The most famous scene in How to Get Away with Murder wasn’t in the original plan. Viola Davis demanded it before she would sign — Annalise Keating had to take her wig off on camera, or Viola Davis wasn’t doing the show.
Season 1, Episode 4, 2014. Annalise Keating sits at her vanity, alone. The polished professor the world sees — the wig, the makeup, the armor — comes off, piece by piece, until the woman underneath is just herself, looking into the mirror. Television audiences had never watched a leading lady do that. Davis knew exactly what she was asking for, because she had set the terms before the role was even hers.
The condition she set before signing
As Davis has recounted it: “Before I got the role, I said, ‘Shonda, Pete, Betsy, I’m not gonna do this unless I can take my wig off… I wanted to woman up, and I wanted to actor up, too.'”
Creator Pete Nowalk has credited the vanity scene to Davis herself. It wasn’t a stunt and it wasn’t vanity in reverse — it was an actress insisting that the character’s private, unarmored self be part of the performance, on network television, in prime time. The Emmy-winning run that followed started with that act of control: I will show you both women, or I will show you neither.
Two years earlier, she had already said why
The wig scene makes complete sense once you hear the earlier chapter — and this page keeps the two moments separate, because they are two different quotes from two different years.
On Anderson Live in 2012 — two years before the show premiered — Davis was explaining why she had worn her natural hair to the Oscars. She said: “Every time I put on a wig I was apologizing for who I was, being a dark-skinned woman with very curly hair.”
Read that sentence again. Not “apologizing for my hair.” Apologizing for who she was — the wig standing in for every room that had ever asked a dark-skinned woman with very curly hair to soften herself before entering it. By 2014, the apology was over, contractually. She didn’t just decline to apologize anymore. She built the refusal into the role that made her a household name.
Why this one lives on a natural hair page
Because most women here know both sides of that vanity mirror. The version of you that the world gets — styled, managed, presentable — and the version that exists when the door closes. Davis refused to let television pretend only the first one was real. She put the second woman on ABC, in prime time, and let her be powerful too.
Join the conversation
Do you remember where you were when that wig came off on screen? And be honest — what is YOUR version of the armor you take off at the end of the day? Tell us below.
Source note: Viola Davis’s pre-role condition and her quote (“Before I got the role, I said, ‘Shonda, Pete, Betsy, I’m not gonna do this unless I can take my wig off… I wanted to woman up, and I wanted to actor up, too'”) are from Vulture / New York Magazine’s reporting on the Season 1, Episode 4 vanity scene, with creator Pete Nowalk crediting the scene to Davis; see also The Wrap’s Emmy cover interview. Her “apologizing” quote (“Every time I put on a wig I was apologizing for who I was, being a dark-skinned woman with very curly hair”) is from Anderson Live in 2012, where she was discussing wearing her natural hair to the Oscars — it is NOT from a How to Get Away with Murder interview, and this article deliberately keeps the two quotes in their separate years rather than merging them, as viral posts often do.
