If you want to catch Kerry Washington for a chat, you’d better be ready for her to multitask. “I hope you don’t mind if I eat while we talk,” she says cheerfully on a call in late April, “I’ve got about one break to do seven things.” Chances are, all of them are pretty important. Washington, who rose to fame as Olivia Pope, the superhero-esque political fixer with a thorny personal life on seven seasons of Shonda Rhimes’ hit Scandal, now finds herself in the plum position of seemingly being able to do close to whatever she wants. Luckily for the rest of us, what she wants to do is to make a difference.
An activist long before she was an actress, the Bronx-born Washington has marshaled her Hollywood connections and storytelling expertise to benefit all kinds of civil justiceminded organizations, from the Vision Into Power Cohort, a program to support grassroots organizations that empower marginalized groups with the Movement Voter Project, to speaking at the 2017 Women’s March, working with Time’s Up, and stumping for Stacey Abrams, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. At her production company, Simpson Street, the aim is to center typically sidelined characters in the projects she produces and stars in–projects, she says, “that feel new and fresh and upend the idea that there’s only one kind of person who deserves to be at the center of the story.”
For Washington, who was raised to celebrate the democratic process, staying involved is a no-brainer. “I have access to these communication skills, and all different kinds of resources, and I’m not the one who would benefit most from them,” she says. Her efforts haven’t gone unnoticed: Washington magazine’s 2022 people of the year in March. With upcoming projects ranging from blockbuster action films and YA-minded Netflix romps to buzzy legal dramas and a spate of new Audible projects, her star is only continuing to rise. catches up with the supernova below.
