Kerry Washington Explains Why She Stopped Playing “The White Girl’s Best Friend” In Movies

In the early 2000s, Kerry Washington found herself a “new niche” as an actress that she quickly became tired of.

After starring in the 2004 drama Against the Ropes as the supporting character to Meg Ryan‘s protagonist, Washington made a concerted effort to stop playing “the white girl’s best friend.” The Scandal star explained why she made one of the most important decisions of her career in her new memoir, Thicker Than Water.

“I played [Meg Ryan’s] coworker and confidante – this was becoming a new niche for me, the white girl’s best friend,” she writes, per Entertainment Weekly.

She writes that she took the role largely because of Ryan, and couldn’t see herself taking that type of role again for the chance to work with any other actor: “When Harry Met Sally is, to this day, one of my top three movies of all time, so once I’d played Meg Ryan’s best friend, playing the role against anyone else would have been a lateral move,” she writes.

Washington writes that this was the third film in a row in which she played the best friend of a white lead character. The previous two roles were in Save the Last Dance with Julia Stiles and a scrapped Fox pilot for series Wonderfalls, where she starred alongside Caroline Dhavernas.

“It’s not that I wanted to be the star of the film; I wanted my characters to be in a story of their own. I didn’t want to be an accessory to a white woman’s journey,” she shares in her memoir.

Her career in the years after Against the Ropes featured more roles that would cement her as the actress she is known as today. She soon starred in the Oscar-winning movie Ray opposite Jamie Foxx, and later on in The Last King of Scotland opposite Forrest Whitaker. It would be eight long years before she nabbed the role of DC powerhouse Olivia Pope in Shonda Rhimes‘ hit series Scandal.

This isn’t the only memorable topic Washington unveils in her new memoir. She also talks about getting an abortion when she was a young woman and learning that her dad was not her biological father.

“I’ve been a very private person when it comes to the public, so I never thought that I would sit down and write a soup-to-nuts memoir about my life,” she recently told People. “I can’t believe I wrote it.”

Thicker Than Water is now available for purchase.