Exclusive: Kerry Washington on working with Ben Affleck on Animals
Currently playing on Netflix is the thriller Animals, directed by Ben Affleck from a script written by Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray and Ben Affleck. The cast includes Ben Affleck & Kerry Washington, with Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Ray Fisher, Christopher Woodley, Matt Gerald, Jacob Estrada, Steven Yeun, and Luis Gerardo Méndez.
When their son is kidnapped, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate and his wife find themselves drawn into a web of deception. As they scramble to raise the ransom payment, they're forced to make choices that could tear their world apart. "How far would you go to protect your family? Who can you trust?" In Animals, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck) faces those very questions. When he receives an ominous phone call, Mark & his wife Abigail scramble to respond to a threat that could upend their carefully constructed life.
For Kerry Washington, who plays the wife Abigail, she’s having a fun time being in front and behind the screen. Not only is she starring in a film with Affleck, she just playing one of the leads in the Apple series Imperfect Women, which was just picked up for a second season. She’s also the producer of Hulu’s Reasonable Doubt, which just started Season 4.
Blackfilmandtv.com caught up with Washington as she spoke about working with Affleck on Animals and Inperfect Women coming back for a second season.
As I watched this movie, there's a line in the movie that told me they changed the script once you were added. Is that correct?
Kerry Washington: So actually what happened was there was a very in-depth rehearsal process where we spent a couple of weeks breaking down the script and rewriting lots of scenes and lots of moments and like really digging in. Ben and I spent a lot of time talking about marriage and really fleshing out these characters.
How did they meet? How did they fall in love? What was their wedding song? But all of the characters really, even that, that scene with Steven and I, that didn't exist in the film previously, but Steven and Ben and I started talking about how black folks in LA think about Korean folks in LA, how Korean folks think about black folks in LA going all the way back to the riots. And Ben was like, wait, wait, wait, we got to talk about this. We were like, we need a moment where they confront each other as two different members of different minority groups.
So a lot of the film that's there now, wasn't there before, even the scenes with, with Luis and Adriana. Ben really had them completely rewrite those scenes. He was like, not just the Spanish, just the dynamics of who these characters are and what they want, what they love.
Like you guys have to write those scenes. So it was a very, very collaborative, creative process. There's a lot of elements in this movie from marriage to race to position, certainly not power politics.
What led you to saying yes to taking on this role?
Kerry Washington: Honestly, the first thing that made me want to do this project was Ben because I'm such a fan of his as a filmmaker. I mean, I think Argo is one of my favorite films. I love The Town. I love Gone Baby Gone. Like he's just, he's a tremendous filmmaker. I was hoping that the material would be as good as the idea of working with him. And then I read the script and I loved it. And then I called Viola (Davis), who was so brilliant in Air.
And I was like, give me, give me the tea. Like, is he great to work with? Did you have fun? Like, cause I knew Ben kind of casually. We have friends in common, but I hadn't worked with him. And so even though his films are great, I was like, at this point in my career, I want to be in great working environments. And Viola was like, he's amazing. Go do it. And so I was so excited to dig in with him and really like flesh this story out and discover this marriage together.
Is there a difference when you're working opposite someone who is also your director? Sometimes you can have a cast member that's a director, but has a supporting role, but here he's right opposite you.
Kerry Washington: But I'm just really used to that. All the years at Scandal when Tony was directing and Scott Foley was directing and then I was directing, it's not a situation that's unfamiliar to me. Ben does it very elegantly. He's really good at it.
How did you want to get into this character?
Kerry Washington: You know, in the beginning, when I first read the script, one of the things that really struck me was, one of the projects I'm most proud of is American son, right? Doing that play on Broadway and then making that film for Netflix was so important to me because I really wanted to embody and share a narrative around what it means to parent a black child and the fear that is inherent in, in parenting black children in an environment where systems are built to demonize and destroy your child. This film felt like it was an invitation to dive into the next layer of work, which was, can we love all of our children with that same veracity? When society says that somebody has less value than a black child because of their immigration status, because of their socioeconomic status, whatever it is, can we begin to look out for each other's children as if they are our own, whether there are children on the other side of the world or children in our own city? I think one of the questions of the film is what does family mean and whose life matters to you in the moments where you're really up against a wall? What does the title mean? Animals. It means so many things, but you know, one of the things is that I think that as human beings, we forget sometimes that we're animals.
And when we're faced with tremendous complicated challenges, challenges that really force us to interrogate our own moral compass and ethical ideals. The question we ask ourselves is, can we remain human and be in alignment with those ethical frameworks or do we become that kind of lizard brain animalistic survival version of ourselves? I think that's a big part of what the question is. I've had a few people say, I love that line when you're talking to Steven Yeun and you're like, I will rip your fucking face off.
It was my favorite line of the whole movie to say, but I often say that moment is my mama bear moment. Right? So we use these metaphors of like, when we are out of control, we use these animal metaphors to describe our emotional states. And I think that's what the film is about is what kind of human are we going to be? Are we going to give over to our animal side? Are we going to give over to our kind of higher nature? It's a lot going on this film.
You got a lot going on. I saw you earlier on stage. You got this movie coming out. Reasonable doubt is out. And now we've got a second season of Imperfect Woman, which I did not see coming.
Kerry Washington: Neither did I. You can ask all the people at Apple. That was their idea. Honestly, we were truly writing a limited series. The ending has like a little bit of cliffhanger fun, but there were never conversations about it. It's not anybody's like deal. This was Apple coming to us and saying, would you be open? So it was really exciting to get that call. I also have my podcast The Street You Grew Up On. Our first guest was Ben Affleck last week and this week, Colin Kaepernick is our guest. It's really fun because obviously Colin is on this giant book tour, but this interview is so different from anything he's done anywhere else because it's specifically asking about your childhood in a really intimate way. And we always find ways to kind of discover with our guests, how their very early childhoods, their once upon a time connects to the person they've become today. So it's, it's really fun. I'm really enjoying the podcast and feeling often challenged because I'm not a trained journalist, but I'm so curious that I enjoy these conversations. I think of the day with all that you got going on, how you balance doing what you do, whether it's on stage, on TV, the podcasting and family.
