Viola Davis is known for her dramatic roles, but in Prime Video’s new adventure-thriller G20, the actress fulfills a lifelong dream of starring as an action hero.
“To see a Black woman as a central figure in the action movie, in a genre that typically you have not seen before, it was the reason why I wanted to do movies as a kid,” Davis told Yahoo Entertainment.
The Oscar-winning actress plays President Danielle Sutton, a war hero turned politician who is taken hostage with other world leaders at the G20 summit. She is no meek first-term president. Davis’s character is similar to protagonist John McClane in Die Hard, a film G20 draws inspiration from.
To save the day, the actress had to be in fighting shape to do her own stunts. Davis credited trainer Gabriela Mclain for “always” making her go harder with “heavy-duty weights.”
“I call her the Lord Voldemort of training,” joked Davis, 59. “She actually just sent me a video of a fish that was half eaten, but it was still swimming. And underneath it, she said, ‘This is how you approach your workouts.’ Because even if I’m exhausted, we’re going to train.”
However, Davis said it was important not to go into the film thinking of Sutton as just “a badass action hero that’s going to save the world.”
“I approach it as a human being, a woman that becomes president of the United States and has to make a choice to either sink or swim,” she said. “That’s a different approach. If I made the approach that I’m just going to play a superhero with a cape, then there were 50 million moments within the movie that you would never have seen.”
Davis said this role shows there is no limit to what she’s capable of doing — as a woman, a woman of color and a woman of a certain age.
“The 6-year-old Viola, the Viola that would go to the Leroy Theatre and the Holiday Cinema in Central Falls, R.I., and when the lights went down, I was transported into these imaginative worlds that I wanted to be a part of,” she said. “When [producers] brought G20 to me in 2015, I couldn’t believe that they saw me. When someone sees you expansively, sometimes it gives you permission to see yourself that way. I don’t see any limitations on myself.”
G20 is streaming now on Prime Video.
