I love Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. Amy is a great interviewer and she attracts great guests who feel at ease with her quickly. Well, Amy’s most recent Good Hang guest was Viola Davis! Viola is promoting her first novel, Judge Stone, cowritten with James Patterson. She’s so proud to have finally written a crime/trial book, it’s always been her dream. Well, Viola and Amy talked about all kinds of things – how much Viola loves a bad kid or a kid with attitude, how she can’t bake for sh-t, how Julliard ruined her Rhode Island accent and how she absolutely hates doing love scenes.

As one of the most acclaimed actresses in Hollywood, EGOT winner Viola Davis has done just about every type of scene, but there’s one thing she really doesn’t like doing on screen.

“I can’t stand love scenes,” Davis, 60, said on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast on Tuesday, despite having done them numerous times in her career. “I can’t stand watching them. I can’t stand doing them.”

Davis, who is one of just eight actors to have won all four major awards (Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, Tonys), raised her issues with the scenes during a discussion about the pitfalls of celebrity. When the actress starred in Shonda Rhimes’s How to Get Away With Murder, she became fed up with the laziness surrounding the scenes.

“I finally said, ‘How to Get Away With Murder, I’m not doing any more love scenes anymore. I mean, that’s it,” Davis said. Then she revealed her one stipulation. She told the show’s producers she wouldn’t do any more love scenes, “unless you give me a boyfriend who has a stomach. A big gut.”

“Wait. Say more,” Poehler, 54, who won the inaugural Best Podcast Golden Globe in January, replied.

“You know why? Because you’ll actually write the scene. It won’t be about taking off the shirt and the six-pack abs,” the Fences actress said.

She described a scene with her How to Get Away With Murder co-star Billy Brown, in which he was in nothing but his underwear, holding a scrub brush, and was asked to “slap it on his hand as if he’s slapping my ass. I’m in the scene, and I’m like, ‘You got to cut. You got to cut. Please cut,’” Davis joked, putting her hands together in prayer.

“So I said, ‘If you write someone with a gut, maybe we won’t be in bed. Maybe it’ll be about everything else. And then when we finally kiss, it’s like something that’s organically happening,’” she recalled.

[From The Daily Beast]

I get that Viola is talking specifically about love scenes in HTGAWM, but I have to ask – was that the only time she’s ever had to do a love scene? Oh, CB pointed out that Viola had that deep-kissing scene with Liam Neeson in Widows. Generally speaking, though, there are fewer and fewer love scenes in movies and television with each passing year. The reasons for that are generational (younger people hate watching love scenes, apparently) and probably financial and ethical too. But I like Viola’s stipulation that she wanted to do a love scene with a man with a big gut. God, someone do a movie where Viola and Jack Black are the love interests.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock for Netflix, Cover Images. Screencaps from Good Hang’s YouTube.