Viola Davis’ husband cried watching ‘Fences’.
The 51-year-old actress picked up the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role at Sunday’s (29.01.17) ceremony and Julius Tennon – with whom she has five-year-old daughter Genesis – couldn’t be prouder of his wife.
He gushed: "It was an incredible performance – it was just awesome. I did cry."
Viola added: "He was a linebacker and he cried".
Both Viola and her co-star Denzel Washington – who won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role – reprised their Broadway roles in the movie adaptation of ‘Fences’ and the actress couldn’t have asked for a better filming experience.
She gushed to ‘Extra’: "Perfect experience, perfect locations, perfect actors, perfect director, perfect narrative, perfect writing, perfect role, and usually something is off about a job. This is when everything is in alignment, and I’m just glad people received it."
And the actress also confessed to enjoying a McDonald’s meal when she’s having a "cheat day" – but admitted she won’t divulge her habit to her personal trainer.
Asked her favourite cheat meal, she said: "French fries. A McDonald’s French fry. But I’m gonna tell my trainer I did not eat French fries."
In her acceptance speech, Viola praised playwright August Wilson, who wrote the play the movie was based on, for helping to tell a tale of an ordinary black family just leading their lives.
She said: "What August did so beautifully is he honoured the average man, who happened to be a man of colour.
"And sometimes we don’t have to shake the world and move the world and create anything that is going to be in the history book.
"The fact that we breathed and lived a life and was a god to our children, just that, means that we have a story and it deserves to be told.
"We deserve to be in the canon of any — in the center of any narrative that’s written out there. And that’s what August did. He elevated my father, my mother, my uncles who had eighth and fifth grade educations, and he just encapsulated them in history."