Viola Davis and female director ‘100%’ changed Amazon Prime action thriller’s approach

Having a female director and producer in charge of Amazon Prime Video’s new action movie ‘100% changed’ the approach on set, one of its stars has said.

G20, an action thriller in which Viola Davis plays the fictional American president, who must save her family, fellow world leaders and the globe when the summit is hijacked by terrorists, was directed by Patricia Riggen and produced by the Oscar-winning Davis.

And for British actor Douglas Hodge, who takes on the role of the UK prime minister, he could absolutely notice the difference – and for the better.

The actor told Metro that having two women in charge ‘100%’ affected the vibe while making the film and how things were done, in his opinion.

Smiling over his self-professed ‘late in life’ transformation into an action star having also just shot the Prime Video Jack Ryan film with John Krasinski and Sienna Miller – his second-ever role in the genre after G20 – he mused: ‘I think there’s a sort of machismo; there’s a sort of heightening of adrenaline.

‘The scene [in G20] where we’re all taken hostage and the windows blow in, the tables blow up, grenades go off, people are shot, the squibs fire – even though it’s not real, there’s things smashing, there’s people screaming, you can almost never hear when they shout cut because everyone’s like, “Aaargh!” and all the guys who are the stunt men are like, this is their moment.’ 

‘Everyone’s sort of upped the ante a little bit, so I think if you do have just a little bit more of a nurturing, caring, sort of tender environment, it’s a little bit safer,’ he suggested.

Aside from that experience from Hodge’s perspective, filmmaker Riggen also felt that her and Viola’s stamp could be seen as women in the genre because they cared about the story too.

‘I find that sometimes action movies have a lot of action, but I don’t really care about them. In fact, you use the fight or the chase to go and get some food in the in the kitchen instead, and then it’s like, “Call me when it’s over so I can follow the story again”,’ she revealed separately to Metro.

‘In this case, I feel both Viola and I really wanted to still have a powerful story with really strong characters and moments, so that the female audience would also be engaged in the movie. And I think we accomplished it.’

 In G20, Hodge’s PM Oliver Everett ‘starts the film hating Americans, certainly, and probably unconsciously hating women’ before being forced to support Davis’s President Danielle Sutton as they fight for everyone’s safety while trapped in a Cape Town hotel with the rest of the G20 member state’s leaders.

‘He probably starts out as some of the more foolish prime ministers and then veers towards some of the better ones by the end, hopefully,’ the 65-year-old We Live in Time actor shares of his character arc.

The action – including shoot-outs, hand-to-hand combat and a massive fight in a hotel kitchen – means action is front and centre in G20, even if Hodge jokes that he ‘just plays a screaming physical coward who hides behind Viola Davis for the entire film’.

‘Diving through hoops of fire, being shot at, all that I thought was going to be hilarious, but in fact it’s just simply terrifying, so there’s no acting required,’ he recalled. ‘But working with Viola – she’s a force of nature, and so I knew that was going to be interesting in the way it always is when you do these big films.’

Observing his co-star on set, Hodge , who has also appeared in the likes of Joker, Sir Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and TV’s Catastrophe, confirms that she is just as impressive as her envious biceps – and EGOT status – would suggest.

‘The scene in the lift where she fights these two massive guys and I’m cowering on the top of the lift, looking through my fingers, screaming like a baby –it was exhausting for me!

‘But what you don’t see is that she did it 20 times. So even on camera, in the film, it’s like, wow, this is pretty full-on. But then you go, okay, let’s go again. Now do this, but again and then again and again – that’s a big day’s work.’

‘She’s the new action star, no doubt about it,’ he praised.

He’s also equally admiring of Riggen’s ‘incredible job’ – ‘I think there’s something about having a woman director’ – and how she balanced an ‘edge of your seat’ action movie with a story at the centre of it ‘about this little beautiful family’, with Sutton’s husband (Anthony Anderson) and two kids (Marsai Martin, Christopher Farrar) along for the ride too.

‘I think the fact that she manipulated that and took care over that, and that each of the characters have some concern and grow and learn a bit, that’s an added plus for the film.’

Hodge is also here for the one-liners and self-aware humour of the film.

‘I’m sort of old school. I think the great action movies, like the Bond movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, they all have a sort of wit. They know that you can’t take yourself too seriously if you’re saying, “I’m going out to save the world”.’

Much will be made of the fact that Davis is portraying a competent American leader on the world stage in G20, as a Black woman, when the US is yet to have a female president yet – although many thought they would ahead of November’s election.

While Riggen has been clear there was no deliberate statement made with the film – which Davis and her co-producer husband Julius Tennon had in development with others years before Donald Trump took office again – Hodge agrees that who’s in the White House now does give G20 a new relevance.

‘Everything has a political aspect to it, and hopefully everything has a relevance. So the fact that there’s a female president [in the film], it certainly should be being talked about all the time as a possibility, no doubt about it, whoever’s the president now, and whatever isn’t the case. So if it makes you think about that, that’s great.’

G20 is streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime Video from today.

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