Viola Davis Accepts the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2025 Golden Globes Gala — Watch

Having achieved EGOT status in 2023 with her Grammy win for Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording, Viola Davis is now one of the most lauded actresses in history, joining Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, and few others. As if this weren’t enough (and it certainly isn’t for a talent like Davis), this past Friday, January 3, Davis was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globe Awards’ inaugural Golden Gala: A Celebration of Excellence. This marks the first time the award was presented outside the larger ceremony, but the intimate experience allowed for the focus to remain on Davis and her fellow awards recipient, Ted Danson, who took home the Carol Burnett Award for his contributions to television.

Presenting the award to Davis was her “Doubt” co-star and close friend Meryl Streep, herself a Demille recipient in 2017. As per Variety, taking the stage at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, Streep regaled the crowd with memories of her first table read with Davis for the 2008 religious drama “Doubt” and being overwhelmed by the talent on display. Upon stepping up to the microphone herself, after calling Streep a “great broad,” Davis shared a different memory of that experience.

“You forgot that I followed you into the toilet that first day of rehearsal,” Davis said. “I just wanted to smell you.”

Once the laughs from the audience died down, Davis launched into her speech, defining it as her “testimony,” and sharing how acting has been her “cosmic cart for a much higher journey” of finding her “worth.” She told the crowd about her difficult upbringing being raised in “abject poverty” in a house filled with “alcoholism and rage,” “rats everywhere,” and “toilets that never worked.” However, what she did have was a special gift that allowed her to shift her mind into a different place.

“What I had was magic,” said Davis. “I was curious. I could teleport — I could take myself out of this worthless world and relieve myself of it at times. I could go to a place where I can have belly laughs. Where I can have fun. The biggest magic was, I could see people. I could see that woman at the corner, standing there in freezing cold weather with dirty hair, really bad acne. Smoking a cigarette with bloodshot eyes. In those corduroy coats with faux fur on the inside. She’d have those pants all women buy at the Rainbow Shop, that cost $9.99 and never zipped up properly.”

Davis went on to explain how she found acting and started to inhabit these individuals as a way of raising herself out of the circumstances she was born into.

“Let me tell you something, not to be a contradiction but when I started off in my career I took a lot of jobs because of the money,” Davis said.

She added later, “I do not believe that poverty is really the answer to craft. I never did. I don’t think that there’s any nobility in poverty. I’ve maybe seen too many rat-infested apartments. I’ve seen too many relatives dead or dying for lack of health care. No. I thank every job I got. It was an opportunity to get in there and tinker, right? And then sometimes those gold nuggets would rain down on me. I got the Mrs. Millers and the Annalise Keatings and the Abilene Clarks and the Amanda Wallers. And I would go ‘Oh my god, I’m cooking. I’m going to be the next Meryl Streep.’ And then nothing. More often than not I got the dead characters. Like the woman standing on the street corner with the cigarette and the bad skin. The characters that are dead, that nobody cares about, that no one loves. I got them.”

Despite the tragic nature of these characters, Davis embraced these figures, offering them the love and beauty they likely never received. In doing so, her purpose became clearer and clearer, as memories of her past also started to surge back into her mind. Standing on a stage in front of Hollywood’s best, all gussied up and honoring her, Davis almost couldn’t believe how far she’s come.

“Little Viola is squealing. She’s standing behind me now, she’s pulling on my dress. She’s wearing the same red rubber boots that she wore rain or shine because they made her feel pur-dy,” she said. “She’s squealing. She’s saying one thing. She says ‘Make them hear this.’ What she’s whispering is: I told you I was a magician.”

Watch Davis’ entire Cecil B. DeMille Award speech below.