Oscar winner Viola Davis says she was terrified when she started thinking about playing Michelle Obama in the new Showtime series, “The First Lady.”
“Everyone knows who Michelle Obama is,” she says during a Zoom interview. “Everybody has claimed ownership of her. Everybody has a time period where they loved her hair or hated her hair or loved her eyebrows or hated her eyebrows. And they feel like they own her.”
To play the role, Davis looked for similarities: they’re both dark-skinned Black women, for example. “That’s a very, very specific journey. But the thing that terrified me about that was there’s a lot of that that I’m not and so that’s the first thing I had to try to tap into. That’s a thing that struck me about her – her absolute surety that she is somebody, that Barack doesn’t make her someone. She was someone from the moment she came out of her mom’s womb.
“What they have in common is that none of them wanted to be there,” says Cathy Schulman, the series’ executive producer. “Eleanor wanted to be there, but only if she could be president. Betty went into the White House kicking and screaming and Michelle was absolutely terrified for the lives of herself and her family. Finding that living in that house turned out to be a benefit…was a really interesting unifier that they had.
When Roosevelt moved into the White House, she asked if she could have an office. “And everybody looked at her like, ‘What would you do in an office?’” Schulman says. Davis says hair and makeup became great tools. “Anything helps to catapult you into them – how they wear their hair, what they look like – so you literally can disappear and step into another life. But it’s only a part of it. The harder part is to capture their humanity, especially in a world where everybody feels like they know them.”
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