Kerry Washington

Watch what Kerry Washington is asked to do in the films we have reviewed. In Ray (2004) she stands in a doorway while Jamie Foxx's Ray Charles does something he should not. In Django Unchained (2012) she is the wife the whole plot rides out to fetch, and she is photographed a great deal and heard very little. In Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) she sits in a pew among a dozen well-known faces, waiting for Benoit Blanc to get round to suspecting her. Three films, three directors, one job: be the reason the men are talking, and do not interrupt them.

She is good at it, which is part of the problem. Washington plays the writing she is given, and when the writing is patience she plays patience without fidgeting, so that a director can leave her in the frame for a long time and nothing goes wrong. Della Bea Robinson in Ray is written as a saint, and Washington gets one scene of anger in 152 minutes. We sat up for it, because for two or three minutes the film had a second person in it, and we were sorry when she went back to the doorway.

The career as the cinema saw it runs from Our Song (2000) and Save the Last Dance (2001) through Ray and into studio work, two Fantastic Four films (2005, 2007) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), none of which asked much of her. Then came Scandal (2012–2018), and Olivia Pope, the first Black woman to lead a network drama in decades. We have not reviewed it, so we will not judge it, but the reputation it made her is for authority, for women in charge, and it is not a reputation the films had tested or have tested since. "Olivia changed my life," she has said. "This was the role of a lifetime." Nobody else offered her one.

The Foxx and Tarantino reunion in Django Unchained is the clearest case. The film is funny and brutal and it insists Broomhilda is the point of everything, and it still gives her almost nothing to do but be looked at and rescued. Watching her stand there with the whole story built around her silence, we were not moved so much as annoyed on her behalf. Rian Johnson does the same thing more politely in Wake Up Dead Man: she is one of several actors who could be lifted out without leaving a hole, and that is a waste of somebody who has been carrying a series for six years.

Since then she has produced through Simpson Street and directed for television, including on Insecure (2016), a series we liked a good deal, though the direction of any one episode is not what we noticed about it. That may be where the answer lies. If the films will not write her a part, she is now in a position to write one, or at least to hire the person who will. Until then, the doorway.