Viola Davis: 'The Help' was a missed opportunity

Viola Davis looks back on 'The Help' as a "missed opportunity". The actor, who received a Best Actress Oscar nod for her role as maid Aibileen Clark in the 2011 period drama, says though the film transformed her life, it did not do justice to the people of colour.


'The Help' changed my life in a lot of different ways. First of all, the friendships that I got - that experience is something I know I'll never have again. And Tate (Taylor, the director) is a great collaborator. I don't want them to feel that I am blasting them in any way.

"It has nothing to do with the players. It has something to do with the culture - that I don't feel that people want to see, want to hear that voice in that time period. Because what it will become is an indictment, and it shouldn't be. I look back at that movie as a missed opportunity," Davis told in an interview.

The Oscar winner had recently said that "at the end wasn't the voices of the maids that were heard" in the film.

Reiterating her point of view, Davis believes 'The Help' was "just too filtered down".

"I know Jim Crow (the racial caste system), I understand that time period. It's a 100-year time period that was rife with lots of violence and anger, and people with lost dreams and hopes. I wanted the frustration and that anger to be more palpable," she said.

An adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel of the same name, the film recounts the story of young white woman and aspiring journalist Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan and her relationship with two black maids, Aibileen and Minny Jackson, during the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi.

'The Help' also starred Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard and Allison Janney.