Twitter

Viola Davis is already an Oscar winner and an Emmy winner. She’s been given critics’ prizes and as many breathless media profiles as you could ask for. She’s celebrated as one of the elite actresses of her era, and justifiably so. But what she’s delivering in the upcoming film Widows is something unique to her career: she’s giving a movie-star lead performance in a heist-thriller with blockbuster potential. As impressive an ensemble as Widows boasts — Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert Duvall, Daniel Kaluuya — the movie belongs to Viola Davis, and she carries it on her more-than-capable movie-star shoulders.

This isn’t a surprising development in 2018, the idea that Viola Davis is carrying a major motion picture. But if you’ve followed her movie career since the early 2000s, through small and thankless roles playing functionaries and best friends and support-givers to all kinds of Hollywood A-listers, this feels like a long distance that’s been traveled. Her earliest role that anyone remembers was an incredibly brief appearance opposite Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. Even there, she struck a memorable chord, playing the cagey, defensive sister to Don Cheadle’s character.

Out of Sight was the first in a long line of tertiary “family” characters play; usually moms. Some of the roles were good and offered Davis the chance to really showcase the talent she’d already been exhibiting on the stage (by 2001, she’d already won a Tony Award for August Wilson’s King Hedley II). Antwone Fisher, directed by Denzel Washington, afforded one such role, which helped her break through as a character actress to watch in 2002.

Others, though: she played Grandma to young 50 Cent in Get Rich or Die Tryin’, mom to Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in Get on Up, and “mother in hospital” in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

Peruse Viola Davis’s filmography and you’ll find so many tertiary characters. Cops and counselors and best friends CIA division chiefs. Davis worked a lot — there’s a 0% chance you wouldn’t have seen her in something long before the Oscars started making her a household name. Still, look at all the secondary, functionary roles it took her to get there:

Cops/Federal Agents/Bosses

Kate and Leopold
Disturbia
Syriana
Law Abiding Citizen
Knight & Day
Blackhat
Suicide Squad

Doctors/Nurses/Counselors

The Substance of Fire
State of Play
Madea Goes to Jail
Trust
It’s Kind of a Funny Story
Traffic

Best Friend/Confidant

Eat Pray Love
Nights in Rodanthe
Beautiful Creatures
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

Not all of these roles were thankless. Just like not all of the handful of roles that avoided these easy categorizations were all that rewarding. Davis was practically Oscar-worthy playing an FBI agent in Michael Mann’s Blackhat, while her potentially intriguing supporting role in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close turned out to be a whole lot of nothing.

The above roles represent the life of a character actress: shining bright in dark corners of the movies, bringing more charisma and warmth and spark and energy than the roles even deserve. The thing with Viola Davis was always that she was a headliner who was stuck in character-actress roles because the lead roles weren’t there for her. The truest words she’s ever spoken remain those that kicked off her Emmy Award acceptance speech in 2016: “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are not there.” The same applies to her movie career. The roles like Solaris (where Soderbergh cast Davis to play a scientist aboard a space mission) and Won’t Back Down (Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal play moms crusading for better schools) were hard to come by, and they certainly never held major box-office potential. Even her Oscar successes in films like Doubt, The Help, and Fences never felt like the stuff of movie stars. As great as Davis’s performances in those movies were, and as well-deserved as her Oscar successes have been, there’s always been a sense that she’s had to weep before American audiences for our approval.

With Widows, though, it feels like Hollywood has finally found a way to appreciate what it has always had in Viola Davis. They’ve handed her a major movie that she can run with. As a heart-pounding heist thriller, Widows is exactly what the doctor ordered and is destined to be a major crowd pleaser. As a Viola Davis star vehicle, though, Widows is a long time coming.

Where to stream Out of Sight

Where to stream Antwone Fisher

Where to stream Madea Goes to Jail

Where to stream Eat Pray Love

Where to stream It's Kind of a Funny Story