Kerry Washington covers the latest issue of Variety to promote her new Hulu series, Little Fires Everywhere, based on the Celeste Ng book. Since I haven’t read that book, I didn’t know what the story actually was about other than Reese Witherspoon and Kerry’s characters having some kind of beef. Turns out, the series is about Shaker Heights, a community in Ohio which gets racially “integrated” in the 1990s. Chaos and racism ensue. Kerry discusses all of that and more with Variety – you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
Working with Shonda Rhimes on Scandal: “I had such a beautiful, collaborative relationship on ‘Scandal’ with Shonda, and I think that made me feel like, going forward in my career, I only wanted to work on projects where I felt I could be heard.”
Working as an executive producer now: All her projects operate on the belief that, as Washington puts it, “everyone is, and deserves to be, the center of their own story — and that there aren’t certain kinds of people who get to be the leaders or protagonists, or others who must be supporting characters.”
Her family immigrated from the Caribbean. “My family came here to try and achieve some sort of American dream, and I think to try and be the heroes of their own story. There’s a lot of that inspiration in there. What does it mean to venture outside your own comfort zone and world and try to reach for the heroic meaning of your own journey?”
She first worked with Reese on Time’s Up, then Reese brought her LFE: “We all started to want to partner professionally as we were partnering in this activist, humanitarian space. A lot of us started building opportunities for us to work together, because we felt like we could control, or impact, the culture in our environments.”
Racism in the ‘90s: “There was a lot of focus in the ’90s on being ‘color-blind,’ on making color unimportant, in some ways to make people feel more comfortable being around people of a different race. We’re at a point now when we know it does matter who we are with regard to race and gender, and it doesn’t serve us to run away from that.”
White fragility was discussed at every level of the project: Washington and Witherspoon talked in-depth about their vastly different upbringings and their levels of awareness about the inextricable intersections of race and privilege in America. (Witherspoon freely admits that as a white person raised in Nashville, such history “wasn’t explained very well” to her, if at all.) Many people in Hollywood would shy away from these kinds of conversations, but Washington relishes the chance to have them. “In the real world, Reese and I are not supposed to be friends,” she says. “I grew up in the Bronx a block away from the projects, and she grew up in Nashville, Tennessee.”
I remember the story about Reese working with Mindy Kaling and innocently asking Mindy how many times Mindy has had to write a part for herself, and Mindy telling her that’s the only way she works, when she creates and writes her own roles. And Reese was like “WHAT?” This reminded me of that conversation, because I feel like Reese’s learning curve has been steep as hell but I have to give her some credit for actually trying, I guess. A lot of women in her position do not try and do not open themselves to the criticism that they’re clueless.
As for what Kerry says here… she made me think a lot about what it was actually like in the ‘90s and how I was in a mostly white school and all of that. It wasn’t even that “color blindness” was a thing, at least I don’t remember it that way. I just remember how, in retrospect, everything was a white space as an absolute default, you know?
Photos courtesy of WENN, cover courtesy of Variety.
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