Viola Davis.Photo: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
Viola Davisrecently headlinedAir, playing Deloris Johnson,Michael Jordan’s mom. Herplaying the part was the one conditionthe legendary basketball player had before giving directorBen Affleckpermission to make the film.
“As soon as they called me, I said, ‘You want me to play his mom?’ " the Oscar winner tells PEOPLE at theCannes Film Festival. “I play a lot of moms. Everyone wants me to play their mom. I have people who hug me in the street who call me Mom.”
Affleck, she says, didn’t have to entice her. “I think the enticement came that it wasn’t your normal mom role,” she says. “He turned it on its head so that she was the one who negotiated the [multi-million dollar Nike] deal that we know today. And that intrigued me. I like surprises.”
Her husbandJulius Tennon is a costar in the film. “He’s just the best. He’s a cutie pie,” she says.
Viola Davis and Julius Tennon.Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
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The scene triggered those feelings, she continues: “I didn’t want to just talk about the shoe, I wanted to talk about my son in the shoe. That’s what we’re talking about. And I think that that’s on the tip of every actress’s tongue and on the tip of every actress of color’s tongue. It was sort of like art imitating life, life sort of influencing art.”
The actress and L’Oreal Paris International spokeswoman, 57, would like to see a wider range of roles for women over 50, particularly for women of color.
“When it comes to Black women who are over 50, then that is when [the lack of interesting roles] is problematic,” she says. “That’s when it is a vast desert.”
Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty
TheEGOTwinner adds, “You always feel like you’re hustling for your worth, as a woman and as a Black woman.”
She credits the “journey of life” for learning her worth: “After a while when you get beaten down so many times, there is something that happens that you have a God divine moment [of] seeing yourself and who you actually want to be. And you make a choice: You want to live, you want hope, you want to be that sort of ideal self, or are you going to embrace the person that you don’t want to be. And I chose to embrace the hopeful Viola, the Viola that was a survivor. It just happened, but itcame through a lot of bruises.”
Today, she says, “I don’t hustle anymore. And it has nothing to do with my age and how long I’ve been in the business. It’s a realization. It’s a self-actualization that worth is nothing to be negotiated with. I wasbornworthy. That’s not on the table. What’s on the table?” she adds with a knowing glance, “Maybe you have to see it the way I see it.”
source: people.com
