Actress and women’s rights activist Kerry Washington is known for her tenacity – just like her Scandal character, Olivia Pope. She talks fear and power with Margaret Wappler.
For six seasons now – a seventh greenlit in February – Kerry Washington has been breathing fiery life into Olivia Pope, the crisis-management queen of Abc’s Scandal. In the fast-paced political thriller created by Shonda Rhimes, swagger has never looked so feminine: Pope is all cream eyeshadow, flowy neutrals and perfectly blown-out hair, even when she’s making a hot mess of her life. Make no mistake, though: as soft as she presents, nearly every word out of her pillowy lips – especially in damage-limitation mode, Pope’s natural habitat – is cold steel. Who needs a gun when you have brute resolve as one of your weapons?
Tucked into a plush air-conditioned trailer during a break from filming the season six finale, Washington reveals the biggest lesson she’s learned from Pope: what it means to be fearless. The 40-year-old Bronx native echoes her character’s favorite mantras: “We will not fail. We will not go down. We will fight the fight. There’s always a solution.” She pauses, letting the words penetrate. “Saying those words, week after week, they’ve sapped into my bloodstream. Now I feel that way. I wake up, I have a house full of kids and pets, a new production company, I’m number one on the call sheet, and I think: ‘I will not go down. There’s always another way.’”
Last year, Washington launched her production company, Simpson Street (named for where her mother grew up in New York), with Confirmation, a non-sensationalist dive into the 1991 Anita Hill sexual harassment testimony against Judge Clarence Thomas. Stepping into the role of executive producer – not to mention actress; her portrayal of Hill earned an Emmy nomination – Washington tapped into lessons from her mentor Rhimes and her vast production empire, Shondaland.
“Shonda’s got I-don’t-know-how-many shows now, plus three kids, and she just figures it out,” says Washington. “However busy I feel, Shonda feels busier, so I’m just going to rise to the occasion. She’s been a real role model. Seeing the community she’s created and the work ethic – I feel like there should be more of this in the world.”
To foster her own creativity, Washington had to smash her notion of perfection and remake it in her image; to include her intersectional identity as a black woman and a working mother. During our interview, 7-month-old Caleb, her son with husband and ex-Nfl player Nnamdi Asomugha (they also have daughter Isabelle, 3), is cradled at her breast for a midday meal. “I can be covered in spit-up on a conference call while I’m pumping and that’s Ok, because this is my perfect,” she smiles. “It may not be somebody else’s, but this is mine.”
Simpson Street is another facet of her “perfect”. Her mission is to broaden the spectrum of whose stories we deem to have value: “We’re looking to do diverse work that brings more and more people to the table – anyone whose voice is underrepresented. We’re trying to carve out a space for them at the table of empowered storytelling.” She will act in about a third of those stories, she says, but all of them will be shaped by her hands-on input.
The actress knows, like few others of her generation, that to carve out one space can mean opening up a whole palace. When Scandal debuted in 2012, she was the lone black actress anchoring a network drama. “I was exhausted from doing interviews about being the first black woman on Tv [in a dramatic series lead] in 40 years,” she says, laughing, “and now it’s not even a thing. This is just what Tv looks like; it looks like all of us. That isn’t to say that black women are all of us – I mean, now Priyanka Chopra has a show [Quantico] and there’s [Asian-American comedy] Fresh Off the Boat. It really is becoming more inclusive.”
Growing up in a house where she watched her parents debate Hill vs. Thomas, Washington doesn’t shy away from infusing her work with politics – or getting out on the streets to defend democracy, as she did for the Women’s March this year. “The power is ours, we just forget it sometimes,” she says today. Like the morning after Donald Trump was elected president and Olivia Pope was trending on Twitter.
“Millions of people were like, ‘We need Olivia Pope to fix this.’ On one hand, I was incredibly honored – ‘Oh, look, we’re part of the zeitgeist’ – but I was also a bit infuriated, because I was like, ‘No, this is your country. You’re the Olivia Pope of your own life; this is your democracy. I can’t fix this.’”
Power is a tricky currency; we don’t always know how rich we are, says the actress. “Often our sense of power in a room comes from our own internal compass, rather than the dynamics of what’s happening in a room.” At times, she admits, she hasn’t felt empowered, but she resists the temptation to place blame. “I felt it as disconnection from my own sense of power,” not that she didn’t have any.
Without naming names, she recalls working on a show with two lead actors: “One who was really encouraging, inspiring and kind, and one who was not.” From that experience, Washington vowed to always be the generous one, like her co-stars in Ray and The Last King of Scotland, Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker, respectively. Or her friends Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, who, with Big Little Lies, stepped into producer-actor roles and encouraged Washington to do the same.
“Being able to share business conversations with other successful women in that way has been great,” says Washington. “Women are embracing the growth of other women, encouraging it, supporting it.”
For all her political passion, and her proximity to at least an on- screen president, Washington howls, “No way!” when asked if she’d ever run for office. Though she proudly served on Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities board, that’s where the story ends.
“When Scandal happened it was like, whether you like it or not, everybody is looking at you,” she says. “You’ve got to be able to meet that challenge.” She did, and opened space for others, too – and that’s perfect, for now.
Watch Scandal on Abc now
