Viola Davis has admitted she regrets feeling ‘a little judgmental’ of Chadwick Boseman and the support he had on their film set prior to learning about his cancer diagnosis.
The duo starred in the 2020 film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, just was released three months after Boseman’s death at age 43 from colon cancer. It was his final film.
During an interview with The Times, the EGOT winner, 59, recalled that Boseman’s fiancée, Taylor Simone Ledward, and make-up artist rubbed his back and played meditative music when they were on the set of the Netflix film. Chadwick’s performance as Levee Green in the film about the 1920s blues singer Ma Rainey earned him a posthumous Oscar nomination.
Viola broke down about Chadwick’s death in December 2020 in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment.
‘Lord knows we all would’ve wanted him to live another 50 years. We all want longevity,’ she said.
‘But I can’t see his life tragically at all. … Because I felt like he was always living in the moment, squeezing out every bit of life,’ the How To Get Away With Murder star continued.
‘What it makes me think is, it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality,’ she said. ‘What I hold onto with Chad is that he lived his life his way. ‘I would say his professional life as absolutely paralleled his personal life, that’s my guess, in terms of how he lived with the utmost integrity.’
After Chadwick’s death in 2020, Viola told In Style: ‘He was someone who had a quality that very few have today, whether young or old, which is a total commitment to the art form of acting.’
After Boseman died, his family revealed that he was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016. He battled his cancer for years and by the time he died, it was stage IV.
In Amazon’s G20, Viola plays U.S. President Danielle Sutton, who is at the G20 summit with other world leaders when a terrorist takes them hostage.
At the Los Angeles premiere of the film on Thursday, she said ‘it was a long ride,’ to get the film from concept to release after working as a producer on it since 2016.
Davis told The Hollywood Reporter that the project ‘was just different for us — it seemed like a very commercial, fun movie, out of the box; something that people wouldn’t normally see me in but that I was very capable of. So, to actually see it brought to fruition, it just makes you proud of our capabilities and our vision.
As Danielle Sutton, Viola must fight to save not just the world leaders, but also her family and democracy. ‘This was more fisticuffs; this was more like street fighting, guns. This appealed to 6-year-old Viola — 6-year-old Viola would have been squealing with this one,’ she explained about the stunt work required for the film.
‘But we choreographed a lot of these fight scenes on the set; you had to use your imagination with found objects, with what’s in the kitchen that you can fight with to take someone down. That was a different sort of fun.’
G20 premieres on Prime Video on April 10, 2025
