Image Text:

PICTURED: Viola Davis

VIOLA DAVIS has described her passionate kiss with actor Liam Neeson in Widows as a groundbreaking moment.

The 53-year-old actress opened up about the importance of the kiss in an interview with The Guardian.

She said: “For me, this is something you’ll not see this year, last year, the year before that.

“That is, a dark-skinned woman of colour, at 53 years old, kissing Liam Neeson. Not just kissing a white man...Liam Neeson, a hunk. And kissing him sexually, romantically.”

Despite her belief in its significance, Davis said she did not think that it would be viewed as such.

She told The Guardian: “Nobody will pay attention to that. And if you mention it to someone, I think they’ll feel like it’s hip and it’s funky that they didn’t notice it. But will you see it again?

“If you don’t think that’s a big deal, then tell me, why isn’t it happening more?...There’s a part of me that can answer that.”

In Widows, Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1980s British TV series, Davis plays Neeson’s wife. Her character, Veronica, takes over her criminal husband’s work after he dies.

It’s the first lead role in a feature film from a major studio for the How to Get Away with Murder star.

While the kiss may seem quite mundane to some, Davis argues that the absence of interactions like it between someone like herself and Neeson is just one of the ways black women are not being fully represented on screen.

She also spoke about the exclusion of the “regular black woman” from major cinema productions.

She told The Guardian: “I always say that one thing missing in cinema is that regular black woman.

“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.”

Read every story in our hardcopy newspaper for free by downloading the app.