Viola Davis won an Oscar for her performance in 2016’s “Fences,” an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name. The “How to Get Away with Murder” actress recently signed on to star in another film based on one of Wilson’s plays.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Davis will topline “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for Netflix. The pic tells the story of Ma Rainey, a blues singer making a record in 1920s Chicago, “where tensions boil over between her, her white agent and producer, and the bandmates.”
Davis has a long, successful history with Wilson’s plays. She’s won three Tony Awards for her roles in stagings of his plays, taking home trophies for “Seven Guitars,” “King Hedley II,” and “Fences.”
While accepting her Oscar for “Fences,” Davis paid tribute to the late playwright, whom she said “exhumed and exalted the ordinary people.”
“I always say that one thing missing in cinema is that regular black woman,” Davis has observed. “Not anyone didactic, or whose sole purpose in the narrative is to illustrate some social abnormality. There’s no meaning behind it, other than she is just there.”
Davis also scored Oscar nods for her roles in “The Help” and “Doubt.” Her upcoming projects include a biopic about Harriet Tubman and Bert & Bertie’s “Troop Zero,” a comedy about a group of misfit scouts.
