Profile: Kerry Washington

BY: PROVOKR Staff

Ever since she was a kid, Kerry Washington always wanted to perform. But it wasn’t always in the way you would think. “I wanted to work with Shamu at Sea World,” Kerry has said. “I thought that was the best job in the world, to care for and feed dancing whales.”

Born in the South Bronx in 1977, Washington the aspiring whale trainer attended the prestigious Spence school in Manhattan where she participated in school theater productions. Not one to be sated by a school play, Washington also joined a theater group that focused on social justice issues. Her extracurricular efforts were eventually rewarded—she was given a theatrical scholarship to George Washington University upon graduation.

While her career ballooned steadily after graduation, booking notable dramatic roles in Ray (2004), The Last King of Scotland (2006), and one comedic one in I Think I Love My Wife (2007), it wasn’t until small-screen sultana Shonda Rhimes came calling in 2012 that things started to change. Virtually overnight, Washington became a household name. Striking while the iron was hot, she also locked up a role in Tarentino’s Django Unchained (2012) that same year and hasn’t looked back since. So while her dream as a youngster might have been to perform at Sea World, Washington has found her whale in D.C fixer Olivia Pope, the unstoppable juggernaut of a lead character on a series that, now in its sixth season, shows no signs of slowing down.