Tate Taylor, who directed The Help. "And we'd talk about a scene that was being shot a week later. She's consumed."
Part of the reason Davis can do all this work is that she's comfortable with struggle. Her dad groomed racehorses, and in 1967, when she was 2, she moved from South Carolina with her parents and sister to the very white town of Central Falls, R.I., where there were two tracks nearby. The town is so poor, it recently filed for bankruptcy protection, and her family was poor for Central Falls. They often didn't have hot water or enough to eat. "One thing that struck me as a little off in The Help was that everybody had a phone," Davis says. "We never had a phone."
After majoring in theater at Rhode Island College, Davis earned a spot at Juilliard. Two years after graduating, she was nominated for a Tony for Wilson's Seven Guitars, her first Broadway role. Tonys for two more Wilson plays followed. She also began picking up famous fans, such as Streep and George Clooney, who worked with Davis on Out of Sight, Syriana and Solaris and loaned her his Italian villa, a chef and a driver for two weeks for her honeymoon in 2003. "She makes every project she works on better," Clooney says. "Every one. What's most irritating is that she does it effortlessly." She totally fooled Clooney.
But Davis' movie and TV career hasn't exploded. The Help is her biggest role to date (and Steel Town is bigger). Her problem is that films with shy, nerdy, pretty, middle-aged characters are always about white people. Actually, almost all female roles are for white people. So Davis can either play sassy, soulful, dignified, downtrodden women or she can deliver exposition for white leads, as Julia Roberts' best friend in Eat Pray Love and as the therapist in Trust and It's Kind of a Funny Story. She took the role of a tough-talking minister in Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail after going seven months without a job. "You're not doing the Irish and Scottish accents they taught at Juilliard," she says. "In the real world, you're doing Ebonics and Jamaican."
The best part she could get this year was as a maid, after playing a maid in 2002's Far from Heaven. Worse, she's got to take crap for it. Scan the comments sections on articles about Davis and you'll see complaints that she's selling out by playing a maid instead of a doctor, a scientist, Rosa Parks or the Virgin Mary.
"The thing about the African-American community compared with the white community is, we are more concerned with image and message than execution," she says. "I don't play roles that are necessarily attractive or portray a positive image. They are well-rounded characters. When you squelch excellence to put out a message, it's like passing the baton and seeing it drop."
Davis and Tennon have started a production company to try to expand the options for black actors, focusing first on a period piece about African-American homesteaders. She also has an HBO development deal for a program about a headmaster at a San Francisco private school. "This character does bad things for all the right reasons," says producer Margaret Nagle. "When I told Viola that, she was like, 'I'm there.' Another actor would say, 'It's really important to me that she be likable.'"
Nor is it important to Davis to expend too much energy on publicity and networking. At a party at L.A.'s Soho House to celebrate her being on the cover of Essence, she's wearing a clingy sleeveless blue Michael Kors gown, lots of makeup and heels that look like weapons. But instead of flitting around a room full of people celebrating her, she sits on a couch in the corner with friends and asks to make sure I got something to eat. There's a giant version of the cover greeting guests as they enter the party; a friend, the actress Elisa Perry, says Davis should take it home and display it somewhere. Davis stares her down. Then Perry tells her at least to give it to a charity, because it's worth something.
"No, it isn't," Davis replies. "I tried to sell my gown from the Oscars on eBay, and I couldn't."
"It was a bad year," Perry says. "It was the recession."
Davis just looks at her again. As always, there's a lot going on in that look. But I'm pretty sure that at least one of the things she's thinking is, I wonder what's on the Discovery Channel right now.