As one of the most acclaimed actresses in Hollywood, EGOT winner Viola Davis has done just about every type of scene, but there’s one thing she really doesn’t like doing on screen.
“I can’t stand love scenes,” Davis, 60, said on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast on Tuesday, despite having done them numerous times in her career. “I can’t stand watching them. I can’t stand doing them.”
Davis, who is one of just eight actors to have won all four major awards (Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, Tonys), raised her issues with the scenes during a discussion about the pitfalls of celebrity.
When the actress starred in Shonda Rhimes’s How to Get Away With Murder, she became fed up with the laziness surrounding the scenes.
“I finally said, 'How to Get Away With Murder, I’m not doing any more love scenes anymore. I mean, that’s it," Davis said.
Then she revealed her one stipulation.
She told the show’s producers she wouldn’t do any more love scenes, “unless you give me a boyfriend who has a stomach. A big gut.”
“Wait. Say more,” Poehler, 54, who won the inaugural Best Podcast Golden Globe in January, replied.
“You know why? Because you’ll actually write the scene. It won’t be about taking off the shirt and the six-pack abs,” the Fences actress said.
She described a scene with her How to Get Away With Murder co-star Billy Brown, in which he was in nothing but his underwear, holding a scrub brush, and was asked to “slap it on his hand as if he’s slapping my ass.”
“I’m in the scene, and I’m like, ‘You got to cut. You got to cut. Please cut,’” Davis joked, putting her hands together in prayer.
“So I said, ‘If you write someone with a gut, maybe we won’t be in bed. Maybe it’ll be about everything else. And then when we finally kiss, it’s like something that’s organically happening,’” she recalled.
Even as a viewer, the Doubt actress detests the scenes. She’s found one helpful use for them, however.
“Right now, for me, a lot of love scenes, it’s like that’s the time to go to the bathroom,” Davis quipped. “If you want to pick up, go to the bathroom, you come back, you haven’t missed anything.”
Poehler, who admitted to having done few in her career, loathed the few experiences she had.
“The couple times it’s been on the call sheet, I’m like, ‘Oh no. This is the worst day,” Poehler added.
“There’s nothing sexy about it. When you do a love scene, in my opinion, there’s nothing sexy about it,” the Parks & Recreation star concluded.
