The queen of mean gets away with murder

The first thing you notice about Viola Davis when she walks into the room is her eyes. OK, so I also notice the slippers she is wearing - in stark contrast to her sleek outfit and jewellery - between takes on the set of her hit US drama How to Get Away with Murder.

Davis chooses her words carefully and communicates as much with her expression as her words.

As an old-school reporter who still takes notes while recording an interview, this can be somewhat disconcerting.

How do I break eye contact to make pen connect with page? Will Davis find me rude?

Truth be told, I'm a little bit scared of Viola Davis. Rather, I'm scared of her alter-ego, Annalise Keating, intimidating professor of criminal law at a Philadelphia university and fearsome defence lawyer in the drama created by Pete Nowalk and executive- produced by Shonda Rhimes as part of her illustrious Shondaland stable of programs (Scandal, Grey's Anatomy).

Keating encourages competition among her first-year students, selecting the top five from her Criminal Law 100 class each year - the class she dubs "how to get away with murder" - to help her out of school hours on her defence cases.

Her eager students give up almost all semblance of a private life and will seemingly stop at nothing in their attempts to win favour and top grades; even becoming embroiled in a pot-boiler of a murder, body disposal and cover-up that plays out across the season's thrilling first nine episodes.

In exchange, they are often berated and humiliated. Is it fair to say Annalise Keating is something of a Pied Piper in their lives?

"I went to Juilliard so I know there are teachers like that, there are mentors like that who are extraordinarily abusive," Davis says.

"Although I love Juilliard now by the way, I want you to put that in print.

"I love it now but back then we had some teachers that were quite abusive.

"But you wanted it so bad, that you wanted someone to validate you, you were willing to follow it.

"I have a 27-year career and a lot of the teachers I know in acting were very, very abusive. And some very nurturing but it is the abusive ones I wanted to please all the time when I was a young actor.

"I think that's the case here too; not every teacher is warm and fuzzy, you know."

Davis, a dual Oscar nominee for roles in The Help and Doubt, had her work in Murder recognised when she last week took home the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama series, having last month missed out on a Golden Globe to The Affair's Ruth Wilson.

Keating is tough and scary as all hell in court, in class and in her campus home that doubles as her practice. But it's not long before we see she is also deeply flawed and vulnerable.

"I think her quality of turning her vulnerability off so fast, I think that is the quality that stuck out the most," Davis says, commenting on the character trait that most appealed to her in the role. "I can't do that, I sometimes feel like an open wound. I try to find ways to put on the mask but I fail miserably at it. I feel like it has almost become my objective in life, how to make myself harder, but she seems to be able to do that very quickly, recover."

Davis feels she had a good amount of input into Keating's "messy" character. "I wanted her to look like a real woman," she says.

"In the mist of all this fiction - and I understand it is fiction - I wanted there to be something about her that is still familiar, that a woman who is sexy and who is messy and doesn't necessarily know how to walk in heels, because women buy heels all the time they don't know how to walk in and that hurt their feet."

In her SAG acceptance speech, Davis thanked Rhimes and others that make her show possible "for thinking that a sexualised, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old dark-skinned African- American woman who looks like me."

While Davis has connected with Keating's vulnerability, it's the fact she is not likable that has clicked with audiences.

"I think you have to play the character unapologetically. I think it is the audience's job to just understand and maybe to be compelled.

"But I think the likability would mean that I would have to edit her too much and that would mean bad acting."