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"  Kerry Washington is searching for something to knock on\u2014wood, preferably\u2014to secure the bout of good fortune she&amp;#039;s been having. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s amazing. I&amp;#039;m so, so blessed,&amp;quot; says Washington, who finds it daunting even to consider her can-you-believe-my-luck moment. She&amp;#039;s the first African-American woman to headline a major network drama since 1974. Her show, ABC&amp;#039;s sexy political thriller Scandal, averaged 9.1 million viewers in its first season and is well into a nail-biting second. And to add to the windfall, Quentin Tarantino chose her as the female lead in this month&amp;#039;s spaghetti-westernized view of the antebellum South, Django Unchained. Washington takes a right place, right time view of her situation: Scandal, she says, wouldn&amp;#039;t exist without the three women powerful enough to bring the series to life\u2014Judy Smith (the DC PR guru who serves as inspiration for and adviser to the series), show creator Shonda Rhimes (Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy, Private Practice), and executive producer Betsy Beers. &amp;quot;I happened to be alive and available to fill that space created by these women,&amp;quot; Washington says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a great example of how we can create opportunities for each other.&amp;quot; She should take more credit. At 35, Washington has earned a reputation for turning roles that could have been just the wife of into arresting performances. She brought her distinct mix of delicate beauty (she&amp;#039;s 5&amp;#039;4&amp;quot;), refinement, and steely resolve to the ladylike Della opposite Jamie Foxx&amp;#039;s title character in Ray; an oppressed spouse of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland; and one half of a terrorized interracial couple in Lakeview Terrace. Washington grew up in what she describes as a &amp;quot;woman-strong&amp;quot; middle-class family in the Bronx and attended the Upper East Side all-girls private school Spence (Gwyneth Paltrow&amp;#039;s alma mater) before earning an interdisciplinary degree in social sciences at George Washington University. &amp;quot;My girlfriends from high school are the smartest and strongest women I know,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I became a woman around them, and I think that has something to do with the sort of roles I take on. I&amp;#039;ve always made it a choice to play characters that are complicated.&amp;quot; Click here to see photos from Kerry Washington&amp;#039;s shoot! Enter Scandal&amp;#039;s Olivia Pope, the owner of a crisis-management firm that defends morally questionable DC figures\u2014high-powered madams, murder suspects. &amp;quot;Olivia deals with a negotiation of power that I think is unique to the modern woman,&amp;quot; Washington says. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s phenomenally successful, able to control her world and make things happen with clarity and force in her professional life.&amp;quot; Washington easily could have gone for the power-bitch trope, but she&amp;#039;s developed a different portrayal of a woman in charge, even down to the subdued colors Olivia wears. &amp;quot;I chose pale pastels and earth tones\u2014no black or navy suits. She spends her days saying things people don&amp;#039;t want to hear. She has to balance that by wearing things that make people feel safe and comfortable.&amp;quot; (Such all-woman wardrobe choices also help fuel the will-they-or-won&amp;#039;t-they\u2014oh, wait, they already did\u2014sexual tension between Olivia and the married POTUS, played by Tony Goldwyn.) &amp;quot;Without Olivia as my day job, I don&amp;#039;t know if I would have been able to play Broomhilda,&amp;quot; Washington says of her Django character. &amp;quot;She has a strength I knew nothing about.&amp;quot; In a vein similar to that of 2009&amp;#039;s raucous historical rewrite Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is the story of a freed slave, played by Jamie Foxx, who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to find\u2014and kill\u2014a notorious plantation proprietor who kidnapped his wife, Washington&amp;#039;s Broomhilda Von Shaft (though it&amp;#039;s not specified in the film, Tarantino has said he envisioned her as an ancestor of that icon of &amp;#039;70s swagger, John Shaft). It may be a highly stylized snapshot of American slavery, but it doesn&amp;#039;t gloss over the era&amp;#039;s horrors. &amp;quot;Tarantino is a director who&amp;#039;s not intimidated by blood and gore and violence and the dark side of the human soul,&amp;quot; Washington says. When they shot a scene in which she is chained in stocks and whipped, &amp;quot;that day on set broke all of our hearts. To find the strength in that circumstance was mind-bending.&amp;quot; Unlike most of Tarantino&amp;#039;s femmes fatales, Broomhilda doesn&amp;#039;t get to annihilate the bad guy. In fact, she spends much of the film waiting for her husband to shoot his way to her rescue. &amp;quot;Look, I can see how it&amp;#039;s not particularly feminist to play the princess in the tower, waiting to be saved,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But as a black woman\u2014we&amp;#039;ve never been afforded that luxury. There was no man coming to save you; it wasn&amp;#039;t part of the story. In some ways, this telling is a statement of empowerment.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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