Black people flocked to theaters in 2011 to see The Help, a movie set in the 1960s about a maid who helps an aspiring author document the lives of Black maids in the South. But one of the film’s stars, Viola Davis, who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, now regrets taking the role of a maid to a racist Southern belle.
Davis, 53, uttered one of the movie’s most memorable lines: “You is kind, you is smart, you is important”. But now she sees the error in her decision to take the role of domestic help.
Davis told the New York Times “it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard.”
She continued:
“I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”
Photo by Dave Bedrosian/Future Image/WENN.com