Like I said a few weeks ago, Viola Davis is always playing characters defined by their work — social worker, CIA agent, bad mom, domestic maid, space engineer, nurse, cop, policewoman — and never by personal longings or creases or compulsions.
True to form, Davis is reportedly considering playing the late civil-rights activist and Congressperson Barbara Jordan. Paris Qualles is adapting Mary Beth Rogers‘ “Barbara Jordan: American Hero.” Davis and her husband would produce.
Add Jordan to Davis’s next two roles — a librarian helping kids deal with hauntings in Beautiful Creatures and a genius recruited by the government to help defeat an alien insect race in Ender’s Game — and it’s even more obvious she’s fallen into a major, major rut.
