We Were Robbed of a Viola Davis Speech Tonight
It’s starting to feel like there are two types of awards in this world: ones that Viola Davis has already EGOT-ten and ones that she will eventually get. This year, the Golden Globes honored the actress and EGOT winner as the 2025 recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for her contributions to the entertainment industry. By Variety’s count, Davis has received more than 120 awards during her career — but this one was special to her. She previously told USA Today that the Cecil B. DeMille Award was the “first award that I was told that I won that made me cry.” And her heartfelt, 16-minute acceptance speech certainly is very emotional … it’s just that anyone who tuned in for the January 5 ceremony didn’t get to hear any of it.
Meryl Streep presented Davis with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the inaugural Golden Gala on January 3. Luckily, Gold Derby has a video of Davis’s acceptance speech, in which she reflected on how a “dark-skinned, Black woman with a wide nose and big lips” can’t always be picky about the roles they take and explained that she believes characters that are dead or that nobody cares about “came to me because they knew that I would love them.” She also spoke at length about how much being a Cecil B. DeMille Award recipient meant to her. “Six-year-old Viola, sometimes I have to rely on her to give me perspective of this moment,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s too big for me to imagine. Going from bed-wetting, poverty and despair, and wrongness to this? And Little Viola is squealing.”
Only 17 of the 70 Cecil B. DeMille Award honorees have been women; Davis is the second woman of color to win the award after Oprah Winfrey made history in 2018. Other past recipients include Walt Disney, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, Lucille Ball, Sidney Poitier, Steven Spielberg, Streep, and Denzel Washington. It’s an undeniably historic achievement. For such a long ceremony, the Golden Globes couldn’t make time to play a clip of Davis’s speech?
Related