
Kerry Washington may have taken on a lot of roles throughout her Hollywood career, but there’s one she’s adamant that she’ll never play again: a white girl’s best friend.
The Scandal star said as much in an excerpt from her recently released memoir Thicker Than Water where she explained that she made the decision after getting the role opposite Meg Ryan in the 2004 film Against the Ropes. Leading up to that particular film, she began noticing that she’d been typecasted in those roles—the first being the best friend to Julia Stiles in Save the Last Dance (2001) and then again in the TV pilot for Wonderfalls (2004). But as the saying goes, third time’s the charm, and Washington vowed after Ropes, that she was done playing second fiddle.
“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,” she explained per Entertainment Weekly.
That decision would ultimately prove beneficial to her as movie roles that came after that included a Spike Lee joint (She Hate Me), a rom-com starring Chris Rock and Gina Torres (I Think I Love My Wife) and The Last King of Scotland opposite Forrest Whitaker.
But it would be the turn of the 2010s that would see her star status become cemented when she took on the role of famed fixer Olivia Pope in the Shonda Rhimes-created series, Scandal. Not only did that show make Washington a household name (and a regular occurrence on almost everyone’s TV on Thursday nights), but it fulfilled the goal she set out for her career all those many years ago to be a character who had a story, a draw, and a life of her own.
To read more of Washington’s story, where she opens up about coming to grips with the fact that she’s a product of a sperm donor, her struggles with an eating disorder, and her reasons why she had an abortion early on in her career—be sure to read her new memoir Thicker Than Water, available wherever books are sold.