Viola Davis Honors Her Inner Child In Emotional Golden Gala Speech

Viola Davis, an EGOT winner and one of Hollywood’s most celebrated talents, delivered an emotional and inspiring speech at the Golden Gala on January 3. Accepting the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille Award ahead of the 2025 Golden Globes, the 59-year-old actress dedicated her achievement to someone very special — her six-year-old self.

“I was born into a life that just simply did not make sense,” Viola began. She painted a raw picture of her childhood, growing up in poverty in a house filled with broken toilets, alcoholism, and rats. 

“I didn’t fit in. I was born into abject poverty. I was mischievous. I was imaginative. I was rambunctious. I was poor going up in a house with alcoholism and infested with rats everywhere. Toilets never worked,” she added.

But even in those difficult moments, Viola said she carried something powerful inside her: “And you know what my magic was? That I could teleport. That I can take myself out of this worthless world and relieve myself of it at times.”

That “magic,” she explained, was her imagination — the spark that would eventually guide her toward acting.

Her journey wasn’t easy. Viola admitted that, in the early days of her career, she often took roles just for survival. “…Sometimes, for a dark-skinned Black woman with a wide nose and big lips, that’s all there is out there. Alright? If I waited for the perfect role that was written for me, well-crafted, I wouldn’t be standing up here. So I took it for the money.”

But even those roles — small, overlooked, or financially motivated — gave her pieces of the “elixir” she was searching for. Characters like Annalise Keating, Amanda Waller, and Aibileen Clark became stepping stones, each one offering her a piece of herself. According to her, each of those characters “gave me some level of an answer.”

In one of the most touching moments of her speech, Viola spoke about her younger self — the little girl who wore red rubber boots every day because they made her feel pretty. So little Viola is squealing. She’s standing behind me now and she’s pulling on my dress, and she’s wearing the same red rubber boots as she wore rain or shine because they made her feel pretty. She’s squealing and she’s saying one thing. She says, ‘Make them hear this.’ And what she’s whispering is, ‘I told you I was a magician,'” the actress said.

Over the years, Viola has become a true force in Hollywood. She has earned seven Golden Globe nominations, winning her first in 2017 for Fences. With an Emmy for How to Get Away with Murder, two Tonys, an Oscar, and a Grammy for her memoir Finding Me, she is among the few artists to achieve EGOT status.