SEE Sketch to Still: Kerry Washington’s Django Unchained
In real life, the hair is more tousled and less workplace-professional, with ribbony streaks of punkish orange mixed in with the natural black. The speaking voice is more singsong and girlish, half an octave up in register. The face, freer to smile, unburdened by crises personal or constitutional, is more beautiful still.
Than? Given that it’s Kerry Washington being described, and that it’s the middle of 2013, we’re clearly not talking about any of the characters she has played in major motion pictures over the last decade: Django’s wife in Django Unchained, say, or Idi Amin’s wife in The Last King of Scotland, or Ray Charles’s wife in Ray. We’re talking, obviously, about Olivia Pope.
For the uninitiated, Olivia Pope is the central figure in ABC’s Thursday-night drama Scandal: the most powerful fixer in Washington, D.C., a woman whose firm, Olivia Pope and Associates, runs interference for high-profile clients in tight spots, be it a wifeless G.O.P. gubernatorial candidate with gay-rumor issues or a female C.E.O. whose long-ago affair with a current Supreme Court nominee is driving the news cycle. That’s the procedural part of the show, anyway. There is also the matter of Olivia’s being the on-again, off-again extramarital lover of the president of the United States, for whom she used to work. This circumstance, combined with the fact that she is privy to and complicit in some whopping state secrets—for instance, that ballot fixing played a role in getting the president, Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn), elected—gives the show its long arc and its hummingbird pulse.
Scandal is paced like a Spanish-language telenovela, plotted with the intricacy of a Tolkien fantasy, produced with the values of premium cable, and set in an alternate-universe D.C. where everyone is uncommonly attractive and uncommonly checkered of past—a combination of devices that has made the show not only a delirious, addictive viewing experience but also a breakout hit in its second season, which drew to its conclusion in May.
K-ssss! F-t-t-t, K-ssss!
Even in this era of D.V.R.-ing and Netflixing, Scandal still warrants its “Thursday-night” designation, for its narrative momentum has engendered a loyal viewership that eagerly tunes in the moment a new episode airs and, what’s more, passionately tweets about plot developments as they unfold. Observing all this social-media activity without having watched the show, Lena Dunham, who knows a thing or two about event television, took to Twitter on the day of Scandal’s Season Two finale to announce, “Not leaving house this weekend until I’m caught up on Scandal. I feel left behind and left out like the last girl to get my period.”
More typical of the rampant Scandal chat on Twitter are the febrile posts of the all-in, punctuation-crazy fan who, while watching an episode last spring, tweeted such sentiments as “SCANDAL SCANDAL SCANDAL!!!!! This show is incredible!!!!” and “Wow! Scandal just got even more SCANDALOUS!!!”
The 77-year-old author of these tweets, one Marion S. Barry Jr., used to be the mayor of the District of Columbia, is currently a city councilman there, and has a certain fluency in matters of scandal and politics. Barry explained to me via e-mail that he had heard members of his staff talking enthusiastically about the show and decided to give it a try one night. He was instantly hooked. “Olivia Pope is the ultimate fixer,” Barry wrote. “I can recall watching an episode of Scandal, and Olivia was running down her strategy to a client. I actually played her idea out in my head and thought to myself, ‘That actually could work.’ ” The key to Scandal’s success, Barry said, is the casting of Washington, of whom he’s been a fan since her performance in Ray. “Kerry Washington is a magnificent actress,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine anyone else playing Olivia Pope. She IS Olivia Pope.”
And yet, Kerry Washington, in person, will tell you, disarmingly, that she is not Olivia Pope—that she is not as smart as the character she plays, “that I have to learn things to be her all the time.” Her actor’s prep, she told me, includes some student-like cramming—for example, reading Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine to better understand Supreme Court machinations—and regular phone conferences with Judy Smith, the real-life D.C. crisis-management expert upon whom Olivia is loosely based. (Her firm, Smith & Company, has steered such clients as Monica Lewinsky and former U.S. senator Larry Craig through their public ordeals.)
I met Washington for lunch in New York City in the interregnum between Scandal’s second and third seasons (the latter begins filming this month and will start airing in September) and found her to be, in some ways, credibly un-Olivia-like. She wore not one of Olivia’s white pantsuits but a black, rather short Giambattista Valli jacquard dress with a teardrop neckline and, over it, a Valli jacket of blue cashmere with contrasting black sleeves. She stuck to tea, explaining that, unlike Olivia, who pours herself giant balloon glasses of red wine (or swigs straight from the bottle), she partakes of alcohol no more than two or three times a year. She was quick to self-deprecate, confessing that she felt a little sheepish about the honor of delivering this year’s commencement speech at her alma mater, George Washington University, because, surely, they could have done better than “the blind girl who fell in love with the Thing in Fantastic Four.”
But c’mon: this is a smart, formidable woman. Like Law & Order before it, which introduced new scenes with a gavel-like ch-CHUNK, Scandal announces scene shifts with a trademark sound effect—in this case, a digitized camera-shutter whir (K-ssss! F-t-t-t, k-ssss, k-ssss!). At times, listening to Washington speak is like hearing that sound—synapses firing urgently, thoughts being thoroughly microprocessed. It is not every TV star who will carefully parse the semiotic significance of her character’s overcoats, down to the “feminine peplums,” or will enumerate, in PowerPoint detail, the three pillars of Scandal’s social-media strategy. Kerry Washington may not be Olivia Pope, but Olivia Pope has more than a little Kerry Washington in her DNA.
“Gladiators in Suits”
Washington is a native New Yorker, born in 1977 to two Bronx-based professionals, Earl Washington, a real-estate agent, and Valerie Washington, a professor of early elementary education at Lehman College. Hers was a socially conscious upbringing. At 13, Kerry, an only child, was taken to Yankee Stadium to see the newly freed Nelson Mandela speak, and upon turning 18, she recalled, “my becoming a voting citizen was celebrated the way other people would celebrate a Sweet 16. My parents took me out to dinner, and we talked about who I was going to vote for.”
From her pre-teen years through 12th grade, Washington attended the Spence School, an elite all-girls academy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. One of her best friends then was Allison Peters, like Washington an African-American girl who commuted to school from the Bronx. Peters, now a digital-strategy consultant who advises clients (Washington among them) on how to harness the power of social media, recalls a “Cosby-like atmosphere” prevailing in the Washington household—“a sense,” Peters told me, “of really caring about education, but with warmth and a family environment rather than pressure.”
Still, Kerry was a rather driven youngster, the kind of girl who took up swimming because her parents told her it was the one sport in which proficiency might mean the ability to save a life. And, being a teen at the height of the red-ribbon era of AIDS awareness, she became a safe-sex advocate, participating, via Mount Sinai Hospital’s Adolescent Health Center, in an educational troupe that performed self-written sex-ed sketches in schools and community centers. In one sketch, she played a girl who helped her brother come to terms with the fact that their father, infected with H.I.V., was gay. In another, she advised a pal, pre-prom, on how to put on a condom, using a banana as a prop.
“It was some of the best actor training I’ve ever had,” Washington said. “We would stay in character after the show, and the audience would interact with us. It taught me the importance of really understanding everything about who you’re playing, because you never knew what question was going to come.” Though she harbored thoughts of becoming a teacher or a psychologist, Washington continued to act through high school and college, and, at the age of 23, landed her first significant film role: as the teen-mom confidante of Julia Stiles’s character in Save the Last Dance, a tale of urban inter-racial romance whose hard lessons were not unlike those enacted in her troupe’s safe-sex sketches. Washington has not lacked for work since and has also established herself as a progressive political activist, serving on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and delivering a speech in support of the president at last year’s Democratic National Convention.
Scandal’s creator, Shonda Rhimes, and her producing partner, Betsy Beers, cast a wide net in seeking out their Olivia Pope, auditioning a large number of African-American actresses in 2011. (Olivia was conceived as a black woman because her inspiration, Judy Smith, is black.) Washington knew she was one of many in competition for the role—the actress Gabrielle Union has said in interviews that she, too, read for the part—and recalled that, in her initial meeting with Rhimes and Beers, “there was a feeling like a Western combined with a first date: sort of checking each other out from across the main street. We didn’t know each other.” Within a few minutes, though, said Washington, “that all went out the window.” Rhimes and Washington proved eminently simpatico (sharing, for example, a proclivity for mainlining popcorn, a trait they would impute to Olivia), and Scandal had its star.
Scandal, in a sense, upholds Washington’s tradition of righteousness through theater, though it has a funny way of doing so. It seems to be set slightly in the future, in a wondrous time when it is unremarkable that the White House chief of staff is an openly gay man, the vice president is a woman, the white Republican president is in love with an African-American woman, and this woman happens to run a crackerjack consulting firm with a racially mixed, gender-balanced staff. The hitch is the show’s characters don’t inhabit a Utopian peace-and-harmony futureworld like the one in the original Star Trek TV series, where diversity was an indicator of how enlightened civilization had become. Rather, Scandal is rife with slimeballs, cover-ups, and double, triple, and quadruple crosses. Its measure of equality is that everyone is empowered to be ruthless and cynical.
The White House chief of staff, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry), views politics as literal blood sport—he secretly keeps a hit man on his payroll—and treats even his marriage as an exercise in manipulative horse trading, promising his reporter husband that they’ll adopt a baby if the husband backs off from sniffing around the Oval Office for stories. The vice president, Sally Langston (Kate Burton), is a Tea Party extremist who barely goes through the motions of solemnity and well-wishing when the president, a moderate, is critically wounded in an assassination attempt. An ailing, hard-bitten Supreme Court justice named Verna Thornton (Debra Mooney) is more Damon Runyon than Sandra Day O’Connor, croaking terrible Washington truths to Olivia and President Grant from her hospital bed like a female Bill Casey. And Olivia’s own crew is a band of head cases and reclamation projects, among them an ex-C.I.A. assassin named Huck (Guillermo Díaz), who attends A.A. meetings to expiate the rush he gets from killing people, and a nervous-Nellie young lawyer named Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes), who, it is revealed as Season One progresses into Season Two, is a fugitive from the law. (I am purposefully not going into further detail about plot points from Scandal’s first two seasons for the sake of those who haven’t yet seen the show and plan on catching up.)
All that said, Olivia Pope, though she crosses some ethical lines, remains the good guy; she and her lieutenants call themselves “gladiators in suits,” a mantle that the show’s Twitter faithful have taken up themselves (e.g., “I’m a gladiator in a suit too! LOL!”—@marionbarryjr, May 2). And Olivia has turned out to be an inspirational figure to viewers.
“One of the most profound things for me about the show is the number of white women of all ages who come up to me and say, ‘I want to be Olivia Pope,’ ” Washington said. “It’s especially profound in a place like South Africa. It’s called The Fixer over there, and it just started its second season. The fact that white women can see this woman of color as an aspirational character is revolutionary, I think, in the medium of television. I don’t think white women would feel that way about Olivia if her identity as a woman, period, wasn’t first in their mind.”
I had happened to see Washington’s most recent movie, the romantic comedy Peeples, co-starring The Office’s Craig Robinson, before meeting with her. I noted to Washington how striking it was that the previews programmed to run before Peeples in the theater were almost all for films niche-marketed to black audiences: a concert film by the comedian Kevin Hart, the Paula Patton movie Baggage Claim, the bro-com sequel The Best Man Holiday. The de facto message was We are not expecting any white people to be interested in Peeples, or, for that matter, in any of this other stuff.
“See, that’s what’s really sad,” Washington said. “It’s an unfortunate part of how the industry is sort of catching up to the material. But that’s one of the things I think is so great about Scandal.”
Welcome to ShondaLand
That Olivia has transcended her racial identity, and that Scandal has transcended pigeonholing as “a black person’s show” (and, for that matter, as a women’s show), is a tribute to Scandal’s creator, Rhimes. We as a nation have not yet fulfilled the promise of being a post-racial society, of which Barack Obama’s election was supposed to be an augury, but in ShondaLand (which is literally the name of Rhimes’s production company), race is almost an afterthought. Rhimes, herself an African-American woman, commands an empire within ABC that includes her long-running hit Grey’s Anatomy, its spin-off, Private Practice (whose six-season run just came to an end), and, now, Scandal. All three shows are nonchalantly populated with smart, able people of both sexes and various races—more notable for the sheer fact of their diversity than for any explicit discussion of race within their episodes.
Rhimes is personally way past any rah-rah celebration of how far she’s gotten as a black person in the entertainment industry. When I mentioned to her how powerful I found the optics, to use the political-handler term, of an appearance she made last December on Oprah Winfrey’s interview program Oprah’s Next Chapter—she, Washington, Winfrey, and Judy Smith all gathered in a room conversing, four African-American women at the peak of their professions—she replied, “To me, that felt like my dinner table, with my parents, you know what I mean? Four African-American women sitting in a room and being powerful isn’t surprising to me, I guess.”
But Winfrey was palpably moved by the experience—declaring that Scandal represents “a new moment for our culture”—and Rhimes appreciates the significance her show has taken on. While Olivia’s blackness hardly ever figures in Scandal’s story lines, Rhimes said, “it’s a lovely weapon in our arsenal to use, in the sense that if people are going to be stupid enough to reduce it to nothing but that, then why not use it as a weapon to get what Olivia needs?”
To wit, there was a much-discussed moment last season in which Olivia confronted the president about his capricious behavior toward her by saying, “I’m feeling a little, I don’t know, Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson about all this.” Such on-the-nose allusions to Olivia’s color are rare in Scandal, and Rhimes says that this scene was more about emotion than race—Olivia wanted to wound Fitz Grant, and therefore resorted to the sharpest rhetorical arrow in her quiver.
Washington enjoys examining Scandal’s racial dynamics more than Rhimes does, especially vis-à-vis viewer reaction. In a moment far subtler than the Sally Hemings one, Olivia and her team swooped in to handle the media siege of the female executive whose old fling with President Grant’s Supreme Court nominee had come to light. As the executive (played by Lisa Edelstein) greeted the team at her door, she turned to one of Olivia’s associates, Abby Whelan (played by the pale, auburn-haired Darby Stanchfield), and said, “You must be Olivia Pope.” This compelled Olivia to step forward and say, “I’m Olivia Pope.”
“Twitter went nuts when that happened,” Washington said. “Both women and men of color: ‘Oh my gosh, people do that to me all the time!’ Being underestimated in the workplace, being assumed not to be.”
“Olivia Pope Style”
Perhaps because it is a melodrama, and is not without its moments of proverbial bodice ripping, Scandal has not really figured into the resurgent discussion of feminism in the United States—the one furthered by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Dunham’s Girls, and the success of Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling as network-sitcom auteurs. But it deserves to. Washington and Rhimes readily identify themselves as feminists, and the latter acknowledges that, without calling too much attention to the fact, she and her writers “have created a world in which the women have the power.”
As with the issue of African-American achievement, female power is not an issue on Scandal but a fait accompli. This applies not only to Washington’s Olivia but also to the Harvard- and Yale Law–educated First Lady, Mellie Grant, magnificently played by Bellamy Young, who relishes the opportunity to wield her character’s knowledge of her husband’s philandering as a political weapon, toggling between photo-op wholesomeness and scorched-earth Machiavellianism. “For a woman actor, there has never been a better time to be alive,” Young told me. “Men have always had Shakespeare; now we’ve got Shonda.” Goldwyn, for his part, points out that the show’s men are also strong, and that Scandal’s gender politics are not a zero-sum game in which the dudes must of necessity be timorous and squishy, “like back in the 90s, when guys were pounding drums and reading Iron John in an attempt to recover their masculinity.”
For Washington, the role of fixer is, in her interpretation, inherently feminine—a long way from the days when the crusty Caucasian face of fixerdom in D.C. was the ultra-connected lawyer and presidential adviser Clark Clifford (who, oddly enough, was played by Goldwyn in HBO’s 1995 movie adaptation of David McCullough’s book Truman). “What I think is cool about Olivia is that she fully owns being a woman,” Washington said. “There’s a very nurturing sense of ‘I’m going to take care of you—don’t worry about it. I’m gonna be your mom in this situation. You come stay in my office, have a cup of tea, and let my gladiators take care of you.’ There’s something very maternal about it. But there’s also something very executive about her, and I mean ‘executive’ in a presidential way.”
Olivia’s fashion choices are carefully calibrated to reflect Washington’s conception of the character. We must take a moment to address Olivia’s clothes, because people are obsessed with them. Pinterest boards and lookbook blogs are alive with photos and analysis of “Olivia Pope style,” which is slim-cut and womanly without being revealing. Washington and Scandal’s costume designer, Lyn Paolo, have carte blanche to devise Olivia’s wardrobe, because Rhimes can’t really be bothered with fashion. (“I would wear pajamas to work every day if it were up to me,” she said.) I asked Washington about all the white that Olivia wears—the very first time we see her in the series, she is in a white Tory Burch trench, and, in subsequent episodes, we find her swimming laps in a white swimsuit, wearing ivory blouses and pantsuits to work, and white dresses to functions. Is this white as overtly symbolic as it seems, meaning: good guys, white hats?
Washington replied that the answer is yes, but that there’s much more to it than that. First of all, Olivia is someone who used to work for the Establishment as a campaign and White House aide to Fitzgerald Grant, but she has broken from the Establishment to work for herself. Therefore, she does not adhere to the received D.C. dress code of corporate grays and navys and Nancy Reagan red. “The way you go against that,” she said, “is a palette that’s more pastels, white, cream, pale pink, and blue.”
The other point is that the soft colors and whites work in concert with Paolo’s tailoring to put forth a reassuringly feminine yet unvampy image. “I felt that, the way Olivia is written, so much of what comes out of my mouth is stuff that people don’t want to hear,” Washington said. “People come to Pope and Associates on the worst day of their lives. I’m giving them the hard truth. Olivia is a person who is really smart about the performance of identity—she tells people how to dress for court, or for a press conference. So she, herself, would make a similar decision about her aesthetic. And if I were somebody who spent the majority of my time saying things that were harsh and difficult to hear, I would want my visual aesthetic to be something soft and feminine, warm and easy to be around. So that’s where that comes from.”
You get the feeling that, somehow, none of this ever occurred to Clark Clifford.
“A Very Rare Breed”
But enough about Olivia’s messaging and the show’s social significance. Scandal is a hoot—to watch, and to act in. “I love the wonderful, crazy, fearless alchemy that is the tonal range of this show,” said Jeff Perry, so good as Cyrus Beene, the paroxysmal White House chief of staff. Perry spends much of his screen time in nose-to-nose confrontation with Washington and Goldwyn, “and it feels like an old comfort zone,” he told me. In the 1970s, he founded the Steppenwolf Theatre Company (in Chicago) with Terry Kinney and Gary Sinise, and he says that Scandal, in its sparkiness and reckless abandon, evokes his days onstage with those guys.
The show’s adrenalized pace is exhausting—Perry likens it to the up-tempo offense of the Oregon Ducks college football team, and Goldwyn to the sped-up screwball comedies of Howard Hawks—but the common theme among its participants is how indefatigable Washington is. The irreplaceable center of her show—a show that, unlike its critically revered brethren on cable, must fulfill a standard 22-episode network order—she has naturally assumed a role of team leadership not unlike Olivia’s at Pope and Associates. (Washington literally cheerleads the cast and crew every time they begin work on filming a new episode, gathering everyone to shout in unison, “Ladies and gentlemen, Episode 30!”—or whatever episode is being made—followed, she said, by “much screaming, jumping up and down, and banging on furniture.”)
“She knows every single person’s name,” Rhimes said. “She gave out the prizes in our little weight-loss competition that we had on set. And, more importantly—and this is a thing I am really trying to learn from her—I have never heard Kerry Washington complain. That sounds like a casual thing to toss off, but think about the fact that she works more hours than anybody. I literally never hear her complain. That is a very rare breed of person.”
Among Washington’s leadership initiatives is Scandal’s Twitter blitz, now the envy of the TV business. Each new Thursday-night episode generates nearly 200,000 fan tweets over the course of its broadcast, in addition to attracting eight million viewers, a terrific number by 2013 standards. Washington and Rhimes already had robust Twitter presences before the show, but when Scandal made its debut, in the spring of 2012, it was as a midseason replacement with an abbreviated, seven-episode season—far from a sure thing, renewal-wise. Washington, with the input of Allison Peters, her friend and social-media consultant, decided it would be a good idea to get the entire cast to live-tweet each episode. But, she realized, “if I ask everybody to go on Twitter, I am now the controlling lead actor who’s really annoying and making some cast members do something that’s going to make them feel uncomfortable.” So she asked Rhimes, the boss, to issue the edict, and the cast complied.
“In the beginning, Jeff Perry used to make me write his tweets because he was like, ‘I don’t know what this thing is and I don’t know what to do!,’ ” Washington said. “So I would sit with him in the makeup trailer and say, ‘Tell me some things you would want to say to the fans.’ I crafted the tweets for him, sort of using his voice. Put them in his ‘Saved’ box. And then, during the episode, he could just press ‘Send.’ ” The 57-year-old Perry now has more than 40,000 followers and has evolved, Washington said, into a “tweeting machine.” By late last season, Perry was benevolently advising his West Coast followers, “More than ever: Western #gladiators should stay away from twitter for a few hrs to avoid spoilers!!,” while Goldwyn, another initial Twitter skeptic—“I was snobby about the whole 140-character thing,” he said—was buttering up his 70,000-plus followers with such sentiments as “Love me some GLADIATORS!!!;).”
As for what Season Three holds, Rhimes reports that we will at last learn some of Olivia’s backstory, about which we know virtually nothing except that she swam in high school—a lift from Washington’s bio file that was incorporated into a script. Season Two ended with a gasp-inducing cliff-hanger in which Olivia’s connection to a shadowy black-ops figure played by the actor Joe Morton was revealed. We will definitely see more of Morton’s character, whose name in the show’s scripts is Rowan, although, Rhimes cautioned, “whether or not that’s actually his name is debatable.”
Washington is as in the dark as anyone on where Scandal’s Season Three arc will take Olivia. The cast receives each new script the way we viewers receive each new episode—with eagerness and raised eyebrows. “We in the cast keep joking that, in honor of the D.C. element of the show, we’re going to stage a Watergate break-in,” she said. “Steal some files from the office so that we know what the story lines are.” Mobilize, #Gladiators!