Kerry Washington on uncovering a family secret: ‘It’s exhausting to put on a mask to maintain appearances’

That Kerry Washington comes from a seemingly perfect family is something to which I thought I could attest. Four years ago, on an icily grey day in New York City, I met the actor after watching her gut-wrenching performance on Broadway in the play American Son. I sat on a sofa on the vacated stage, in deep conversation with Washington’s parents, Earl and Valerie: she a professor, he a businessman, who had raised their daughter in a hard-working, predominantly black neighbourhood in the Bronx. I remember thinking how good-looking, charming and erudite they seemed. And Washington – gracious and gorgeous in real life – made so much sense as their offspring.

If there is a single goal behind Washington’s new memoir, Thicker Than Water, it is exploding the fiction of that perfect image.

“We were perceived as a happy, easy, working-middle-class, successful, ‘perfect’ family. And there was a lot of joy and happiness at home. But there was a lot more complexity as well,” she says. “There were tensions in the marriage and tensions in the household, and there was a lot of focus on appearances.”

Kerry Washington with her parents, Valerie and Earl, in 1998. Photograph: Courtesy of Kerry Washington

For Washington, many of those tensions related to her relationship with her father. “He seemed, sometimes, like a foreign figure from a strange land,” she writes in the book. Washington couldn’t understand where the distance came from, and it made her doubt herself. “I felt in some ways trapped by his love, occasionally appalled by his desperation, then always ashamed. Ashamed of not being a better daughter,” she writes. And that was before she even knew that there was a secret – that the man she called “Dad” was not her biological father.

“I’m on this other personal journey now, where I’m really starting to re-examine who I am in my life,” she says, explaining her motivation for writing the book. “Mostly,” she adds, “I was thinking about freeing myself.”

For two decades, Kerry Washington has been a celebrated face of the screen, recognised for movies such as Django Unchained. But it’s in recent years that she has become an even bigger household name, thanks in no small part to the hit TV series Scandal, in which she played the lead role for seven successful seasons.

She is speaking to me in a luxurious seven-seater SUV – the kind in which celebrities are chauffeured around. It’s her publication day and we are heading towards a Manhattan bookshop where she plans a covert operation to sneak in and sign some books without causing too great a commotion.

The last time I met her, my impression of her model family life was completely intact. But this time, as rain pounds on the roof of the car, she opens up about the turmoil of living a lie for so long. “I felt like I was assigned a role in the performance of this perfect family,” she says. “It’s exhausting to walk in the world and feel like your authentic, true self is not acceptable … to put on a mask, or a facade, in order to maintain appearances. It’s stressful. And the more you play those roles that are in contrast to your authenticity, the more unacceptable your true self seems.”

The result, she says, was chronic anxiety, fear and self-loathing, and a tendency towards self-destructive behaviour. “I could go wild,” she recounts. “As long as I could keep it behind the curtain.”

In Thicker Than Water, Washington lifts this veil of deception. Her mother, who came from an aspirational Jamaican family, and her father, whose real estate business ventures were under the constant threat of Inland Revenue Service investigations, watched their attempt to embody the American dream sour into disappointment. Her father began drinking, causing bitter arguments in the home. From a young age, Washington spent distressing nights pretending to be asleep while overhearing it all.

There were tiny little acts of trying to destroy myself. Watching my mother hide her rage gave me surprising permission to cultivate my own

“As they slammed doors and shouted obscenities at each other, I could feel the tension between them, vibrating through the wall,” she writes in the book. “I developed panic attacks at night.”

The stress of hearing her parents’ anger and disappointment at night was exacerbated by the family’s collective response: in the morning, they would all pretend nothing had happened. “But there were tiny little acts of trying to destroy myself,” she explains. “Watching my mother masterfully hide her rage in those earlier years gave me surprising permission to cultivate my own.”

Despite this, Washington pushed herself to consistently high achievement, and she frequently refers to herself as “high functioning”. She obtained good grades and began to excel at acting, leading to a scholarship at the elite Spence school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a world away from her home in a working-class neighbourhood of the Bronx.

“As I was reaching for perfectionism, a lot of times what that looked like was an impossible version of humanity. I was never going to be a rich, thin, Upper East Side white girl from old money. No matter what I do in this lifetime,” Washington says, laughing, “I’m never going to be an Anglo-Saxon girl who was born on Park Avenue, with generations of wealth.”

For someone ill at ease with their own experience, their own body even, acting seems a counterintuitive choice. But Washington was no stranger to performance. And even though auditions involved frequent rejection, she was all too familiar with the discomfort of falling short. “Constantly not feeling good enough … that felt familiar.” Ironically, the more she became aware of the financial pressure her parents were under and how acting could alleviate them, the less able she was to win the valuable roles she coveted. “I didn’t book an acting job in years,” she tells me. “It made it harder for me to connect.”

Kerry wears dress: Altuzarra. Jewellery: Nicole Rose, Natasha Schweitzer. Styling: Rob & Mariel. Hair: Takisha Sturdivant-Drew. Makeup: Carola Gonzalez. Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian

Washington’s acting journey had begun in earnest when, aged 12, she joined S.T.A.R. – or Serving Teens through Arts Resources – a theatre group for adolescents based at a New York hospital. It was 1989, the height of the Aids epidemic, and the group toured the New York tri-state area educating young people on safe sex and tackling issues like self-esteem, loss of virginity, sexuality, drugs and living with family members who are HIV positive. Washington so embraced the role, even travelling with condoms in her purse in case she encountered peers who needed contraception, that friends nicknamed her “Condom Kerry”.

“Any time anyone needed to know how to put a condom on, she would just pull out a banana and a condom, and do a demonstration for us,” one friend says in a video looking back at the group’s work.

Footage from that time shows an incredibly intense and self-possessed young Washington delivering a monologue in which her 14-year-old character realises that she might have contracted HIV. Her performance had such impact that it was picked up at the time by US TV network ABC for a news special.

From the outside, it looked as if she was flying high, but the reality was different: “Even though the facade was of this high-achieving, high-functioning good girl, I was taking a lot of risks, whether it was, you know, with drugs and alcohol, or creative risks, or risks in activism.”

I was lucky to have opportunities to play incredible supporting characters. But opportunities to play the lead role were few and far between

As she writes in the book: “There were boyfriends, and parties, and drugs, and alcohol, and I was heading out to clubs in New York City, even on school nights. I was using alcohol, and sometimes food, and sometimes weed, and sometimes sex, to alter my brain chemistry and allow me a dangerously destructive escape.”

But it was her relationship with her body and eating that drove her closest to the point of self-destruction. At George Washington University, where she won an acting scholarship in the late 1990s, Washington was binge eating and starving herself in a vicious and destructive cycle.

“My relationship with food and my body had become a toxic cycle of self-abuse that utilized the tools of starvation, binge eating, body obsession, and compulsive exercise,” she writes in Thicker Than Water. “I would, when seeking to stuff my feelings, stuff my face, secretly binge eating for days at a time, often to the point of physical pain, sometimes to the point of passing out.

“Then,” she writes, “awake the next morning surrounded by dirty dishes, empty food boxes, and sticky leftovers, I would resolve to rid my body of the comfort I had sought the night before. But not by throwing up; that was too messy – that behaviour was for girls with eating disorders, girls who were weak and undisciplined. Instead, my drive toward perfectionism directed me toward control, either by not eating for days at a time, or by exercising for several hours, all in an attempt to right the wrongs of the bingeing.”

Ultimately, Washington sought help, leading to counselling and group therapy, which have continued to help her long into adult life. Her acting career began to evolve into commercial, mainstream movie roles, the turmoil of her adolescence seemingly behind her. But the true source of her family’s dissonance was yet to emerge.

I first became aware of Washington in the 2001 hit romcom Save the Last Dance. In it, in which she plays Chenille, a friend of Julia Stiles’s Sara, an aspiring white ballerina who seeks acceptance from a black, hip-hop-loving community in the South Side area of Chicago.

Chenille’s impact extended way beyond her role in the film, introducing audiences to the politics of interracial relationships and the myopia many white Americans have to the reality of black lives – themes that, more than 20 years later, remain as live as ever. Washington brought a real tenderness to her role of a young, black teen mum. But she was still the white main character’s black best friend.

“I was really lucky to have opportunities to play incredible supporting characters – the best friend to Julia Stiles, and Meg Ryan,” Washington says of Save the Last Dance and Against the Ropes, which she made with Ryan in 2004. “But it did feel at times opportunities to play the lead role were few and far between.”

Hollywood, as is still becoming clear, has a long history of unfairness when it comes to race, but also gender. Washington’s next roles were not so much leading ladies as “first ladies”, since she found the characters available to her were often wives. She appeared as Della Bea Robinson, wife of Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray, and Kay Amin, wife of Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, in both cases to critical acclaim. Yet it was her male peers who won Oscars for their roles. “I was becoming the actor who, if cast to play your wife, would help you win an Oscar,” Washington jokes.

That all changed in the most dramatic way when, in 2012, the world first encountered the political fixer and strategist Olivia Pope. Scandal, the seven-season, multi award-winning series by superproducer Shonda Rhimes, saw Washington take on the lead character, loosely based on the real-life Washington DC lawyer Judy Smith, who represented Monica Lewinsky during the Bill Clinton scandal.

I wore my engagement ring pinned inside my clothing for fear that if people knew it would be impossible to have a wedding away from public spectacle

To call the character a rare opportunity is something of an understatement. The role was, Washington reminds me, the first black and female lead character in a US network TV series in nearly 40 years. “At the time I got the role I was, I don’t know, 33? So that had not happened in my lifetime,” she remembers.

The influence of Olivia Pope on Washington is impossible to ignore. “I feel like we grew up together,” she admits. “Like I grew up in this marriage with her. We had become household names together and we had become fixtures in the culture. We’d become political forces together, locked arm in arm. There was a level of security that being her allowed me status and purpose.”

Of course Washington’s real life was not the same as Olivia Pope’s. In Scandal, Pope is caught in a love triangle with US president Fitzgerald Grant III and Captain Jake Ballard, an intelligence officer initially assigned to protect her, who goes on to become director of the National Security Agency. Meanwhile, Washington met her husband, former professional American football player Nnamdi Asomugha, and began a family with him. “While Olivia was still trying to choose between Jake and Fitz, I was, like, married with three children and building a very different domestic life.”

And yet Pope would have been impressed by Washington’s moves to guard her privacy. The drastic lengths to which she and Asomugha went to keep their wedding secret from an ever-intrusive press is one of the most memorable details in the book.

“For months I had been wearing my engagement ring secretly pinned inside my clothing for fear that if people knew we were engaged it would be impossible to have a wedding away from public spectacle,” Washington writes in Thicker Than Water. She also shares how Jason Wu, an old friend who designed her wedding gown, kept it secret even from his own team, code-naming it as “the dress I’m designing for the Moroccan premiere of Scandal”.

skip past newsletter promotion

Sign up to Inside Saturday

The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

after newsletter promotion

Kerry wears dress and gloves: Alberta Ferretti. Jewellery: Yvonne Leon. Styling: Rob & Mariel. Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian

Washington has continued to shy away from bringing her family into the limelight, rarely appearing with or speaking about her husband, and never posting images of her children online. So writing a book as personal as this seems a surprising move.

She disagrees. “When you walk on a red carpet with your spouse, or you’re dating, you’re not in control. You’re actually exposing your most vulnerable relationships to other people’s interpretive writing and however they want to project who you are and what you are.

“But I’m not doing that here. I sort of bring all the tabloids together and say, ‘I want to share something with you. You can write about it however you want.’”

That decision has already been tested as some of the stories in the book have already been seized upon by the press. One episode is an abortion that she underwent: she used a fake name, only for a nurse to tell her at a vulnerable moment during the procedure that she bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor Kerry Washington.

Another centres around the sexual abuse she experienced in childhood at the hands of another, clearly troubled child, who she chillingly describes as “the Frozen Boy”. Washington recounts in harrowing detail in the book how, over the course of several sleepovers when she was 10, she realised that someone was tampering with her clothes and touching her in intimate places while she slept. But when she suspected and confronted the boy who perpetrated this abuse, “he was entirely still, as if frozen” – a form of gaslighting that made her doubt herself until she caught him in the act. At the time, she contemplated telling her parents, but in the end said nothing. “I decided that he would not survive me telling, and that of the two of us, I was probably the one best equipped to hold this trauma and live with the truth of it,” she writes.

Those experiences were, Washington says, “the hardest” to write about. “I haven’t shared this because I want people to like me,” she adds, “I shared this because I want our culture to embrace honesty and vulnerability. I want that to be OK in our culture.”

After almost an hour meandering the congested streets of midtown Manhattan, we arrive at a Barnes & Noble. Washington cheerfully descends from the car, running as fast as her heels allow across the pavement and out of the rain into the bookshop. A few bemused shoppers recognise her and film on their phones as she signs a stack of books piled up on a display table in the middle of the store.

Although Thicker Than Water is an act of vulnerability, after Washington finished Scandal she actually pitched a proposal for quite a different book.

“I was selling a really empowering, fun book,” she chuckles. “It was 10 things I learned from Olivia Pope. It was about playing the lead in your own life.

“But whenever I sat down to actually try to write that book, I couldn’t. I didn’t want to just bullshit for 300 pages about myself. I was like, I’m on this other personal journey now, where I’m really starting to re-examine who I am in my life. And so I just can’t write this other book … this book full of advice. I tried to give the money back to my publisher,” she says. “But they wouldn’t take my money back.”

The reason Washington’s initial book idea had become untenable was a bombshell her parents had dropped. After years of feeling adrift and struggling to understand why her loving father was someone with whom she nevertheless felt an uneasy connection, her parents made a confession: Washington had been conceived by a sperm donor.

Now I can identify the distance between my father and I as genetic. It’s not a lack of understanding or that I don’t like him. It is that he’s not related to me

The truth came out when Henry Louis Gates Jr, the American Academic whose PBS show Finding Your Roots invites celebrity guests to delve into their ancestral story, invited Washington to participate.

Her parents were initially excited about their daughter taking part, until they learned that it would involve sharing their own DNA. The realisation began to cause Washington’s father panic attacks, until finally both her parents summoned her to a family meeting at which they told her the truth. The revelation sent shock waves through her entire understanding of her family and identity.

“Maybe there was some sense deep within me that we were not genetically related,” she says thoughtfully. “And without having that information, I could only make sense of the distance I felt between us as more personal.”

Finally knowing the truth freed Washington, she says, from anxiety that there was something else wrong with the relationship. “Now I can identify that distance as genetic, it closes the gap,” she reflects. “I’m not ascribing it to something it’s not. It’s not a lack of chemistry or a lack of understanding. It’s not that I don’t like him. It is that he’s not related to me.

“But,” Washington adds carefully, “he’s my dad … I know how much closer I feel to him with the release of that secret.”

Washington chooses her words with care, conscious of the minefield she has entered. She is abundantly clear about the love she and her parents share, about the nurturing and supportive family life she has enjoyed. She is equally unequivocal about the importance of knowing the truth.

“I’m still unpacking this,” she says. “I think one of the things that my parents gave me, in telling me about my parentage, was truly a pathway back to myself and to trusting myself in particular.

“It’s allowed me to release the part of me that was stuck in a problem-solving, puzzling mode,” Washington continues. “I could put that down and just have the love.”

With her father, Earl, in New York City in 2008. Photograph: Courtesy of Kerry Washington

A piece of the puzzle Washington is yet to work out is the identity of her donor. Her parents knew only that the sperm came from another black man. No records are available, and no one who shares that genetic inheritance has yet been found on any of the major ancestry databases. “I have the best geneticists looking into this,” she tells me, determinedly.

The absence of a breakthrough so far may have frustrated Washington, but she is philosophical about it. “I feel there is a reason why this answer is not coming to me quickly,” she says. “It has really allowed my dad and I to own this space of truly belonging to each other. And for me to not take for granted that I have a dad.”

Washington says having new insight into that relationship has also helped her feel closer than ever to her mother, including visiting Jamaica with her and meeting family members there.

“That was my first time really feeling like a Jamaican,” Washington says of the trip earlier this year, “of feeling embraced and immersed in the culture. It completely changed me.”

How do her parents – the charming couple I met at American Son four years ago, before the world knew of their private struggles – feel about the story being shared so publicly? They had their reservations, she admits, but have ultimately supported her all the way. The night before we meet, Washington tells me, her dad even made a primetime TV appearance in his own right. He appeared on the late-night talkshow Watch What Happens Live, discussing, among other things, the storylines on the various shows of the reality TV franchise The Real Housewives. “He was the special guest,” she laughs, clearly delighted at her dad’s ability to not just tolerate, but even enjoy his time in the limelight.

“At one point Dad was really nervous about me writing. He kept saying, ‘This is just not going to be good for your brand,’” Washington recalls. “And I had to take a step back, and think, ‘It’s not good for the brand of the facade.’”

Washington pauses a moment. Then looks at me resolutely, “I was like, I don’t want to be a brand. I want to be a human.”

Thicker Than Water by Kerry Washington is published by Sphere at £25. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Join Afua Hirsch for a Guardian Live online event on Wednesday 8 November at 8pm, when she will be talking about her new book, Decolonising My Body, which is published by Vintage on 19 October. Book tickets here