'FIRST I WAS BEST FRIEND TO WHITE GIRL, THEN I WAS WIFE OF FAMOUS BLACK MAN'

Kerry Washington is Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated and one of America's highest-paid actors, but even at the top she can see a worrying backlash in Hollywood

- Vicky Jessop

Kerry Washington wrote at one point that she almost quit acting five times. "I love being an actor. I love the research and the rehearsal, but I don't always love the business around it," she says thoughtfully.

"The business of show is sometimes exhausting to me, and I think it was really hard for me before I became a producer, to just feel like I was at the mercy of other people's tastes. To just be waiting to be invited to the party. And then so I started throwing my own parties. I think I felt like a victim a lot of the time, and I didn't want to walk through life feeling that way."

She's certainly the one calling the shots now. Washington, now 49, has been working in Hollywood for decades, but rose to widespread fame in 2012 when she took on the lead role of Olivia Pope in the ABC drama Scandal — for which she was twice nominated for an Emmy and once for a Golden Globe.

In it, she played a morally murky crisis management expert in the vein of Tony Soprano — and the show was a smash hit, spawning seven seasons and finally wrapping up in 2018, the same year Washington was named the eight-highest paid actress in television by Forbes. Now, she runs Simpson Street — her own production company — and is set to star in the new Apple TV show Imperfect Women, which tells the story of three best friends whose lives are torn apart after a terrible crime.

"I feel like for so long, women were the accessory, you know?" Washington says. "You're the wife or the sister, or the mother to a central character. It's really exciting to live in a time when women are the central characters, where we are centring women's lives and women's stories.