Kerry Washington Calls Scandal 'Surreal' But Also Too Real

“We shot the episodes way before the real election,” Washington said on Tuesday’s Ellen Show (toward the end in the clip below). “But it’ll be hard to believe that we didn’t know about our election, because it’s so surreal what happens on the show.”

Even crazier is what doesn’t happen. There was a storyline involving Russian hackers that Shonda Rhimes chose not to develop. “Shonda was thinking about doing a Russian hacking story toward the end of the season, which we had to scrap,” says Washington. “Because it used to be that Scandal was this crazy show that was outside the realm of possibility,” she jokes.

As Rhimes told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month, “We literally had a storyline where the Russian government was trying to destabilize the United States government by messing with the election… The writer’s room was full of people staring at the board going, ‘Oh, my God.’ It comes from the fact that we all read all the papers, we’re all paying attention to the news. We try to stay up with everything both conservative and liberal and then try to extrapolate it to its most crazy degree. Unfortunately, reality is extrapolating itself to its most crazy degree right now.”

Reality is definitely extrapolating itself! Make it stop! (Sidebar: Is Shonda a god?) Rhimes says the writers considered, “How dark do you want to be at a time when people aren’t feeling so happy? I think there are things that hit very close to home that I certainly never anticipated. I just don’t think that I thought that we would be in this mood.”