By EurWeb
Actress Viola Davis, a supporting actress Oscar nominee for “Doubt,” has just booked her first-ever headlining role…playing a maid for a white woman in the 1960s.
Before the outrage begins, consider the Dreamworks film is an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help,” which explores the complicated relationships between the upper class matriarchs and their servants in the American South of the early 1960’s.
Emma Stone has been cast as Skeeter Phelan, a white recent college graduate uncomfortable with the current social norms of Mississippi at the time – a time when black maids did all the work and received no respect.
Davis would play the role of Aibileen, a maid whom aspiring writer Phelan candidly interviews. That interview sets off shock waves that reverberate across the entire community as it uncovers not just racism but cruelty and criminal action by white society women.
Tate Taylor directs from his adapted script. Taylor, Brunson Green, Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus and Mark Radcliffe are producing. Filming kicks off this summer in Mississippi.
