Viola Davis’ last-minute change to The Woman King made it a much better movie

polygon.com:

When the 2023 Oscar nominations were revealed this past January, award pundits and movie buffs alike griped about one particular omission: Viola Davis being left out of the Best Actress category. Though Cate Blanchett (Tár), Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Ana de Armas (Blonde), Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie), and Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans) all gave noteworthy performances in 2022, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King was built on Davis’ back, leveraging her movie-star magnetism into a powerhouse physical performance. With the movie out and at No. 1 on Netflix, Davis’ snub feels even more frustrating. This is an actor working on every level, a fact that becomes more apparent when one learns how it coalesced.

In The Woman King, Davis stars as Nanisca, the militant leader of the Agojie, an all-female army protecting the West African kingdom of Dahomey with the ferocity of Greek Spartans. Covered in scars and haunted by the past, Nanisca commands her troops with singular focus. Threats come at them from every angle — the violent Oyo Empire wants to overrun them at home, the Europeans want to control them from afar. But the Agojie only begin to crack when their king (John Boyega) begins to compromise, and a young woman (Thuso Mbedu) emerges to challenge the norm.

Davis’ interpretation of Nanisca is calculating and cutthroat, much like her roles in Widows, Fences, and even the Suicide Squad movies and the Peacemaker TV series, as the ride-or-die Amanda Waller. But Nanisca draws power from her emotional core — she’s always human, even when she’s larger than life. Though Davis, a producer on The Woman King as well as its lead, recruited Prince-Bythewood to helm the film after directing Netflix’s