Khandi Alexander Choreographs Her Career

Studio 360

Khandi Alexander has made a career of bringing hard, funny, complicated women to life. On CSI:Miami she played a pathologist who used to talk to the dead bodies she was cutting up. In Treme, she played LaDonna, a tough-as-nails bar owner trying to make it in New Orleans after Katrina. And right now in Scandal she’s Maya Pope, the devious mother of Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope.

Alexander goes to great lengths to get under the skin of her characters. When she was cast in Treme, Alexander walked the neighborhoods of New Orleans in search of a real-life model for LaDonna. “I took two weeks and I found her,” Alexander tells guest host Hilton Als. “And then I followed her.” Alexander wanted to become this woman, offering to buy the clothes off her back: “I will buy everything you have on, name your price,” she said. “Including your earrings.”

Alexander started out on stage, as a dancer. She wanted to act, but she was concerned about her prospects. “I never saw a consistent through line of employment for black actresses,” she explains. “I was like, ‘How are they supporting themselves?’” But she found an example in actress Diana Sands. “I knew that she worked consistently in theater and occasionally had great roles in film and TV,” Alexander tells Als. “But I saw her consistency in theater, so that’s where I really focused.”

Alexander got noticed on TV for her parts in News Radio, and in David Simon’s gritty miniseries The Corner, in which she played a junkie. But roles for black women have broadened, especially in the last few years. Alexander credits producer Shonda Rhimes, who created Scandal. “Thank God for Shonda,” Alexander says. In Rhimes’s shows, black female actresses have received top billing for the first time that Alexander can recall. “It’s really outrageously wonderful to look up when you’re driving down Sunset Boulevard and see a billboard with only Kerry Washington [the star of Scandal] on it,” she says. “It’s not a little thing for a little black girl to see that.” Of her own childhood, Alexander remembers the impact that Lola Falana had, in Fabergé Tigress perfume ads. “It meant everything to me. It gave me hope. It let me know there was room for me, that I was special.”

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