Kerry Washington

It was incredible.

That would have been amazing.

Well, you mean in the movie, but not on set, right?

That was the thing.

I mean, I had a really great film career before that because I had been in these Oscar-nominated films.

I had a joke that if you hired me to play your wife, you would win an Oscar because I was with Jamie Foxx in Ray and I was in Last King of Scotland with Forrest Whitaker.

And so I had done... But nobody connected that the girl from Save the Last Dance was the girl from Ray.

I was kind of a character actor and it was sort of disappearing into these really fun...

very different films with accents from all over the world.

But TV is just different, especially before streaming, right?

Like TV was a different beast where all of a sudden I was in people's living rooms every single week.

Like how many people do you have in your life that you actually spend an hour with every week other than your shrink?

Not a lot.

So it's a very intimate relationship.

I'm talking to myself and myself.

Um, so it did, it did, it definitely changed my, like I changed, you know, sort of the level of how I walked in the world maybe, or like level of fame or whatever.

No, I really there was all this pressure because at the time there was all this talk.

Every interview was about the fact that in almost 40 years there had not been a black woman as the lead of a network drama.

Every article in the beginning.

And I was like 37 or something at the time.