She went from being a very smart student to being the star of Scandal, but she had lingering doubts about her standing in the world. The actor then agreed to participate in an American genealogy show and discovered that his own story wasn’t quite right. what it seemed. . .
I think I can attest that Kerry Washington comes from probably the best family. Four years ago, on a frigid, gray day in New York City, I met the actress after seeing her heartbreaking Broadway performance in the play American Son. she was sitting on a couch on the liberated stage, in the middle of a verbal exchange with Washington’s parents, Earl and Valerie: she was a teacher, he was a businessman, who had raised his daughter in a working-class, predominantly black community in the Bronx. I thought about how beautiful, charming, and erudite they looked. And Washington, elegant and dazzling in genuine life, made perfect sense as an offspring.
If there is only one purpose in Washington’s new memoir, Thicker Than Water, it is to blow up the fiction of this better image.
“We were seen as a happy, quiet, working-class, prosperous and ‘perfect’ family. And there was a lot of joy and happiness at home. But it was also much more complex,” he says. There’s tension in marriage and tension in the home, and the emphasis on appearances. “
For Washington, many of those tensions were akin to dating her father. “He rarely looked like a foreign character from a foreign land,” he writes in the book. Washington did not perceive where the distance was coming from, and that made his own doubt. “I felt trapped by her love, sometimes dismayed by her despair, and then always ashamed. I’m ashamed that I’m not a better girl,” she wrote. And that was even before he knew there was a secret: that the boy he called “daddy” wasn’t his biological father.
“Now I’m on another non-public journey, where I start to reexamine who I am in my life,” he says, explaining his motivation for writing the book. “Most of the time,” he adds, “I was thinking about breaking free. “
For more than two decades, Kerry Washington has been a prominent face in cinema, known for films like Django Unchained. But it’s in recent years that his name is even better known, thanks in large part to the hit TV series Scandal. , in which he starred in seven successful seasons.
She talks to me in a sumptuous seven-seater SUV, the kind of vehicle chauffeured celebrities use. It’s the day of its publication and we head to a Manhattan bookstore where he is planning a sting operation to sneak in and point to some books without much fanfare.
The last time I saw her, my impression of her lifestyle in the family circle was completely intact. But this time, as the rain falls on the roof of the car, she talks about the confusion of living in a lie for so long. as if I had been assigned a role in running this better family circle,” he says. It is exhausting to walk through the world and feel that your original and true self is not acceptable. . . Put on a mask, or a façade, to keep up appearances. It’s stressful and the more roles you play that contrast with your originality, the more unacceptable your true self seems.
The result, he says, has been chronic anxiety, worry and self-loathing, as well as a tendency toward self-destructive behavior. “It might drive me crazy,” she says. As long as I can keep the curtain. “
In Thicker Than Water, Washington lifts this veil of deception. His mother, from an ambitious Jamaican family, and his father, whose real estate business is constantly exposed to risk by Internal Revenue Service investigations, saw his attempt to include the American dream turn into disappointment. His father indulged in drinking, which provoked bitter arguments at home. From a young age, Washington spent harrowing nights pretending to be asleep while listening to all this.
“As they slammed doors and shouted obscenities at each other, I can feel the tension between them, vibrating through the wall,” he writes in the book. “I evolved panic attacks at night. “
The tension of listening to their parents’ anger and sadness during the night was exacerbated by the family’s collective response: In the morning, everyone acted as if nothing had happened. “But there were very small acts to perform to destroy me. “”Seeing my mother masterfully hide her anger in the early years gave me unexpected permission to tame mine. “
Despite this, Washington has consistently strived to achieve the best results and refers to itself as “high-functioning. “He got good grades and began to excel in acting, earning him a scholarship to the elite Spence School in the Upper East. Side of Manhattan, a place away from the world in a working-class community in the Bronx.
“When I reached perfectionism, I felt like an edition of humanity’s most improbable. I was never going to become a thin, rich, white woman from the Upper East Side on pennies old. It doesn’t matter what I do in this life. ” Washington laughs, “I will never be an Anglo-Saxon woman born on Park Avenue, with generations of wealth. “
For someone who is uncomfortable with their own experience, or even their own body, acting is a counterintuitive choice. But Washington is no stranger to acting. And while the auditions were about common rejections, I was all too familiar with the discomfort of failing. “I always don’t feel smart enough. . . It sounded familiar. Ironically, the more aware she had become of the monetary pressure her parents were under, and how acting can alleviate them, the less likely she was to win the valuable roles she coveted. “I haven’t booked an acting role in years,” she tells me. “It became harder for me to connect. “
Washington’s acting adventure began in earnest when, at the age of 12, he joined S. T. A. R. – or Serving Teens via Arts Resources – a youth theater group founded in a New York City hospital. It was 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the organization traveled the territory of the three states of New York educating young people about sex and addressing issues such as self-esteem, loss of virginity, sexuality, drugs and living with sick relatives. Washington was very accepting of the role, even traveling with condoms in her purse in case she encountered classmates who needed birth control, which her friends nicknamed “Condom Kerry. “
“When she needed to know how to put on a condom, she would just pull out a banana and a condom and give us a demonstration,” a friend said in a video about the group’s work.
Footage from that time shows an incredibly intense and confident young Washington delivering a monologue in which her 14-year-old character realizes she may have contracted HIV. Her performance had such an effect that she was captured in the time through the American television network ABC for a news special.
From the outside, it seemed as if she was flying high, but the truth is different: “Although the façade says that she is a success and a smart and successful girl, I am in a lot of danger, whether it is you. I know, with drugs” and alcohol, or artistic dangers, or the dangers of activism.
As she writes in the book, “There were boyfriends, parties, drugs and alcohol, and I went to nightclubs in New York, even on school nights. I fed myself alcohol, food, marijuana and sex, to adjust my life. “brain chemistry and allowing me a dangerously destructive escape.
But it was her relationship with her body and her nutrition that brought her to the breaking point of self-destruction. At George Washington University, where he won a theater scholarship in the late 1990s, Washington indulged in compulsive dinners and starved in a vicious and destructive cycle.
“My relationship with food and my body had become a poisonous cycle of self-abuse that used the equipment of hunger, binge eating, physical obsession, and compulsive exercise,” she writes in Thicker Than Water. feelings, I filled my face, secretly overate for days, to the point of physical pain, rarely to the point of fainting.
“Then,” she writes, “when I woke up the next morning surrounded by dirty dishes, empty food boxes, and sticky remains, I decided to get rid of the comfort I had sought the night before. But not through vomiting; Too confusing: This habit is reserved for women with eating disorders, weak and rebellious women. Instead, my tendency toward perfectionism led me to control, either by stopping eating for days or exercising for several hours, all in an effort to correct the mistakes of drunkenness.
In the end, Washington sought help, which led him to counseling and organizational therapy, which continued to help him into his adult life. Her acting career began to evolve into advertising roles in mainstream films, with the problems of her adolescence likely behind her. But the real The source of his family’s dissonance had not yet been revealed.
I first met Washington in the 2001 hit romantic comedy Save the Last Dance. In this film, she plays Caterpillar, Sara’s friend of Julia Stiles, an aspiring white dancer who seeks acceptance through a black network passionate about hip-hop in Chicago. South side.
Caterpillar’s effect lasted far beyond his role in the film, introducing audiences to the politics of race relations and the myopia of many white Americans in the face of the authenticities of black life, issues that, more than 20 years later, remain important. Provide as usual. Washington brought genuine tenderness to her role as a young black teenage mother. But she was still the most productive black friend of the white main character.
“I’ve been very lucky to have the opportunity to play some incredible supporting characters: Julia Stiles and Meg Ryan’s most productive friend,” Washington said of Save the Last Dance and Against the Ropes, which he directed with Ryan in 2004. “But it is. I feel that the opportunities to play the lead role were few and far between.
Hollywood, as is still clear, has a long history of injustice when it comes to race, but also when it comes to sex. Washington’s next roles were not so much protagonists as “first girls”, when he discovered that the characters at his disposal were wives. She gave the impression of being Della Bea Robinson, wife of Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray, and Kay Amin, wife of Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, either to critical acclaim. his male peers who won Oscars for their roles. “I was looking for the actor who, if chosen to play your wife, would help you win an Oscar,” Washington jokes.
That all changed in the most dramatic way when, in 2012, the world first met political strategist and fixer Olivia Pope. In Scandal, the multi-award-winning seven-season series from superproducer Shonda Rhimes, Washington played the character’s name, loosely based on real-life Washington DC lawyer Judy Smith, who portrayed Monica Lewinsky in the Bill Clinton scandal.
To call the character a rare opportunity is an understatement. The role was, Washington reminds me, the first black and female lead character in an American television series in just 40 years. “At the time I got the role I had, I don’t know, 33 years old?So that didn’t happen in my life,” he recalls.
Olivia Pope’s influence in Washington is ignoring. ” I feel like we’ve grown up together,” he admits. As if he had grown up in this marriage with her. We would have become combined surnames and we would have become basic cultural elements. We would have become combined political forces, arm in arm. There was a point of security that allowed me to be her, to give me prestige and purpose.
Of course, Washington’s genuine life was not the same as Olivia Pope’s. In Scandal, Pope is caught in a love triangle with U. S. President Fitzgerald Grant III and Captain Jake Ballard, an intelligence officer tasked with protecting her first, who later becomes director of the National Security Agency. During this time, Washington met her husband, former professional football player Nnamdi Asomugha, and began a circle of relatives with him. “While Olivia was still looking to decide between Jake and Fitz, I was like a girlfriend, I had three kids and I was building a very different domestic life. “
And yet, Pope would have been inspired by the steps Washington has taken regarding his privacy. One of the most memorable points of the book is the drastic efforts she and Asomugha have made to keep their marriage a secret from an ever-intrusive press.
“For months, I had been dressed in my engagement ring secretly pinned to my clothes, fearing that if other people knew we were engaged, it would be to celebrate a wedding away from the public spectacle,” Washington writes in Thicker Than Water. She also tells how Jason Wu, an old friend who designed her wedding dress, kept it secret even from his own team, calling it “the dress I’m designing for the Moroccan premiere of Scandal. “
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Washington remained reluctant to put her family in the spotlight, rarely appears with or talks about her husband, and never posts photos of her children online. Therefore, writing a book as private as this turns out to be an unexpected move.
She doesn’t agree. ” When you walk the red carpet with your wife or go out, you’re not in control. In fact, you are exposing your most vulnerable relationships to the interpretive writings of others and regardless of how they should assign who you are and what you are.
“But I don’t do that here. It’s like gathering all the tabloids and saying, ‘I need to share anything with you. You can write about it however you want. ‘
This resolution has already been tested as some of the stories in the e-book have already been picked up by the press. One episode is an abortion she underwent: she used a false name, so that a nurse would tell her at a vulnerable moment of the procedure. who bore an uncanny resemblance to actor Kerry Washington.
Another focuses on the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of another obviously troubled child, whom she describes frighteningly as “the frozen child. “Washington poignantly recounts in the e-book how, over the course of several sleepovers when she was 10 years old, she learned that someone was manipulating her clothes and touching her in intimate places while she slept. But when she became suspicious and confronted with the boy who had perpetrated the abuse, “he was absolutely still, like frozen” — a form of power-up that made her doubt herself until she hit him red-handed. At that time, he thought about telling his parents, but in the end he didn’t say anything. “I made the decision that he wouldn’t tell her anything. “”And that of the two of us, I was probably the one who could best endure this trauma and live with the truth,” she writes.
These reports were, according to Washington, “the hardest” to count. “I didn’t do the percentage because I need other people to appreciate me,” she adds, “I did it because I want our culture to embrace honesty and vulnerability. “I need you to be smart in our culture.
After an hour’s walk through the congested streets of midtown Manhattan, we arrived at Barnes’ house.
Although Thicker than Water is an act of vulnerability, after Washington ended Scandal, he submitted a proposal for an entirely different book.
“I was promoting a challenging and fun book,” he laughs. These are 10 things I learned from Olivia Pope. Se she tried to play the leading role in her own life.
“But every time I sat down and tried to write this book, I couldn’t. I didn’t need to tell three hundred pages about myself. I thought: now I’m on another personal journey. , where I’m starting to reexamine who I am in my life. And that’s why I can’t write this other ebook. . . This eBook is full of tips. I tried to pay my publisher back,” he said. Says. But they didn’t want to reimburse me. “
The explanation for why Washington’s original concept was untenable was a bomb dropped through his parents. After years of feeling adrift and suffering to discover why her beloved father was someone with whom she, however, felt a difficult bond, her parents made a confession: Washington had been conceived. through a sperm donor.
The fact came to light when Henry Louis Gates Jr. , the American educator whose PBS shows celebrities Finding Your Roots to delve into their ancestral history, invited Washington to participate.
Her parents were first excited about their daughter’s involvement, until they learned it would involve sharing her own DNA. This realization began to cause panic attacks in Washington’s father, until nevertheless either of her parents summoned her to a circle of relatives collecting in which they told her the truth. The revelation shocked his entire understanding of his family and his identity.
“Maybe there’s a very internal feeling in me that we’re not genetically related,” he says thoughtfully. “And without having that information, it may just give a more personal sense to the distance I felt between us. “
Finally, knowing the fact freed Washington, he says, from anxiety that there was something more to the relationship. “Now I can identify that distance as genetic, it closes the gap,” he reflects. anything that is not so. It’s not a lack of chemistry or a lack of understanding. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s because he’s not similar to me.
“But,” Washington adds cautiously, “he is my father. . . I know how sorry I feel for him with the revelation of this secret. “
Washington chooses its words carefully, aware of the minefield it has entered. He is well aware of the love he feels for his parents, the nurturing and supportive circle of family members he has enjoyed. She is also unequivocal about the importance of knowing the truth.
“I’m still unraveling this,” he says. I think one of the things my parents gave me, by telling me about my ancestry, was a path back to myself and a specific self-confidence.
“It allowed me to release the component of me that was stuck in a problem-solving and puzzle mode,” Washington continues. “I can put that aside and just have love. “
One piece of the puzzle Washington has yet to solve is the identity of its donor. His parents only knew that the semen came from another black man. There are no records and no one has yet been discovered to share this genetic heritage. in any of the primary ancestry databases. “I have the most productive geneticists reading this,” he tells me determinedly.
The lack of progress so far would likely have frustrated Washington, but it remains philosophical about it. “I think there’s an explanation for why that answer doesn’t come to me quickly,” he says. “It allowed my father and me to own this area of true belonging to all. And that I don’t take for granted that I have a father.
Washington says having a new vision of those appointments has also helped her feel closer to her mother than ever, in addition to visiting Jamaica with her and reuniting with relatives there.
“It was the first time I really felt Jamaican,” Washington says of the previous year, “feeling welcome and immersed in the culture. It completely replaced me.
What do his parents, the adorable couple I met at American Son four years ago, before the world knew of their personal struggles, think about this story shared so publicly?They had reservations, she admits, but in the end they supported her for The Day Before We Met, Washington tells me, her father even made a prime-time television appearance. He appeared on the late-night show Watch What Happens Live, discussing, among other things, the plots of the series. “He was the special guest,” she laughs, visibly extremely happy with her father’s ability to not only tolerate, but even enjoy his time in the spotlight.
“At one point, Dad was nervous about me writing. He kept saying, ‘This will rarely be very smart for your brand,'” Washington recalls. “And I had to step back and think, ‘This is not smart for the façade brand. ‘
Washington pauses for a moment. Then he looks at me resolutely: “I like it, I don’t need to be a brand. I need to be human. “
Kerry Washington’s Thicker Than Water is published via Sphere at £25. For The Guardian and The Observer, request your copy in Guardianbookshop. com. Shipping fees may apply.
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