Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

Even today, there is the inevitable code-switching and double consciousness required for survival as a Black person in America, but that shape-shifting can be empowering. As an adult, I’ve told myself that I was not abandoning myself to fit in—I was flexing my capacity to feel at home in diverse environments. But if I’m honest, it’s not until recently that I’ve begun to understand how to be an integrated person who moves fluidly through different spaces as herself.

This is when the connection between art and social change became crystal clear to me. I started to understand the power of representation, the need for people to see themselves in the content they consume, but also the power of content to change how they think and feel and behave.

It wasn’t just what we were saying in the show that made us educators and activists. It was also how we protected the art we were making, how we defended it, how we fought for the right to have it live in the world.

I wanted to play complicated characters with difficult truths; I wanted to never be afraid if the stakes were high and if the material was controversial. I vowed to value my identity as both an artist and activist throughout my career, wherever it took me.

Even though I didn’t yet know how to fully control it, I knew that when I could plug into the character and give myself over to the reality of the performance, what happened felt like sorcery and was perceived as magic.

shielding me from learning the logistics of self-care meant that I had been groomed for success, but not self-sufficiency. For some reason she didn’t feel she could give me both.

Auditioning is one of the areas in my life where I learned the hard way that I needed to take hold of the concept of success and wrangle it away from the grip of others to define it for myself. This may sound strange coming from a person who is considered generally successful, but I don’t do well when my goal is to be liked, loved, popular, or famous. I can’t control what other people think of me, and when I try, even now, I can lose a sense of myself and get pulled back into feelings of fear and weakness, and into that ominous feeling I had growing up that something was wrong, and that the only way to fix it is to be as perfect as possible.

Auditions became my time in the lab to explore the ideas and frameworks I was being taught in class. I was being taught to analyze and break down dramatic literature, to approach a play through an academic lens. This was my first exposure to pure scene study without the promise of an audience or the end goal of securing a job. Reading for a role no longer became a test of my value, my ability to win, my beauty, my perfection, or even my talent. I started to see auditions as simply a gift and an opportunity. They became moments in time when I had full permission to use my imagination—to play, create, discover, and just have fun. They were invitations to spend fifteen minutes of the day doing what I loved to do, and then letting go of the results.

It was in that class that I first began to understand that as an actor you are both the producer and the product, the marketer and marketed, the driver of innovation and the passenger on the unpredictable ride that is show business.

I wanted those people, those characters, to have an impact on the lives of their audiences.

It’s the work that excites me more than anything.

enjoy the premieres, I’m grateful for the magazine covers… but it’s the hard dig that I love, the rehearsals and the discovery process and the scene setting and the fight prep and finding the perfect shoe. What’s happening in this scene? What do these characters want? What are the emotional stakes? What’s the historical context? What is the story being told and why does it matter? The dramaturgy: that’s what I love, and that’s what I learned at GWU.

To perform meant to deliver excellence and to meet, if not exceed, expectations. More than anything, acting for me was the magical practice of using detailed characters and specific stories to be a mirror, to reflect some truths about humanity back to an audience that does not see us, the actors, but rather sees a version of themselves. To perform also meant to devote myself to a creative process of expression that allowed me to transform and often disappear.

To exist was to perform. And so, I was never not onstage. But none of the roles I played in my everyday life were rooted in my truest self. The pathway to knowing my truth clearly had been broken before the bones in me were fully set. So, I searched for that version of me, and wondered who she was.

Knowing that I would be faced with a business that would seek to objectify, marginalize, and “otherize” me, I wanted first to embrace, and thereafter always remember, the sacred shared humanity at the root of great acting, and great artwork of any kind. Travel, I hoped, would enhance my ability to understand and create characters by enriching my knowledge and experience of how different people live all around the world.

What I remember most viscerally about my first yoga class, however, was the end of it.

she stopped talking. And we just lay there, breathing. I started to weep. I had spent thirty minutes flowing through poses that moved me into a deep physical connection with myself. I was fully awake in my body, lying on that mat, with nowhere to go—no distractions, no performance, no urge for perfectionism. Just me. I had no memory of ever feeling this way before. I felt safe, and I had spent most of my life not feeling safe. I understood the tears that were melting out of me only as confusion and disorientation at the time, but those tears were also an outpouring of grief for the hypervigilant little girl who lived within me. She had learned long ago that rest and relaxation were hazardous states of being. She had not slept for years, trying to protect herself, terrified of the things that transpired in the night. And even in the daytime, she had avoided being fully awake in her body to skirt the memories of those same terrors, and to escape the disconnect all around her and the loneliness it produced.

I was shocked by the power I had drawn from mindful movement, and then by the feelings the simplicity of silence and stillness had evoked in me. Safety had led to grief. And yoga had led to some kind of deep physical and emotional thawing that felt more like the real me. Yoga would become a bridge back to wholeness, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I started to find space within my body, to rest and reside within it. And I started to understand that there was strength to be found in stillness and determination required on the journey toward flexibility.

I felt triumphant, and proud, and grateful to have the opportunity to be stretching my mind and humbling myself as a traveler in the unknown.

It is strange how memory works. In my life, there are things that I remember with clarity and other things that remain a disjointed blur. Many of my early memories are disturbingly faint. I wonder if this is the result of being told that my truth was not my own. Why remember the details if they aren’t even real? Why store narrative in a brain that can’t be trusted? I know that this is also a common result of trauma,

decided at some point that booking a job should not be the measure of success

I started to refocus my definition of success on process rather than on results. Had I tried my best? Had I given it my all? If I could honestly answer yes to both of those questions and it still did not go my way, then—out of necessity—I had to have faith in the belief that I was collecting these “nos” on the way to “yesses,” and if the “yesses” never came, then I would know when it was time to move on.

I was still working at a restaurant, substitute teaching in New York City Public Schools, and teaching yoga. I always made sure to have secondary sources of income because I would rather have worked extra shifts on a day job than have done a movie that felt disparaging to women or people of color. It meant that when I came across a script that I felt reinforced negative stereotypes, I had a handful of other jobs to sustain me and maintain my creative freedom.

Like me, Niecy was a performer, willing to play the role that best offered security in her relationships. And in the life of a booster, that meant she also had to dress the part. She walked in the world like a wealthy young woman and pretended to belong in a socioeconomic environment that was not her own, an experience I understood firsthand from my years attending Spence.

It was as if these women, these powerful characters, were each trying to teach me something. They were like waking dreams coming through my subconscious. And because I struggled with fully understanding myself, my learning came through these characters, tiny miracles in the pursuit of my own awakening. Eventually I would begin to ask those same questions of myself. I would learn to give myself the love and dignity that I bestowed upon my characters, to give myself permission to exist, to live, to be real, to take up space, and to matter.

When my mother dropped me at nursery school for my first day of pre-K, I barely flashed a look back. She has since said that witnessing my desire for independence at such a young age forced her to prepare for the inevitable day that I’d leave for college. In many ways, this safeguarding of her heart maintained the veil between us while also generously giving me the space to grow.

my mother wanted to find a name that embraced her pride in being a Black woman, while also honoring her mixed heritage. She knew that her family was descended from Scottish and Irish immigrants (legend had it they were pirates) who had landed in Jamaica and settled there, and in her research, she’d learned that Kerry means “little dark one” in Irish, in reference to the southern areas of Ireland where the landscape and people are rich in darker tones. (Specifically, Kerry was originally Chiarraí; “ciar” means black, or sometimes dark-haired. The “Black Irish” are generally from County Kerry.)

It’s not that I wanted to be the star of the film; I wanted my characters to be in a story of their own. 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.

you can’t create more magic with mere repetition. You have to keep inviting it and stirring the pot and poking the bear and whispering to the magic and remaining open to a response. The one thing you can’t do is to push the same button again and again. By the afternoon, as we continued to work on this particular scene because I wasn’t surrendering to the magic, I found myself trying to force it. I felt that I just couldn’t get to where I wanted to go emotionally; I couldn’t find the truth. It was as if I were merely performing an idea of the scene. I had never been on a movie this big, or had this important a role, and I knew I wasn’t getting it right.

“You have to let it be different every time. Don’t try to make it be what it was—just keep finding new things. Play…”

With that new approach, the scene began to sing. I asked myself, “What new moment can I discover? What new item can I find in his bag of works? How can I respond to him differently?” This felt like freedom. Jamie had thrown me a lifeline. 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.

Knowing that there was a culture of campaigning for these awards allowed me a peek behind the curtain that fractured any concept of “best” in the creative arts. Campaigns were built to increase popularity and win votes. I would argue that one doesn’t win these kinds of awards without tremendous talent and the work to show for it, but it was also now clear to me why some of the greatest performances of our time had not been awarded trophies. 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.

It was now clearer than ever that this disappearance of myself, the untethering of my reality into the imaginary in the service of a character, was one of the things I loved most about acting.

To be an actor is to consider the humanity of others. It’s my job to see the world through other people’s eyes and to step into their shoes. To me, there’s a connection between the craft of acting and a belief in the importance of human rights. My pull toward civic engagement is born of my understanding that each of us has a valuable perspective and important dreams for ourselves and our families and our future.

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 role model. Olivia was complicated, she was human, and she had arrived.

I knew at the time that waiting to be rescued from a tower was not a particularly feminist idea, but I also felt that as Black families, we were deserving of superheroes and fairy tales, too.

When my cousin John, who later became a visual artist, was in elementary school, he spent most of his spare time writing and illustrating his own comic books. He was obsessed with superheroes and their adventures. One afternoon, when I was still an infant, my dad asked John why he never drew any Black superheroes. And John said, “Because there aren’t any.” My dad heard John’s observation as an invitation and was determined in that moment to prove John wrong—to prove that there were superheroes in the world who looked like us. This was one of those moments where my dad’s magic was undeniable. “Have you never heard of Chitterlin’ Man?” my dad said. “No…,” John said, confused. “Oh!” my dad exclaimed. “Chitterlin’ Man is the Black superhero. I’m friends with him. So maybe you guys could meet one day.” For the next twenty years, my dad would sometimes call John, disguising his voice and pretending to be Chitterlin’ Man.

I was feeling lost. There was Olivia Pope—I spent most hours of the day thinking about who she was and what she wanted. How she walked; what she wore; what she said. There was “Kerry Washington,” who had become an avatar for progress and inclusion and fashion and fame—she, too, had a calculated appearance and way of being. And then there was me, behind the scenes, the longshoreman at the end of the dock, in the middle of a nor’easter with my head down, working through the night. In some ways, my worldview became very small, and my circle of trust shrank. I felt a distance growing between my friends outside of work and me. Trust requires consistency, and outside of work, I was at best inconsistent. Even now, I find it easier to maintain relationships with those who are most forgiving and allow me to disappear into the work.

on Scandal, I started to drop the mask not only because the hours were long, over an extended period of time, but also because we knew we were part of something historic. We were committed to the show and to one another, and that rapid-fire intimacy didn’t disappear—it lasted for seven years. Through the course of it I learned how to maintain and nurture authentic closeness and vulnerability over the long haul, through weddings and divorces and illness and births and good times and bad times and everything in between. I had come to understand, accept, and even embrace the limitations of intimacy with my parents. We had found an ease and fluidity with the veils and masks we donned. But with my Scandal family, the long hours and the creative commitment and the rare air of fame led to unguarded honesty and unbridled connection.

That kind of intimacy didn’t come naturally for me. But playing Olivia Pope helped. She also helped me to lead. Being number one on the call sheet required an intense work ethic, stamina, and resilience. Part of why I was able to be number one was because I was playing a talented leader who stared down challenges and navigated situations that paralyzed other people. “It’s my name on that door,” I said week after week, and I thought, It’s my face on that poster, my name at the top of the credits. Playing her on-screen helped me to step into an Olivia Pope version of myself, helped me find my own sense of capability and power. Olivia Pope helped me to become a fixer and a leader in my real life.

was a loneliness that I felt in my family that wasn’t entirely connected to my being an only child, a sense that when floating in the complexity of life’s most intimate challenges, I was on my own. I shared with my mother my intention to walk down the aisle by myself, to greet my husband at the altar as an independent woman making the choice to partner for life.

this new life, this new chapter, was being authored by me.

Olivia Pope had proven to be an excellent opportunity for me to try to discover a version of myself that was more powerful, assertive, elegant, emotionally expressive. Olivia Pope was a true compassionate leader, too, and she taught me to be that both on and off set. Being given the responsibility of playing Olivia made me move through the world in entirely new ways. Like Anita Hill, Olivia’s walk was not my walk, but I found it by asking the question, If I had the courage and confidence to be Olivia Pope, how might I move through the world?

Kerry is what my mother chose. Washington is my dad. Asomugha is my future. Marisa belongs to me.