Viola Davis Shares Her Touching Connection To Fences During SAG Acceptance Speech

Viola Davis just won her fifth SAG award. She was the winner for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role for her part in Fences alongside Denzel Washington. She thanked her cast and crew, admitting that she is both “a friend and a fan” of director and co-star Washington. But her real connection to Fences lies in the similarities she found among the characters and her own family. And for that, she credits August Wilson, who wrote the original play Fences in 1983. “They say all that one can hope for is the right regrets,” Davis began. “And what August did so beautifully is he honored the average man, who happened to be a man of color. And sometimes we don’t have to shape the world and move the world and create anything that is going to be in the history books. The fact that we breathed and live a life... and was a god to our children... just that, means that we have a story and it deserves to be told.” Translation: Black Lives Matter, in case it wasn’t clear. Davis went on, “We deserve to be in the canon of any, in the center of any narrative that written out there. And that’s what August did. He elevated my father, my mother, my uncles who had eight and fifth-grade educations. And he just encapsulated them in history. So thank you, August.”