Acclaimed actress Viola Davis recently expressed regret over her role in the 2011 film “The Help,” saying she felt like she betrayed herself for doing a movie that caters primarily to white audiences.
“There’s no one who’s not entertained by ‘The Help,’” Davis said in a Vanity Fair interview. “But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth].”
She added that while not a lot of narratives are also invested in Black people’s humanity, they’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black.
“The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the movie theater and they talk about what it meant,” Davis said. “They’re not moved by who we were.”