Kerry Washington’s Scandal-Free Domestic Life: ‘I Like to Make Banana Bread’
Eight years ago, Scandal hadn’t yet captivated viewers with its pulpy blend of hot sex, passionate political intrigue, and sizzling style. Kerry Washington didn’t yet have a deal with Neutrogena. Nor did she have a trio of acting Emmy nominations to her name. So how, exactly, has she remained so … cool?
“Having friends and family that don’t love you because you’re on a TV show is important,” she tells Yahoo Style. “I don’t have to be Kerry Washington when I’m at home. I’m a mom and a wife. I like to make banana bread. What else do you do with the bananas that wind up spoiling?”
Things aren’t quite as blissfully domestic on the set of her day job. The style-savvy star, who plays calculating political operative Olivia Pope on the buzzy series, has so far had a forbidden affair with the president, gotten pregnant, had an abortion, and split with her presidential lover. No wonder she has no idea where the show might go next when it returns on Thursday. It certainly won’t be run-of-the-mill, as her character tries, in her own way, to make amends with her boyfriend’s ex-wife, Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young), who’s now running for top office.
“I think Olivia is on a journey that’s attempting to be a redemptive journey. She’s paying a debt for taking something away from Mellie — her marriage — and she wants to give Mellie something she’s always wanted: a seat at the table,” says Washington.
Pope is impeccably attired as ever. Onscreen, her ensembles are crisp, tailored, and largely conservative, from the blue Giorgio Armani suit she’s worn to meetings and the scarlet, flowered Carolina Herrera dress from the Christmas episode, to a black, beaded Oscar de la Renta coat she slipped into outside the White House.
On the red carpet, however, Washington mixes it up, most recently clad in a gold Dolce & Gabbana frock at the Golden Globes. The whole ensemble came together in just days, because Washington prioritizes her time. “Dolce approached me. They thought it would be special,” she says. “I thought, they should find a special person to do it with. And they said, ‘What about you?’ I was humbled and honored. I fell in love with that dress.”
Washington, who has just turned 40, is married IRL to athlete Nnamdi Asomugha, and is the mother of an infant son, Caleb Kelechi, and a 2-year-old daughter, Isabelle Amarachi. She’s long been politically active, working with former President Barack Obama’s administration as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and campaigning on his behalf; she was present at the Los Angeles version of the Women’s March on Saturday. And she says the parallels between her show and what’s going on in real-world Washington, D.C., aren’t lost on her.
“We open on election night,” she says of the new season. “You find out very quickly who won and who lost. It seems like much of the season is filling in the time when we left at the convention and when we come back on election night.”
Just don’t expect Washington, who is adored and respected by the public, to merge life and art by running for office. The thought of it leaves her a bit giggly.
“Never. Never,” she says. “It’s so important that more women run, and more people of color run, but for me, I’ve been in the business of show for a long time. There’s an element of that in politics that I’m not drawn to. I’m not drawn to the showbiz part of it.”
And while she advocates for women through the Allstate Foundation Purple Purse initiative, which spreads awareness about domestic abuse in the form of financial abuse, Washington doesn’t put herself up on a pedestal. She’s not comfortable being referred to as a “role model.”
“I don’t think about it in those terms, I guess. I know it’s true, because people have said to it to me, but I don’t traffic in the idea of that,” Washington says. “I can’t make decisions based on doing what I think other people need me to do. That has never served me well in life. The most I can do is focus on being the best version of me. I know how important it is to have people who inspire me.”
When she sees her face on a poster advertising Scandal, she says, she pauses for a beat, and then gets on with her day. Because if she took herself too seriously, or became too self-important, her cast would go all Olivia Pope on her. And, without naming names, showrunner Shonda Rhimes famously refuses to work with anyone who’s problematic.
“We’re such a family on the show. We’re the same people we were six seasons ago. Some of us got married and had kids. What our lives looked like — the stuff in our lives is different. The core values of who we are is the same,” she says. “It would be weird to act otherwise.”
Now she’s back at work, but with two babies at home. “We just started last week. I’m just wrapping my head around it,” she notes. “It’s just one more ball to juggle.”
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