So hopefully that is something that Scandal has done,” she said in a press conference in 2018, per The Hollywood Reporter. “Now, it feels very normal and obvious that women of color can lead shows. We knew that none of us had seen a role like this in our lifetime - and for us - and so there was really a sense of, like, ‘May the best woman win, and whoever gets it, we will all have her back.’” The New York native continued, “It was actually this very powerful moment for Black women in Hollywood because. She earned two Emmy nominations as well as one Golden Globe nod for the part. Starring on Scandal allowed Washington to become a household name. Jeff Perry (Cyrus Rutherford Beene), Bellamy Young (Melody Margaret Grant), Katie Lowes (Quinn Perkins, née Lindsay Dwyer), Darby Stanchfield (Abby Whelan) and Guillermo Díaz (Huck, né Diego Muñoz) were among the show’s large cast. She left her position as White House communications director following her secret affair with President Fitzgerald Grant ( Tony Goldwyn). The ABC drama quickly changed the landscape of TV - even after it concluded in 2018 after 7 seasons.Ĭreated by TV mogul Shonda Rhimes, Scandal follows Olivia Pope as she launches a crisis management firm. “Hopefully we’ve created a world in which we’ve stopped seeing these characters on television and it’s a magical anomaly that they’re there and there’s an otherness to them … Hopefully we’ve made a dent in that.”įor six years, fans witnessed Kerry Washington’s Scandal character Olivia Pope solve the impossible.

Similarly, Rhimes spoke about how Washington toplining a broadcast drama impacted TV going forward. The New York native continued, “It was actually this very powerful moment for Black women in Hollywood because … we knew how special this was. “There hadn’t been a Black actress as the lead of a network drama in almost 40 years, so Shonda really saw every Black actress between the age of, like, 18 to 74 at this point.” “It was a really coveted role,” she recalled in July 2020 when the cast reunited for charity.

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