One of the best reasons to become a celebrity, in my opinion, is for all of the ways in which your eating experience gets improved as you rise up the social ladder. Log into Instagram, and in between selfies you'll see snaps of delicious-looking meals you or I would have to sell a kidney to eat.
Celebrities would probably also benefit from special treatment at restaurants, if the framed photos you see at various eateries around the globe are any indication. But no matter how famous she gets, no matter how big a tip she can leave at a restaurant, you won't find Viola Davis turning down a free meal any time soon.
Sitting down with Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Davis - who is best known for her roles in How To Get Away With Murder, The Help and Suicide Squad - talked about her life before hitting stardom, and it's not one we'd readily associate with the life of a celebrity.
She talked about meeting with director Steve McQueen for a role in his movie Widows - which is expected in theatres in November - at a sushi restaurant called Katsuya. Although she could afford the movie, Davis revealed that she really stretched out the meeting so she could continue to nab some free sushi. Her words, not mine:
"I made that meeting as long as possible. I said: 'Oh yeah, well I don't know if I'm sold yet, so let's order some more of this California roll...' yellow tail - I had some of the eggplant - and then after sucking it down, sucking it down, I was like 'This is so great that this role was written for a Caucasian actress but you're considering me'.
I was like 'wait a minute - do you want me to be sexual? Do you want me to lose weight?!' And then, I think I sucked down about 10 more sushi rolls..."
Of course, it's played for laughs, but this isn't the first time that Davis has spoken about her impoverished childhood, and how she could never take food for granted. "It was like, If you don't eat it now, it'll be gone, and you're going to be hungry for the next—Lord, who knows how long," she said in a 2015 interview with Glamour magazine.
Davis said she constantly plotted how to score free food, from dumpster diving to befriending a boy whose mother would give her banana bread. "I was always so hungry and ashamed, I couldn't tap into my potential," Davis revealed. "I couldn't get at the business of being me."
Nowadays, things are much better, and although she can joke about it now, Viola Davis has come a long way since those impoverished childhood days. Still, if you take her out for a meal, you'll see through her appetite that she has never forgotten where she's come from.
