Viola Davis is back in action for Amazon‘s G20, playing U.S. president Danielle Sutton who must defend her family and world leaders when the G20 summit is overtaken by terrorists.
At the film‘s Los Angeles premiere on Thursday, Davis noted how “it was a long ride” to release the movie after working on it as a producer since 2016.
Standing alongside husband and producing partner Julius Tennon, 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.”
https://twitter.com/THR/status/1905686625537196425
And though the film is action-packed, Davis said the stunt work was different than her preparation for 2022’s The Woman King, which required training “five hours a day for three months.”
“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,” the Air star explained. “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.”
Anthony Anderson, who plays Davis’ husband in the film, noted how impressed he was “watching her train and training with her — jiujitsu and karate and boxing and all that so she can get out here and kick ass the way that she did. Just the heart, determination and passion that she brought and led this cast with spilled over into everything that we did.”
As for releasing this White House-set story of a Black woman president amid the current political climate, Anderson said, “We made an apolitical movie, but we have Viola leading the free world as an African American woman and leading her family as well.” Producer Andrew Lazar echoed that the “premise of the movie really started with there’s amazing women on both sides of the aisle that did military service and was committed to their country.”
“We actually went out of our way not to do a political movie, to do a movie about a mama bear who has to protect her family and in doing so actually saves the world,” he continued. “But it is about family and coming together and we’re super proud of that. We need to come together as a world and as a country, so there’s nothing divisive about the movie.”
G20 starts streaming April 10 on Amazon Prime Video.
Anaja Smith contributed to this report.
