00:00Scandal! I mean I know people probably chase you down the street and yell Eli or Papa Pope
00:08or things of that nature. Did you think this character would take off the way it did and
00:12become such a pop culture sensation? You know you never know and that's what that's not why
00:17you take on a role to begin with right so the way it was introduced to me was that at the end of
00:23season two I would be revealed in the last two lines of that particular script as Olivia Pope's
00:28dad so that alone I thought well that should be fun because by that point the show was pretty big and
00:32Kerry Washington was fairly big in the show so I thought oh that should be fun not knowing where
00:37we were going after that. In season three is when Shonda started writing me these incredible monologues
00:43where I was saying things like you have to work twice as hard to be to get half as much or calling
00:48the president of the United States a boy or those kinds of things and that's where I think my
00:52involvement with the audience or their involvement with the character began to grow and people got
00:57excited because they they were anticipating what I might say. Do you turn on a little Papa Pope like
01:02at the grocery store or at the bank when you need things to move a little faster? No. No? I would
01:07totally do that if I had that power of monologue. Well first of all it's not something I can sort of
01:12put on and off like a jacket right it takes a little time to sort of get into character and
01:16sort of deal with how he thinks about things and how he speaks and how what his relationship with
01:20his daughter is and with the country etcetera etcetera so it would be no too much work just to get ahead
01:27of the line. I just think no doesn't mess with you. Any scoop you can give us for the next season? Have you
01:32guys started to prep the next season of Scandal? No and we know we never know anything until we sit
01:37down at a table read. So even when the season ends no one says it so this is what's going to happen next
01:42year because we don't know and so when we sit down at the first table read we'll find out and that
01:47moment what's going to happen. Does that create any anxiety? Well it does and it doesn't. I mean
01:53what it does is it makes very everyone really nervous about what's going to happen. One of the
01:59actors, Josh Molina, he has a habit of whenever there's a table read he skips to the back of the
02:04script to see what's going to happen at the end. So at the end of season two they actually gave him a
02:08fake script so that when he looked at it it looked like he was dead. That's not nice. He literally had to
02:15look at the actor neck to him and say so can I see your script please? To make sure that it was
02:19legit. And so how do you balance back and forth between characters? You have you know
02:23that are so different and how does that work? Well fortunately and so far the
02:27schedule has worked out where I'm not doing one and then going back and doing
02:30another. So it's it's it gives me a little sort of air in between.
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