Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

What replaced those blue screens in post-production were images called plates, which had been taken from the actual White House balcony. This had never been done before. Many shows and films had created what they imagined to be the view from that balcony, but Scandal had been able to film actual footage from the balcony and then use those images. This remarkable access had been possible because of Shonda’s strong relationship with the Obamas, and permission to film these plates had been granted when she’d paid a visit to the residence.

In their home, as in many Caribbean households, a premium was placed on having lighter skin. Centuries of white supremacy and institutional racism led to internalized beliefs that the closer one’s appearance aligned with European aesthetics, the more valued they were as human beings. My mother experienced the effects of this colorism firsthand. She was not the child chosen to represent the family on various outings or community events; her darker hue meant that she was not celebrated for her beauty.

We were fine—but I learned a long time ago that FINE can be an acronym for fucked-up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

My parents’ battles were minor in comparison to the one that was raging within me. My mind and body became the enemy; I was trapped within them. I tucked away the fear and started to develop a role, a character that would stay with me: The good girl. The perfect child. The solution.

“My therapist told me the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.” His therapist explained that when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take from them the very thing that is most important to each of us—our ability to know and trust ourselves.

I am built with a sometimes codependent need to see things from another person’s perspective, to understand them, to justify their feelings and their behavior and to experience their reality as my own.

One of the consequences of growing up in a household with half-truths is that there is no space for trust to thrive.

I had come to understand that the best and most appropriate way to metabolize pain was to pretend that it never happened.

The lying became a way of life for me. And when I wasn’t lying, I was positioning the truth in a way that was most acceptable to others—especially when it came to my parents.

As an actor, there is no piano to sit at, no instrument to hide behind. You are the instrument of your expression, and your humanity is on the line.

I started to become aware of my own need to earn the love of a sometimes emotionally unavailable mother.

I didn’t want to be an accessory to a white woman’s journey. I wanted to play women with agency who were living through pivotal moments of their own, not just helping lead characters reflect on their “protagonistic” journeys.

People-pleasing and perfectionism were still signature parts of my personality—the shape-shifting I’d learned as a child had created in me a desire to get it “right” instead of digging for the unknown.

The award doesn’t always go to the “best” performance—it goes to one of the year’s most extraordinary performances backed up by an effective campaign.

Every Black woman in Hollywood auditioned for the role of Olivia Pope. We all knew that it was a historic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Olivia Pope became an icon. For many Americans, she was the first Black woman they spent time with in their homes in an intimate way, week after week, for an hour at a time. For others, she was one of us—she represented a version of Black excellence that allowed us to see ourselves in our smartest and most powerful forms, perfectly coiffed, well-heeled, fearlessly at the center of power, and with an unimpeachable mastery of language. She was smart, she was beautiful, and she was messy. She was in full control within her crisis management firm, while also at the center of her tumultuous romance. She had been written to embody the complexity of being of a flawed human being and an antihero who remained an aspirational

After we made the pilot of Scandal, the network picked us up for a paltry six episodes. At the time, the standard episode order—for a show like Grey’s Anatomy, for example—was twenty-two per year. Given the reality of having a Black female actor in the lead, the network’s decision had undertones of risk aversion—having a Black woman helm a primetime television show was a gamble in their eyes. Executives considered it an enormous financial risk.

Olivia Pope helped me to become a fixer and a leader in my real life.

Character, in acting terms, is often defined by how a person does things. Everyone engages in behavior: sleeping, walking, talking; and everyone has feelings: joy, sadness, fear, excitement. How we do those things, and how we express those feelings, helps define a character.

Kim’s belief is that characters and their circumstances come to actors because there is a need in the actor’s subconscious to explore or express specific ideas that are engendered by the work.

Being Olivia Pope had helped me step into being Kerry Washington: actress, advocate, activist, fashion and beauty personality, producer, wife, mother. Her fearlessness had propelled me forward into a life that was bigger and bolder than the one I had imagined for myself.

I had asked questions of my characters, but there had been a reason I had been unable to ask the questions of myself: “Who am I?” “What do I want?” “How do I feel?” I had not been given the assignment of playing my true self; the role my parents had required of me was the role that best supported their story.

We have been taught to think that kids come into the world and it is our job to mold them, guide them, and help turn them into the people they’re meant to be. Tsabary believes that our job is not to make our children better; rather, our children are opportunities for us to become better, to serve them, and to make room for who they are meant to be.

I believe that projects choose me, too. They come into my life to teach me something. They are opportunities to learn and grow. The challenges I face in playing a character and navigating the circumstances of their world are opportunities for me to be better, so that those characters can be who they’re meant to be. Some lessons are clear in the moment and others only become evident long after the fact.

These characters, these projects, had chosen me just as my children had. They were opportunities to move closer to myself, not some version of me born out of perfectionism and people-pleasing and being the good girl, but a version rooted in authenticity and the courage to be my true self, even as I grappled with knowing less about where that true self came from.

I used to think my mother was afraid. Afraid to leave my dad, afraid to live a bold life of adventure, afraid to write and publish, afraid to feel. But it turns out she was an intrepid adventurer, bold and brave, willing to be innovative and experimental in her quest for a child.