Kerry Washington
Kerry Washington takes chances, whether it’s following up a film about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin with a Wayans Brothers comedy or showing up as a panelist on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” This week, the 31-year-old actress stars in Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace,” and its list of themes is enough to keep a political roundtable busy for weeks.
“One of my favorite things to do is to ask people what this movie is about,” Washington said in a recent phone interview. “They’ll say it’s about power or it’s about gentrification. Some people say it’s about race relations in America, it’s about the generation gap and the culture clash, it’s about conservative versus progressive, or some people say it’s about love and being able to tell the truth in your marriage. And it’s fascinating to me that the movie is about all those things.”
In “Lakeview Terrace,” Washington plays Lisa Mattson, who relocates from Oakland, Calif., to the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband Chris, played by Patrick Wilson. This interracial couple immediately runs afoul of their neighbor, Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) a police officer and strict father who runs the cul-de-sac like he runs his house. Abel does not approve of the Mattsons, and he does everything possible to make the Mattsons consider putting their house back on the market.
Washington said that she expected intensity from LaBute, the director and playwright whose debut film, “In the Company of Men,” was a caustic expose on office politics. What she found was an uncommonly enjoyable working experience.
“You know, he’s just really fun,” Washington said of LaBute. “The film is at moments so dark and so much of his other work is so dark, but he is just this lighthearted, jovial, hilarious person. And that was the tone on the set, believe it or not. Everyone is like, ‘Oh it must have been so intense, and were you all just scowling at each other all day?’ Sam and I were laughing between takes.”
Her filmography shows a wide range of subject matter, but Washington said she has not actively pursued wildly divergent roles, except when she insisted on doing a crazy comedy after her intense experience filming “The Last King of Scotland” in Africa. The result was “Little Man,” a movie about a vertically challenged criminal pretending he is a baby. But Washington is equally adept at comedy and drama: she starred in Spike Lee’s farce “She Hate Me,” and will appear this fall in the director’s World War II drama, “Miracle at St. Anna.”
But her recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” offered a side few of her fans had seen. An official surrogate for the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Washington held her own debating Maryland Governor Michael Steele. She said that she doesn’t worry about the perception some viewers have of performers who enter the political arena.
“You know, I guess I don’t really think about it in those terms,” she said. “I don’t try to be taken seriously, I just try to be fully present and fully authentic and fully expressive, you know what I mean?”
– George Lang