According to a statement from Showtime, the new anthology series will follow the “personal and political lives” of the nation’s first ladies, with the first season focussed on Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama. Roosevelt and Ford have yet to be cast. “First Ladies is set in the East Wing of the White House, where many of history’s most impactful and world-changing decisions have been hidden from view, made by America’s charismatic, complex and dynamic first ladies,” the statement revealed.
The one-hour drama was originally put in development by Showtime last August with a three-script commitment. The announcement of a full series pickup came on February 5.
“Throughout our history, presidents’ spouses have wielded remarkable influence, not only on the nation’s leaders but on the country itself.” said Jane Winograde, the President of Entertainment at Showtime Networks Inc. “Having Viola Davis play Michelle Obama is a dream come true, and we couldn’t be luckier to have her extraordinary talent to help launch this series.”
Aside from portraying Obama, who served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017, Davis will be an executive producer of the project. The actress holds five Emmy nominations and took home one win as well as a Golden Globe and SAG Award for her portrayal as a ruthless, hardened defense lawyer on HTGAWM. Oh, and don’t forget her Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress for Fences, the film adaptation of the play that won the actress a Tony back in 2010.
Hopefully, this political drama can soothe the ache left in the wake of HTGAWM as well as the Showtime staple Shameless, in its 11th and final season this year.
These days it’s nearly impossible to know what women are spending on the way they look. Someone with Instagram-flawless contouring might have honed her craft using the finest from the drugstore aisles, and the utterly makeup-free type might be spending thousands on laser treatments and serums. Enter our series What It Costs to Be Me, in which we’re asking interesting women for radical transparency.
Next up? Lori Taylor Davis, global pro lead artist for Smashbox, 52, from Los Angeles. Her grand total? $9,091
If you’ve ever admired that bronzy, sun-kissed California makeup look celebrated by, well, basically everyone, chances are you’ve got Lori Taylor Davis to thank: the global pro artist for Los Angeles-based Smashbox (and a born and raised Angeleno herself), Davis has been creating her signature glowy, natural looks all around the world for over two decades. She’s also a beauty enthusiast to the core and has been since childhood. “My entrée into makeup was through my two grandmothers. They were my personal beauty influencers,” says Davis. “They both had trays of perfumes, Avon lipsticks…they were full-on glamazons. One of my grandmothers would wear incredible lashes and wigs, like a little Diana Ross. My first makeup came from her. Of course, it was makeup designed for someone much older than me and the colors weren’t right, but I would literally go to school in a full beat.” That beauty curiosity and infectious enthusiasm is instantly apparent when Davis runs through her regimen, whether she’s detailing her handmade Ayurvedic hair oil recipe, her latest Smashbox loves, her treatment splurges, or her “seven layer dip” skin-care routine.
My shower routine: $295
My poor husband has no room for his things in the shower. We have five tiers of products in the shower, and I fill up every shelf! For my body, I use a neem oil soap ($5) that’s super-natural and really moisturizing. For shower gel, I go between Dr. Bronner’s Almond Castile Soap ($11) and a body wash from that new brand Nécessaire ($25). It smells so good: like eucalyptus but not overpowering, and also somehow very fresh and citrusy. I love that scent. Sometimes I use a scrub from Mario Badescu ($26) to exfoliate, and I also like to wash with a natural sea sponge ($10) or a scrubby mitt—I always see the ladies at the Korean spa using them, and I can get a bunch for something like $1 each on eBay.
Because I have naturally curly hair I don’t necessarily shampoo that often, but I do always work in some kind of conditioner every time I shower. For natural hair you always want to have the right amount of moisture, and you want to get a good curl pattern after you wash. My friend is into Ayurvedic skin care, so I have a special custom oil blend that I mix up myself and put into all my conditioners (read my recipe for it below). I add it into every conditioner I own, and sometimes I’ll just apply some of the oil mixture directly onto my roots. That’s my one little secret-secret potion—that oil is like my superhero costume for my hair, and it makes my hair a lot healthier. The conditioner I currently use is Bumble Bb Curl conditioner ($34). It’s not too heavy, but it still manages to do a lot for my curls. I shampoo twice a week at the absolute most—for my hair, the conditioner plus my oil potion sort of is the wash, it’s a co-wash. When I do shampoo every so often, I use Living Proof ($27).
L’Oréal Paris has been on a mission lately to make one thing clear—every woman is “worth it,” no matter her age. Over the past few years, the beauty brand’s been working to expand its roster of spokeswomen beyond the typical starlets in their twenties. Jane Fonda, Helen Mirren, Courteney Cox, and Vanessa Williams have all been tapped to be a part of the L’Oréal family. In fact, as of this fall, its portfolio included nine women over the age of 40. Now its latest announcement makes 10.
At 54 years old, actress and activist Viola Davis is the new face of L’Oréal Paris, making it her first-ever contract with a big beauty brand. (And if you’ve ever seen her walk a red carpet or watched a minute of her on How to Get Away With Murder, you’ll join me in saying it’s about freaking time.)
Davis announced the news on Instagram today, writing: “The self affirming words of, ‘Because I’m worth it’ have always given me chill bumps. What a joy it will be to not just say them over and over again…but to spread the message of worth to women around the world. It is a gift.”
Introduced by L’Oréal’s deputy general manager (and Glamour Women of the Year, All Year honoree) Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle at an intimate press event yesterday, Viola told a crowd of beauty editors exactly what being labeled “worth it” means to her.
“I believe that the greatest privilege is to be who you are,” she said. “No apologies for your age, your color, anything. As long as you’re you and living up to who that is and what that means, you’re worth it. That’s self-worth.”
She went on to tell the room how when she began acting she felt pressure to conform to Hollywood’s “classic” (read: stale, singular, Eurocentric ) definition of “pretty.”
“Earlier in my career when I was much more affected, [conforming] almost felt like prerequisite to success, which is crazy if you think about it—what do looks have to do with acting ability?” she said. “In order to succeed, you had to meet these impossible standards. Now I am much more secure in who I am, but there was a time that I did feel those pressures and succumb to them to a degree.”
But also, she pointed to her role as Annalise Keating on HTGAWM (who wasn’t originally written to be a black woman) as proof Hollywood is evolving. “To have been a part of that shift is so powerful and humbling,” she said.
Perhaps the set of Stuart Little isn’t where feminists expected to battle gender norms, but Geena Davis is the happiest warrior. Trust that she will open a frontline when she sees one.
In the movie, Davis is Mrs. Eleanor Little, mother to George Little and Stuart Little, the mouse-son the family decides to take in. Once, between takes, Davis watched one of the second-unit directors line up extras for a scene in Central Park. George Little is meant to enter a boat race, and he needs some competition. So “[the director] found a little boy and gave him a remote control and had him sit on the edge of the water,” Davis recalls. “Then he found a little girl to come and stand behind him as his cheerleader.” Over and over, the pattern repeated: boy, contender; girl, admirer.
It took Davis a second, and then it struck her: “Oh, wait a minute—we could do something different here.” She approached the director to make her case. She wanted an equal split, with both genders in both roles.
“He got this sickened look on his face of utter mortification,” she remembers. “Yes!” he told her. “Of course!”
For Davis, 62, it’s this simple. “It’s all so, so unconscious,” she insists. Not the harassment or the discrimination that has come to the fore since the #MeToo movement exploded almost 12 months ago, but the bias, which has been the site of her activism for over a decade. Davis believes that men don’t mean to undercut women, but she saw it on Stuart Little, and she’s seen it in countless executive suites and on dozens of sets since. Even in 2018, men still make most of the choices. And when those men write a remote control into a script, it tends to be placed in the hands of a character who looks like them.
Since her landmark back-to-back roles in Thelma and Louise in 1991 (which she was so desperate to be part of that her hastily drawn contract didn’t even stipulate which of the two title roles was hers) and A League of Their Own in 1992, the icon has strived to offer decision makers a new vision.
PHOTO: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
At first, she planned to do it onscreen. In the wake of her one-two punch for which writer Thelma & Louise writer Callie Khouri won an Oscar and Davis was nominated for a Golden Globe for A League of Their Own, the media all but coronated her: Because of Davis (and Khouri and Susan Sarandon and Madonna) it would all be different now! The rules of the game had been rewritten! For women in film, Davis heralded the dawn of a new era.
As far as Davis was concerned, she’d had it made. When Davis was new to the business, awards season came like a divine promise. “Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Sally Field, Jessica Lange—these women were getting nominated or winning Oscars for incredible parts. I thought, They’re older than me, so they’re going to fix everything. There’s no way these people are not going to be working into their sixties.” Streep and Close and the rest had blazed “a ferocious trail.” She would just follow it.
Except she couldn’t.
Insiders had predicted a wave of movies with female athletes after A League of Their Own, but audiences didn’t get one until Bend It Like Beckham premiered a decade later. Interviewers wanted her to corroborate that women’s opportunities in film had expanded thanks to her work, but she wasn’t so sure. She’d go on to shoot just three live-action films in her forties. (“I didn’t want to just react—to be the girlfriend or the wife of the person doing all of the cool stuff.”)
Davis noticed that it wasn’t just her. A lot of movies were “supposed” to upend the status quo. Thanks to The First Wives Club, women over 50 would be cast in lead roles. Then came The Hunger Games, with its promise of women-helmed action franchises. Fifty Shades of Grey generated over $500 million in ticket sales, but Sam Taylor-Johnson told Indiewire in a recent interview that she was offered “nothing” after the movie came out. Wasn’t Frozen meant to scuttle the damsel-in-distress trope? Didn’t Hidden Figures and Black Panther demonstrate that black casts could command millions at the box office? Each movie vowed to correct a flawed calculus, but none have quite done it.
Davis realized she needed new tactics. If she couldn’t fix the disparities between women and men onscreen alone, then she wanted research. She founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004 to convince the entertainment business to make a commitment to better representation, commissioning Stacy Smith, Ph.D., at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, to calculate the percentage of female characters who appear and speak onscreen. Perhaps with the Stuart Little moment in mind, she resolved to fix a particular gaze on movies and television shows made for children, whose sense of their own possibilities media helps shape.
“When I was coming up, there was an explicit assumption that girls will relate to male protagonists, but boys won’t relate to a female protagonist,” Nina Jacobson, who produced The Hunger Games and Crazy Rich Asians, remembers. “In essence, a white male protagonist was like the type-O blood for representation.” The first time Jacobson met Davis, she was the president of Buena Vista Motion Pictures and Davis had come in to make a presentation. Davis was the first person to show Jacobson what that meant—how few characters little girls could see themselves in were onscreen. Jacobson now refers to that as the “paradigm shift” in her career and also as a “true holy-shit moment.”
PHOTO: Getty Images
PHOTO: Alamy Stock Photo
PHOTO: Getty Images
“The ratio of male-to-female characters in film has been exactly the same since 1946,” Davis tells me. Later, she adds, “It’s preposterous that’s still the case, but we never get momentum because it goes back to people’s idea, this Hollywood fixation, that men won’t watch women but women will watch men.” The excuse came up so much that she directed her institute to crunch the numbers. (See? Data.) Researchers found that movies with a female lead made 16 percent more at the box office than movies with male leads in 2015. More studies confirmed her conclusion: Inclusion isn’t just some moral imperative. Women are good for a bottom line. So what gives?
“I think men were raised from minute one in worlds nearly bereft of a female presence,” Davis explains. “So when adult men look at a workplace or a cast list and see one woman, that looks normal. One is what’s expected.” She mimics the protest she’s sometimes encountered when she puts the problem to men: “We have a woman!” Then she shows them the data.
Davis has sat down with hundreds of men and can’t think of one who has said, “Well, that’s not important” or “That’s not true.” But once, when she went to address the Animation Guild, which was at the time around 17 percent female, a man in the audience raised his hand and said, “We hear what you’re saying, but we really can’t add more female characters because they’re too dull.” Davis reminded him he was one of the people responsible for shaping those unimaginative characters.
“Well, we don’t dare give them flaws,” the man responded. “They can’t be unattractive, heavy, clumsy, stupid. They can’t have any flaws, whatsoever, because we don’t know what you want.” It was an accusation. That usual male howl: Women! Impossible to please. Davis (who has this response to at least 70 percent of the insane anecdotes she recounts to me over the phone) laughed.
“What if you made, I don’t know, half of the characters female,” she proposed at the time. “And then they can be whatever you want.”
“She’s a shining bright light,” director and producer Paul Feig says of Davis. “She’s holding lots of really aggravating, embarrassing, enervating facts. And yet I’ve only seen her present them in just the loveliest manner. You’re even more shamed because she never yells.”
“You just want to be around her,” he continues. “She motivates people to want to change things.”
Even in our current era and despite her involvement in Time’s Up, which is committed as much to genuine progress as it is to loud collective awareness, Davis maintains there’s a place for her quieter war. “I haven’t kept it a secret from the public,” she says of her crusade. “I give speeches and interviews, and we release data to the public. But the main goal is not to educate the populace.” It’s to launch a complaint with the people in the room where it happens. If that means she needs to whisper when she’d like a bullhorn, she’ll do it.
Her methods are not lost on Emma Watson, the heir apparent to her brand of activism. “Geena’s work has been a huge inspiration to me,” she writes in an email. “I’m a massive geek when it comes to data and am constantly citing research from her institute.” Watson proves it, adding in the note that women make up less than one third of all speaking characters in film and under a quarter of fictional onscreen leads.
This month Davis traveled to the Toronto Film Festival to promote her latest work. She’s a producer on a new documentary, which includes the likes of Jessica Chastain, Shonda Rhimes, Meryl Streep, and Davis in conversation about sexism in entertainment. In an interview with the Associated Press, Davis said that despite profound inequalities across all industries, “the one area that can be fixed overnight is onscreen.” It doesn’t need to be a slow process or incremental. Davis feels in her bones that one film can do what A League of Their Own or even Bridesmaids was supposed to. Our beacon of optimism! She knows it’s possible. So she decided not to wait for the media or the experts to write their op-eds. The film is titled This Changes Everything.
Geena Davis is an executive producer on the upcoming documentary This Changes Everything. This profile is part of a full week honoring iconic women. For more, head here.
Viola Davis is out and about promoting her new film Widows—and in the process, she’s igniting conversations about the depth and scope of past characters she’s portrayed. Specifically, her role in The Help as a 1960s maid named Aibileen Clark for which Davis received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Speaking to The New York Times, Davis shared that The Help is a source of regret for her because she felt like the voices of the maids weren’t heard.
In the interview, Davis was asked several questions from readers, including whether she regretted passing up a role. “Almost a better question is, have I ever done roles that I’ve regretted?” she replied. “I have, and The Help is on the list.”
Davis explained that she didn’t feel the story fully explored the perspectives of the maids. “I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,” she said. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”
Still, those feelings don’t diminish the relationships she made on the set. “The friendships that I formed are ones that I’m going to have for the rest of my life,” she said. “I had a great experience with these other actresses, who are extraordinary human beings. And I could not ask for a better collaborator than Tate Taylor.”
Although The Help won many accolades when it came out (in addition to Davis’ Oscar nomination, her costar Octavia Spencer won the award for Best Supporting Actress), critics have taken issue with its treatment of the black characters. Roxane Gay has called the film “emotionally manipulative,” and the Association of Black Women Historians issued a statement that said the film was “the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own.”
In fact, this isn’t the first time Davis has criticized the film. “The anger, the vitriol, and the hatred that [the maids] would have towards these white women if they were asked, if they were put in a situation where they were isolated, would have been vocalised,” she said at a BAFTA event last year. “You didn’t see none of that!” But by steering the conversation and reminding people of the film’s shortcomings, Davis continues to reinforce why nuanced portrayals of black women are so critical.
As she put it at the BAFTA event, “That’s the issue I have with a lot of our stories. By the time… it makes it to the screen, the truth is so filtered down, and then it’s given to you to make you feel very comfortable. It’s not our job to make you feel comfortable, it really isn’t. If you feel comfortable, then that is your journey, and your cross to bear. That is the beauty of art, the beauty of art is that we throw it to you, you receive it, and if you shift in some way, [then] we’ve done our job.”
In between being nominated for all the acting awards and being a damn inspiration, Viola Davis spends a fair amount of time going to bat for women of color. She did at last year’s Oscars, at the 2015 Emmys, and she did it again this afternoon by sharing a very important rule she has for her daughter.
We all know that women of color face discrimination everyday—from the workplace to the makeup counter—and Davis never allows a moment of personal achievement to pass without reminding the world of this imbalance. Still, at the same, she celebrates the power of black women (see the straight up transcendence of any one of her acceptance speeches). So it’s not surprising that she brings the same fire and fierce affection for blackness to raising her daughter. When it comes to playing dress up, Genesis, age 6, is given the full range of Disney princesses and superheroes to choose from, but Davis draws one line.
“I say, ‘You’ve gotta wear your hair exactly the way it is,” Davis told Yahoo Lifestyle. “You can be Wonder Woman, but you gotta be Wonder Woman with your hair. You can be Elsa, but you gotta be Elsa with your hair.’”
The news is run through with stories detailing the obstacles that women of color face simply for living life with natural hair and this uncomfortable truth makes Davis’s rule all the more meaningful. She goes on to explain that she tells her daughter she can be anyone she wants, “if you start with the palette of loving who you are.” Cue total and absolute sense of affirmation.
Judging by Davis’s throwback Instagram post below, this rule has been in place for some time.
And judging by this Instagram post, it’s giving Genesis a sense of self-worth that is truly exceptional:
