Among the new titles coming to streaming this week is an action-packed thriller where Viola Davis plays a U.S. president who must fight for the globe by using her skilled military background at the annual G20 summit. And, after I previously learned from Viola Davis’ stunt double for The Woman King that she insisted she do just about everything for the 2022 war movie, I was, of course, curious how the Oscar winner handled Amazon Prime’s G20.
A couple of years ago, Jénel Stevens (who also worked on the Black Panther stunt team) told CinemaBlend that Davis did 95 to 98% of her stunts and “was down for everything basically.” When I asked G20’s director Patricia Riggen about how Davis balanced things out with the stunt team, here's what she said:
Viola came already, of course super fit, because she had done The Woman King, so she had a lot of that already on her. But what we did is a lot of training in terms of weapons and knives and pans in the kitchen, you know, just other things that she was not an expert in. And that was really fun. And, we actually had two different [stunt] doubles for different things because it was a very complicated shoot and it had a lot of moving parts, a lot of scenes, so it was just useful to have them. But most of the scenes are very close contact. So it's her face, it's [her].
Playing a warrior from a West African kingdom in the 1800s obviously has a different skillset than one Madame President who has been to war, and as the director shared Viola Davis picked up some new skills to show off in G20. But, yes, she very much used a stunt team. Good for her!
When I spoke to Ramón Rodriguez about an early scene in the movie where his character, who is the head of the Secret Service, and Davis are going head-to-head in Ju Jitsu in front of the White House, he offered some more insight on her abilities at 59 years young with these words:
She threw my double down. We did a lot of training for that. We did a lot of Ju Jitsu, so all the other stuff prior to that toss is us. And by the way, throughout the film we got to do a lot of our own stunts. If it was too crazy, then yes, we'd have a double come in and do that for us and make us look great. And we had an amazing stunt team, by the way. But, that was a great way during that training to kind of develop that relationship between Madam President and Manny. We really get to be physical with each other and in that process it immediately develops an intimacy. And then I wanted to just make sure she felt and knew that I had her back as Manny does.
After Viola Davis sounds like she absolutely gave The Woman King everything she had, I’m happy the actress allowed two stunt doubles to share the work with her because she proved herself in the 2022 action film. But she clearly did quite a few scenes herself, too. And when you watch the movie with an Amazon Prime subscription once it comes out, you’ll notice it’s rather violent as well.
Riggen continued:
This is a real event, the G20. So one of the things I wanted was to be very realistic in terms of it's not [being a] fantasy. It can happen in this world. I had a lot of advice from military advisors, technical advisors to make sure that we were really doing a G20 summit and then really taking it over. And I think there is a lot of violence I guess, right? So nobody can say a woman is not good to [direct] big, violent action scenes. I guess I'm a little bit cold. I don't have any problem with seeing all of that violence even though I've never thrown a punch in my life.
G20 has Davis and the first family (played by Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin and Christopher Farrar) traveling to South Africa for the summit where a group of major world leaders get together and discuss the global economy. The action starts when terrorists led by The Boys’ Antony Starr take over the summit and use the world leaders to create their own deepfake videos with them to then inspire the world to go into another financial direction.
In the press tour so far, Viola Davis took method dressing to a new level by wearing a red dress like the movie and turning up to the premiere in a helicopter. The Amazon movie drops on Thursday, April 10.
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