The show is as much about the scarily ambitious students as it is about Annalise, but she is the enigmatic and intimidating core from which all the drama flows.
"I love the fact that she's messy and mysterious and you don't know who she is," Davis tells TimeOut. "She's not necessarily nurturing and all 'Come sit on my lap so I can talk to you, baby'. She doesn't need God, Jesus, or Buddha, because she knows all the answers. She's messy. She's a woman. She's sexual. She's vulnerable."
Davis recently won the Screen Actors Guild Award for the part, and since debuting in the US late last year, How To Get Away With Murder has become a zeitgeist smash, generating numerous "jaw-dropping moments" lists across the internet.
The teacher/student dynamic that anchors the series echoes the creation of the show itself, minus the murder and cover-up, of course. Although overseen by Rhimes and produced via her Shondaland production company, How To Get Away With Murder was created by Rhimes' protege Peter Nowalk.
"Hopefully it's seamless how we go from the case of the week to the murder mystery," he says. "I think the cases of the week are really important, and I think the characters we defend are going to be really interesting and fun, so I wanna tell the murder mystery more slowly and really get into the nitty gritty of these every-episode cases of why people do bad things.
"What feels really fresh and new about this show for me as a writer is that Annalise is someone we see through these students' eyes.
"So she's always a mystery and she does things that sometimes we don't really have perspective on.
"I think it's very interesting to create a star vehicle for someone with Viola's talent, where she is the centre of mystery, basically, for all of our people to wonder about and our audience to wonder about."
It is that kind of weightiness that made the character so attractive to Davis, who has had roles in plenty of big movies (Prisoners, Ender's Game and Get On Up), but not in the kinds of roles she feels passionate about.
"I kept saying to my manager, 'Why don't they make roles for black actresses who look like me, who are sexy, mysterious, messy? Why do I have to always know what I'm saying, know what I'm doing, you know, be like, you know, big momma on a couch'. And all of a sudden, as God would have it, Annalise fell in my lap. And so I did the only smart thing that any sensible actress would do, and I took it. I dove at it. And then it became 'Oh, my God, now I have to actually play her'.
"I think the day of choosing TV over film and TV somehow diminishing your career as an actor or actress has changed. I think people migrate towards material, especially after they reach a certain age, certain hue, certain sex. And I have to say, and I will be bold enough to say, that I have gotten so many wonderful film roles, but I've gotten even more film roles where I haven't been the show. It's like I've been invited to a really fabulous party, only to hold up the wall. I wanted to be the show.
"I wanted to have a character that kind of took me out of my comfort zone. And that character happened to be in a Shonda Rhimes show."
What: How To Get Away With Murder starring Viola Davis
When and where: Premieres at 8.30pm, Tuesday February 10, TV2
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