Viola Davis says playing Michelle Obama terrified her

“Everyone knows who Michelle Obama is,” she says during a Zoom interview. “Everybody has claimed ownership of her. Everybody has a time period where they loved her hair or hated her hair or loved her eyebrows or hated her eyebrows. And they feel like they own her.”

To get those beats right, Davis studied films showing how Obama spoke, moved, “how she touches her pearls. I think I listened to her podcasts probably over 100 times and still felt terrified.”

When Davis met Obama, what struck her most was the former first lady’s sense of belonging. “There was nothing about her that felt secondary, that felt like she was the woman behind the man.”

To play the role, Davis looked for similarities: they’re both dark-skinned Black women, for example. “That’s a very, very specific journey. But the thing that terrified me about that was there’s a lot of that that I’m not and so that’s the first thing I had to try to tap into. That’s a thing that struck me about her – her absolute surety that she is somebody, that Barack doesn’t make her someone. She was someone from the moment she came out of her mom’s womb.”

For the series, producers pair three first ladies and draw parallels. In addition to Obama, the first season includes Betty Ford (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) and Eleanor Roosevelt (played by Gillian Anderson).

Unlike Davis, Pfeiffer and Anderson had more distance. Viewers probably wouldn’t remember their characters as readily as they would Davis’.

“What they have in common is that none of them wanted to be there,” says Cathy Schulman, the series’ executive producer. “Eleanor wanted to be there, but only if she could be president. Betty went into the White House kicking and screaming and Michelle was absolutely terrified for the lives of herself and her family. Finding that living in that house turned out to be a benefit…was a really interesting unifier that they had.”

Ford shed light on a number of issues – from breast cancer to drug and alcohol abuse. Obama was an advocate for education, nutrition and poverty awareness. Roosevelt was the first to assume a public role as first lady.

“She was the beginning of two really important social movements,” Schulman says of Roosevelt. “One having to do with women’s rights and one having to do with desegregation.”

When Roosevelt moved into the White House, she asked if she could have an office. “And everybody looked at her like, ‘What would you do in an office?’” Schulman says.

While Anderson didn’t have as much material to draw on, she says there were plenty of recordings that helped find her version of Eleanor.

“You start working at some point in the journey with a voice coach,” she says. “You try to get the pitch somewhere that feels appropriate, that lives comfortably somewhere between your own and theirs.”

Davis says hair and makeup became great tools. “Anything helps to catapult you into them – how they wear their hair, what they look like – so you literally can disappear and step into another life. But it’s only a part of it. The harder part is to capture their humanity, especially in a world where everybody feels like they know them.”

Both women see their characters as inspirations. Growing up, though, Anderson looked to civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman and actress Meryl Streep as role models – “women who, against all odds, create a place for themselves in the world to help others who are living a life that is against all odds.”

For Davis, actress Cicely Tyson, women’s rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and other activists make the list. “As I move through my life, I think it’s really interesting how my mom moves to the front of the line,” she says. “What I love so much about my mom is that as much as life really has seemingly beat her down, there is still so much love she has and passion for people and hope. The people who move to the forefront to me are people who love and survive and hope and connect – all of those things we don’t value is what I now value as a human being.”

“The First Lady” begins April 17 on Showtime.