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Viola Davis To Play Queer Blues Legend Ma Rainey for the Big Screen

Viola Davis To Play Queer Blues Legend Ma Rainey for the Big Screen

Viola Davis

Davis won a Tony and an Oscar for her role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom playwright August Wilson's Fences. 

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Academy Award winner Viola Davis has been tapped to play the unapologetically queer "mother of the blues" Ma Rainey in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom alongside Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

A Tony and an Oscar winner for her role in Wilson's Fences (opposite Denzel Washington on the big screen in 2016), Davis's How To Get Away with Murder character is bisexual. But with Rainey, she'll get to explore the life of one of the most famous blues singers and LGBTQ pioneers of the day.

Wilson's 1982 play unfolds in a recording studio where tensions eventually turn violent as Rainey, her bandmates, and her white agents work to make a record. The play includes a character named Dussie Mae who is Rainey's girlfriend.

Rainey moved in circles with famed lesbian blues singers including Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley. Her "Prove It on Me Blues" was ahead of its time in terms of its overt queerness.

"Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men," the song goes.

George C. Wolfe, who helmed Oprah Winfrey's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will direct Ma Rainey's Black Bottom while Tony winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Lackawanna Blues) is set to adapt the play for the screen.

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Tracy E. Gilchrist

Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP of Editorial and Special Projects at equalpride. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.
Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP of Editorial and Special Projects at equalpride. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.
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