Kerry Washington calls on her portrayal of Anita Hill to urge people to vote on The Late Show

Scandal star Kerry Washington may have hung up her enormous wine glasses and favorite bludgeoning chair, but the actress told Stephen Colbert that she’s hardly done with politics on Monday’s Late Show. For one thing, she’s starring on Broadway in Christopher Demos-Brown’s new play, American Son, about an interracial couple’s night spent in a police station looking for answers about their son’s disappearance. As Washington said about the intense, racially charged play (which she reassures potential theatergoers does have some improbable laughs), the play is “like a prayer, an opportunity to listen to each other and be surprised.”

Unsurprised herself at how the recent confirmation hearings of now Supreme Court judge and credibly accused sex criminal Brett Kavanaugh turned out, Washington—who famously portrayed another publicly vilified woman accusing a potential Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct—said the Kavanaugh hearings were “hard to watch.” Saying that both Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill and Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford “gave up their anonymity for the sake of our democracy,” Washington called both women “admirable and courageous,” even as she admitted that watching an all-male Republican senate committee attack a sexual assault survivor for partisan political purposes was, dishearteningly, “a repeat of history.”

Still, Washington told Colbert she was anything but disheartened about the upcoming midterm elections where, she said, Americans have an opportunity to reassert their power to put better people in office. “We have to show up at the polls and vote and let people now who
we are and who we want our country to be,” urged Washington, calling out those (Republican) officials currently attempting to steal voting rights from (primarily non-white) people in places like Georgia, North Dakota, Kansas, Texas, and other places for not being “true believer[s] in what America stands for.” Said the one-time fictional fixer, the key to fixing the current political shitshow is in voters’ hands come Tuesday, November 6th. As Washington put it, “If you’re mad about Kavanaugh, vote.”

Check your voter registration here. It may not be as settled as you think.