Kerry Washington Chooses Roles With Trusted Collaborators and Producer Control
kerry washington says producing is “pretty important” to her, and she still takes acting jobs without producer credit only at a very high level with collaborators she trusts. For her, the question is not just the role itself but how much say she has once a project moves from casting to marketing.
“I feel so blessed to be able to do what I love to do,” Washington said, adding, “I want to do it with people I think can make me better and who I can make better.” She said that approach guides her work on Imperfect Women, where she is the star and executive producer.
Imperfect Women and Los Angeles
Imperfect Women is a dream project for Washington, who said it was greenlit in “a challenging time in a lot of ways.” She also said production took place in Los Angeles, a choice she insisted on for the Apple TV psychological thriller series.
Washington said most of the work she does now is either produced by Simpson Street or involves her as an executive producer. On this project, Love & Squalor and Simpson Street are the lead production companies, and Washington said she and Elisabeth Moss are “much more communal partners” rather than people at the top of a ladder.
Rian Johnson and Ben Affleck
Washington said she still signs on for projects she does not produce, but only when the collaboration is unusually strong. She pointed to working with Rian Johnson on the Knives Out film and working on Animals with Ben Affleck, saying both directors are people she “really respect[s] and admire[s]” and that she believed they would be great collaborators.
That selectiveness is the friction in her current career model: the higher her level of involvement, the more control she wants over who gets hired, who the department heads are, who is cast, edits on the writing, post-production, and marketing plans. She said producing lets her “have a voice in the creative process” and “collaborate and contribute at every stage of the process.”
Eight Episodes, Shared Control
Washington said Moss bought the rights to Araminta Hall’s book and brought her in, and she described the source material as extraordinary because it shifts perspective among characters, including the dead woman. The structure, she said, is useful “in the world right now” because it reminds people they may not understand the full picture until they stand in someone else’s shoes.
That is the clearest read on Washington’s current strategy: she is not chasing volume, she is narrowing the field to projects where the creative arrangement matches the level of trust she wants. For viewers, that means her next roles are likely to keep coming with some measure of producer power attached, and when she steps into a job without it, the partner on the other side will matter as much as the script.
