Spotlight: Kerry Washington

She plays the wife of bounty hunter and former slave Django (Jamie Foxx), who sets off to rescue her from plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Diango Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's second rollicking, shoot-'em-up revenge fantasy involving a historical atrocity (see Inglourious Basterds). But please don't tell Kerry Washington the movie looks like "fun." It is about "total fear, and emotional and spiritual imprisonment," says the feisty 35-year-old. At one point during the filming, Washington was so spent that "Jamie leaned over and said, 'It's going to be O.K., Olivia.'" By which he meant Olivia Pope, the sashaying, often ruthless Washington, D.C., fixer the actress plays in Scandal (now in its second season on ABC). "I was going from running barefoot in the forest to wearing platform Gucci pumps," she says. Fabulous footwear aside, the program is the first hour-long network drama to star an African-American woman since Teresa Graves in Gel Christie Love!, almost 40 years ago. "I didn't feel pressure for myself. I felt pressure for this country," she says of the milestone. "Were we all ready to have a black woman be the center of an hour-long drama?" Detect a streak of social consciousness? Washington serves on President Obama's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and has long lobbied Congress to protect funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. When she was "a latchkey kid growing up in the Bronx, the N.E.A. was my third parent," she says. Thanks to the N.E.A., "I was able to go to ballet class and have piano lessons and be in the children's theater company." The image of crack vials on the sidewalk on her way to dance class in the early 80s still makes her shudder for the girl she could have become. If not for the N.E.A., "where would I have been going and what would I have been doing?"

by Evgenia Peretz, Vanity Fair, February 2013