December 8, 2021 • 60 mins
We all know and love the mind of Shonda Rhimes.
She’s the founder of Shondaland and the force behind so many beloved TV series including Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, and How to Get Away with Murder + Bridgerton.
In this episode, Shonda talks about the intentionality behind her shows and explains how having a diverse cast and crew wasn’t so much a matter of choice as it was simply inevitable. She talks about her “unaplogetically feminist upbringing,” and a family that gave their children what they needed to succeed in this world.
Indomitable as Shonda is, it hasn’t always been easy. Jess and Shonda talk about Shonda’s “Year of Yes,” the year in which Shonda said “yes” to the things that terrify her, and the memoir by the same name that she wrote about her experience.
Shonda’s no stranger to Dominant Stories, and as one might expect from a prolific writer, she has powerful insights to share regarding how she challenged and changed them.
These days, Shonda is unapologetically herself, and still creating amazing television, such as the upcoming Netflix Original series, Inventing Anna.
This incredible and inspiring conversation is a must-listen!
And to learn how you can support the next generation to have a positive relationship with beauty, visit Dove.com/selfesteem for academically validated tools to help parents, teachers, and mentors tackle tough topics ranging from bullying and poor body image to discrimination.
Please rate, review, subscribe and share Dominant Stories with everyone you know.
If you want to learn more about Dominant Stories and how you can challenge and change them, visit jessweiner.com or follow Jess on Instagram @imjessweiner.
You can also email us about your Dominant Stories and how you are changing them - podcast@jessweiner.com or leave us a voicemail at 213 259 3033
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Shonda Rhymes and we're bringing the Dominant Stories created
by SHAWNA. Land Audio in partnership with the Dove Self
Steam Project. We live in a world in which we
tout phrases like body positivity and the people who are like,
how dare you fat? Chained me? And I'm really proud
of my side. But the reality of the situation is
(00:22):
is in all of those conversations, you're still focused on
someone's body and we rarely do it with men. Hey,
I'm Jess Wiener and this is Dominant Stories, the podcast
that helps us reclaim and rewrite the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves, about our bodies, our beauty, our creativity,
(00:47):
and our identities. You know, I've mentioned this before, but
when I was a little girl, I was completely obsessed
with TV. And because I was a kid who grew
up in the eighties, we literally only had four networks
to watch, and so I also consumed every single show.
(01:07):
I mean, anything on TV was magic and power to me.
And of course, now we know that the images that
we consume on a regular basis can help shape our
view of ourselves and shape our identity. And I actually
feel like that was true for me because when I
was watching all of that media as a kid, I
paid attention to whose stories were being told, who was
(01:30):
considered beautiful and worthy, and as such, how are they
treated by the world around them. I sort of searched
all of those programs for faces that looked like me,
or looked like my friends, or looked like my family,
because we know that when you don't see yourself reflected
in the media that you consume, you can feel invisible, unworthy,
(01:50):
not beautiful. So today's conversation is with somebody who has
absolutely changed and evolved the rules of TV. She has
created characters that we see ourselves in because they are
a reflection of the world around us, their sisters, friends, lovers,
and mothers who are complex and naughty and flawed and searching,
(02:13):
and they stay with us well after the episode ends.
My guest today has no doubt rewritten our concept of beauty.
I am so incredibly excited to be joined by the
indomitable Shonda Rhymes. She is our prolific writer and executive
producer and creator of the record breaking series Gray's Anatomy,
(02:33):
oh and Scandal and bridgertain and the upcoming series Inventing Anna,
which will premiere on Netflix on February eleven, And of
course I'm here even doing this podcast in part because
of the wonderful partnership with Shonda ly and Audio. So
I cannot wait for you to hear this convo. And
as always, if you're loving the podcast, let me know
what you think by subscribing and writing a review wherever
(02:56):
you're listing. Are you ready, let's dig it? So, Shanda,
I just reread Year of Yes, and I found so
much more in this reading, as we can often do,
(03:17):
about the stories that you share around the year that
you decided to say yes to the things that scared you.
And one of the things that you're very generous about
talking about little Shanda and how much you lived in
your head and in the pantry, the kitchen pantry, telling
stories and letting your imagination sort of lay out these
worlds that you lived in for hours. And so I'm
curious in those worlds that you created when you were
(03:39):
a little girl, who were the heroes of your stories
that you were making up, and what kind of recurring
themes were happening in those stories. You know, I honestly,
I'm not sure that I could tell you because I
was such an introvert and telling stories was just who
I was, and so the stories were always changing. Being
in the pantry was a trill place to be for me.
(04:01):
It was like a comfortable, like little haven, cozy space.
And it's funny now because my kids like climbing little
closets to read all the time now and I and
I get it. I love that and the rich imagination
that you talk about as a child, I know you
were also a voracious reader. What kind of books were
you drawn to? Was there a genre that you particularly loved.
(04:22):
My parents had a rule which was that I could
read anything. There wasn't a off limits or this is
too old for you, or this is not appropriate kind
of reading book for me. So I was the kid
who walked to the park for a South library in
Illinois and would clear off the shelf of new books,
(04:44):
much to the librarian's dismay, and take them home on
a weekly basis. You know, I remember reading like the
French Lieutenants woman when I was eight. To ask me
my mother some very some very saucy questions, and she
would just point to the dictionary and say the dictionaries
over there, go look, get up, and I would and
the books had very different meanings for me when I was,
(05:05):
you know, six seven and eight that they were when
I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, But I still read them.
And because nothing was off limits to me, I felt
like I could read anything in the world was completely open.
So there wasn't a kind of book I loved the most,
although years later I realized and I don't know if
(05:25):
this is a function of the kinds of books people
right for children when you think about Disney movies, or
if it's just what I was drawn to. I read
so many books about children with no parents. I think
it's just how stories are told. I mean everything from
Harry Potter too. I remember that there was this book
(05:45):
called Adopted Jane. When I was little. There were just
all of these books about children with no parents that
were classics that everybody read. You're so right, that's definitely
a trope of kids books and stories. In some ways,
it's like our worst fears when we're kids, right, is
that we're going to lose a parent, or that we
kind of have to find a new family. I was
very similar interesting my mom. So my mom was a
(06:07):
big romance novel reader, and so I remember like tons
of books that were certainly probably inappropriate for me in
the house, but those were some of the books that
I would read at a very early age too. And
I loved unusual female protagonist. Like I was always looking
for the girls that the world didn't think we're beautiful,
or they were finding their voice, or they were fighting
back against people being cruel to them. And obviously, now
(06:30):
I look back at that, and I think a large
part of that was I was looking for stories where
girls were embracing and finding their own beauty because I
was struggling with that myself when it came to that
kind of relationship to beauty and appearance. For you, did
did you have a sense of what your beauty was
as a little girl or even as a you know,
a young teen, Like, how was beauty even talked about
(06:52):
or approached in your family life? I mean, we were
raised I'm the youngest of six. We were raised by
two very intellectual people who being pretty was not a
thing that was talked about in my household. And it
was certainly not for better or for worse. You know,
for some people, being pretty was not a compliment interesting.
(07:15):
It was not a word that was used in a
complimentary way. In my house, you were smart, you were powerful,
you were interesting, you were intelligent, you were witty. My
sister was really musical. You were musical, you were athletic,
you were strong. But being pretty was not a compliment
because it didn't require anything of you other than I
(07:38):
guess an accident of genetic So that was not part
of the conversation. And I'm wondering what that feels like. Then,
as you grow up and go out into the world
in which pretty is an attribute and an aspiration that
is put upon for women to aspire to in a
lot of ways, did you feel or experience a rub
(07:58):
of that awareness that this was not how you were
cultivated at home to think about beauty. But then there
is this world at large that does put a premium
on women's appearances. I remember being confused by it in
a lot of ways. You know. I had these friends
who growing up as we hit puberty, who were very
(08:18):
invested in how they looked to boys and how boys
thought of them, and how how their appearance mattered in
ways large and small. And it was like over my head.
I mean, my mother sold all of our clothes. We weren't,
you know, fashion wasn't a thing. We weren't allowed to
wear makeup. I wore my hair into gorn rose down
(08:41):
the sides of my head for most of my childhood
life up until I was in high school and didn't care.
I lived my life in my head a lot, and
I feel in a lot of ways, I feel fortunate
about that because it allowed me to be a much
freer person. I think my value never came to me
(09:02):
based on what somebody else thought about how I looked.
That is a huge gift when I think about the
amount of time I spent or my friends spent obsessing
about looks or being distracted by searching too, you know,
to be approved of by other folks. Like, there's a
tremendous amount of labor and time that goes into that distraction.
(09:22):
I think that's a really makes a ton of sense,
the freedom that you get from not searching for that
or chasing that in that way, and this rich world
that you were able to create for yourself. But even
more powerfully, like I think about this a lot. If
you are a girl, from the moment you are born,
you are generally raised to behave in a way that
(09:47):
is in relation to how a man will want you. Yes,
you know, I always say that that game there's a
dirty word in there, but Mary blank kill um that game.
That game is not a game. So you can either
be the kind of girl someone wants to marry. You
can be kind of a Marilyn Monroe kind of girl,
(10:08):
or you can be somebody who is useless to a
man and therefore fall into the kill category. And I
think that we are taught to behave in ways that
you know you will be quiet, be nice, be sweet,
don't be too loud, don't be too awful, don't be
too dangerous, be polite, let him talk. All of these
things that women are told. I grew up in a
(10:30):
house where we just weren't told those things, and my
father thought we were all fantastic. I mean, I have
a dad who when I got ready to go off
to college, before he wrote my tuition check, was like,
don't become a housewife, Like that's not a thing. I
was really raised in a way that now I look
at it, it's unapologetically feminist, but at the time it
(10:53):
really wasn't. It was really just parents of color making
sure that their child had everything she needed to succeed
in the world. I wrote this thing for Papa Pope
to say in Scandal, where he says, um, I spent
my life shining other people's shoes, so you could do
nothing but see your reflection. And I think I was
raised my parents who worked very hard to make sure
(11:15):
that I did nothing but see my reflection in the world.
And so we are these very strong, very unapologetic women
who never felt like we were required to behave in
a way that made other people more comfortable with our presence.
And you think about all of those stories dominant stories too,
(11:36):
that women have in your right in relationship to mail
gaze and mail approval. Tom like a kid from late
seventies and eighties, and absorbing the content of that time
is also very unique. There were like four networks available
at that time. You had to watch everything. You had
no chance to skip commercials. So like, I devoured every
single thing on television because everything coming out of TV
(11:59):
was magic for me and powerful for me. And I
was always looking for characters that reflected or represented or
sounded like my my people. What characters did you relate
to in the media that you consumed growing up. Were
there characters that really stood out for you that were
important there were I mean, at a certain point in time,
(12:21):
television really shifted and you could start to see people
who were like you. But there were four channels. That
was it. But because there were four channels, when you
watch television, you sat on the floor and your parents
sat behind you. My mother was always, you know, she
sat behind me on the sofa. She was doing something else.
She was maybe reading a book, she was knitting, or
(12:42):
she was going to college for a while, so she
was studying, and she would give a running commentary telling
me like that's girls not gonna come to any good.
Or that was really stupid, or I can't believe that happened,
or you know, want to end up like that? Or
she married him like she married that one, like all
(13:03):
of that. Those stories were in my head while I
was watching television. So I never watched television just through
the lens of whatever man wrote the show. And then
I find myself doing that now to my kids, whether
they like it or not, yes, because I have this
thing where I'm like, you can't go off and just
(13:23):
staret and I've had in a corner because I don't
know what you're watching. So these kids will be watching
something and I'm like, well, she's not going to come
to any good because I mean, she's really not getting
an education, and they're just like, what are they annoyed
by that? Or do they like it? I think they're
just startled by it. I mean, I'm the mom who
says things like, why don't we like princesses, and my
(13:45):
kids are like, because princesses don't have jobs, and I'm like, exactly,
princesses don't have jobs. But in a larger sense, that
really influenced how I looked at characters, and I don't
think it was until and I know, you know, we
all have our Cosby show the feeling that that has
(14:06):
been tainted. But I will forever love Claire Huxtable and
feel like she was America's mom because she both reminded
me of my mother but also showed me what a
working woman was like who to become. You saw an
example of somebody out there in the world who spoke
her truth and was herself, so it was exciting to see.
(14:28):
And then then Oprah was on television, and then you know,
there are different women on television at different times. That
suddenly seemed like it was expanding the definition of who
could be on television. Will Be Goldberg was on Broadway
on HBO. It was exciting to watch. You're making me
remember something. I don't think I've ever actually like spoken
about this out loud, but like, because my mom was
(14:49):
a big romance buff, we watched soap operas. That was
our bonding time in the afternoons after I got home
from school. And much like your mom and the running commentary,
I watched him all the ABC shows, so it was
General Hospital and all my children in One Life to
live my mom and that was how she grew up
with soap operas with her mom, and they also had
kind of a running commentary. But I remember being a
(15:12):
very like I was young. I was probably eight, nine, ten,
and through my middle school years where my mom used
the soap operas that we were watching to teach me
things that like nobody was talking about with my friends.
I knew what infidelity was, I knew what an affair was.
I you know, sometimes when those people would kiss and
then like fall down the door, I'd be like, what
(15:32):
are they doing? Like where are they going? And she,
you know, and she would talk about they're making love,
like and she would give me all the proper terms
around that. I had very good sex education as a
kid in middle school because we watched soap operas. And
I just put that all together. As you're talking about
your mom's running commentary, I'm like, God, I did that
every day at three o'clock after school. You had that time. Yeah,
we had that time. It's an interesting thing. And like
(15:53):
television used to be a family time where values were imparted. Yes,
it was, in fact equivalent of sitting around a camp fire.
There is no longer that thing happening. Now your kid
goes in one room and watches one thing on their iPad,
and the other one goes in the other room and
gets on Discord, and somebody else goes and gets on Minecraft,
(16:13):
and then somebody's watching the Disney Channel, and you're in
your room watching you know, something on Netflix, and none
of you were watching the same thing. And it's no
longer a generalized camp fire, and no wisdom is getting
passed down or the wisard that's getting passed down, and
stuff that you aren't totally aware of. Yeah, and parents
most definitely are not in the know about all the
things their kids are looking at these days. Um, I
(16:36):
want to return to the respite of your imagination and
the power of the stories that you're telling. And I
want to fast forward a little bit to college, Shonda,
which I found myself thinking about a lot in year
of yes and you were student at Dartmouth. You were
engaged in the Black Underground Theater Association, and you were
directing and performing student productions and writing fiction. And I'm
(16:57):
at that point in your life, Shanda, like, what was
coming alive inside of you? What were you discovering about
your voice as a storyteller, specifically as a college student.
I think more than anything during that time in college,
I was learning that I could be a leader. It
was the first time I had done anything in a
leadership capacity. You know, I was in plays and therefore
(17:21):
speaking in front of audiences, but then I was the
director and therefore choosing plays, casting plays, teaching other people
how to act, making all the decisions about design and
set and all those things. I was discovering how to
be a leader and how to lead people, and how
hard it was and how important it was, and what
(17:41):
morale meant, and how really didn't matter if I was tired.
You know, you still have a show to put on.
All of those things were vital to me really understanding
you know, what I was called the business of show.
It was really profound and powerful because I gained so
much confidence in myself. You know, you believe in yourself
(18:04):
and you have these ideas about what you're capable of.
But that as an intro, that was the opposite of
anything I'd ever believed that I was capable of doing.
And what was the hardest leadership skill for you to
learn in that space? Do you remember a stumble over
or struggle over a certain part of that journey? For you?
I think at the very beginning, it was this idea
that when you're when you're in a pantry making up stories,
(18:26):
all the stories are your own, and all the characters
say what you want them to say and do what
you want them to do. It is the idea that
a good idea can come from anywhere, and that every
person truly is the star of their own story. So
whatever is going on with somebody that day is vital
to how you should be relating to them. So to me,
(18:49):
that was part of what I was learning, and to
see things in in shades of gray and not to
just assume that people were one way or people were another.
I met so many people I never would have met,
and related to them in ways I never would have
related to them, and learned so much about observing people
and how they are in their vulnerable moments and in
(19:11):
their angry moments and in their strong moments. Things that
really served me well as a writer. Later, I bet
you know, my activism side came alive in college. I
was also a founder of a theater company at Penn
State that was focused on activist issues and talking about
sexual assault and discrimination and eating disorders. And that experience
(19:31):
as a founder and as a playwright at that time
changed the whole trajectory of my life. I think, discovering
how to create and marry the meaning with the work
that you know I had been kind of struggling with
in my earlier life, that was just a big aha
moment for me. But I loved that whole world. But
I think one of the reasons that in my career
that I didn't continue to pursue performing as an actor
(19:53):
was the thought that somewhere somebody would decide whether I
was beautiful enough to be on stage or on screen,
you know. I think, unfortunately for me, I did have
some experiences with manipulative male directors who made sure that
every woman working with them knew that they were only
as good as their looks were desirable. This made me
think about in your trajectory before you were Shonda Rhymes,
(20:15):
in the way that you are now as you're beginning
to work professionally in the industry, was that kind of
judgment present, Like, I think a lot of people are afraid,
and you know, I've had a lot of conversations that
that's a barrier of entry to this industry a lot
of times, is the fact that appearances could be a
non starter for a lot of folks. That's a powerful,
(20:37):
powerful statement and a powerful question that you're asking. I
think that there are two pieces to this. I think
that you are as welcome in a room as you
allow yourself to be welcome in a room one, but two,
sometimes you have no control over the attitude that are
going to come at you when you enter a room
(20:58):
and people make assumptions about you. Um. And I've talked
about this before. I had sort of a number two
male writer who worked with me on Scandal. Now keep
in mind we're talking about Scandal at this point. I've
already made Grey's Anatomy, a huge hit show. I would
enter a room and people would only talk to him
because he was a tall white man, and he would
(21:21):
be very uncomfortable and unsure, like not even sure where
to look, because like they're not they're ignoring his boss.
What I learned from it was in the beginning, when
I would enter a room and people would underestimate who
I was, I would use that to my advantage. I
always felt like, this is great, Like I'm a stealth warrior,
(21:41):
like standing in their midst because people look right past you,
they look over you, they look through you, they don't
see you. I always used to call it sort of
the the bounties of casual racism that I was going
to reap later, in the sense of like ignore me
at your peril, Like that's okay, you don't want to
notice me right now, that's fine, but you will. And
(22:06):
it was always there was always like a wonderfully surprising
moment when they realized that they had been rude, or
that they had been ignoring me, or that they had
been dismissive, and that maybe I was the person who
was going to be giving them a job. And it
was always I felt like a very powerful lesson for them.
But if I had been a person who would come
(22:26):
into the room and had been treated that way, and
instead of thinking ignore me at your peril, thought, oh
my god, I don't belong here. They're treating me badly.
I feel unseen. Maybe I'm not seen. I should go.
Where would I be right now? Wow? And that is
like a perfect embodiment of the stuff we've been talking
(22:48):
about on this show around the dance with that voice
and that dominant story of like, if you would have
listened to that voice or believed in that voice, it
changes the whole trajectory of your life. Hey, y'all, don't
go anywhere. This conversation is getting so good. You know
(23:20):
what I need? I need more of this epic conversation.
Let's go. You know, as your building career in the
beginning and as you're learning this industry, was there a
moment in time that you look around and like there
isn't representation around you, both as a writer and TV programming, Like,
(23:44):
can you talk a little bit about what that realization
felt like at that time and how you noticed the
lack of diversity and representation in the world in which
you're wanting to work in. I mean, I think you
have to understand, and I don't mean this to sound
dismissive of this. I pretty much always been one of
(24:07):
the only black girls in the room, you know what
I mean. I went to Catholic school. I went to
Dartmouth College, which was like bless Its Heart, Fat Boy Heaven,
which I loved once I was there, but you know,
it was a very white male and had a conservative
even reputation at the time. I was not surprised to
(24:28):
discover that there was a lack of representation. I think
the only people who are surprised to discover that there
was a lack of representation are people who are represented.
People who are used to seeing their faces are the
only people who are ever surprised to discover that there's
a lack of representation of other people's faces because they're
not noticing, they're not looking. I was very used to
(24:50):
the fact that I was going to be the only
face in the room, and that my job was to
make sure that there were other faces in the room
that looked like me. That was not a bird. It
was not a fear, it was not a pressure, it
was not a pain. It was just a fact of
life that is America. So if that is the case,
(25:11):
and I am in this job where I have suddenly
found that I am thriving and writing television like it's working,
Like I'm writing TV shows and people are liking them
and I'm enjoying them and I'm getting a little bit
of power, then it's only natural that I am telling
stories about people who look like me. That was the
other thing that I found fascinating. People were like, how
(25:32):
did you decide to do that? I was like, I
was telling stories about people who looked like me, the
same way you tell stories about people who look like you.
I wanted to see my world represented on screen. There's
no magic formula. It's not special, it's not different. It's
just that you guys never thought of it before, is
what I always wanted to say to TV executives, Like,
(25:54):
for some reason, you thought that there only needed to
be one person of color character on every show, and
that person could only talk about being a person of color, correct,
which is not how the world works. And so when
I was writing, I wanted to write people who were
people that I knew, who felt like people that I knew,
who were interesting to me in ways that people that
I knew were interesting, Right, What about when you began
(26:18):
to cast your own shows? And in the beginning, were
there elements in the in casting as an example of
like dominant stories of like this person has to be
thinner or taller or lighter skinned, or look like a
model or younger, Like did you hear those come up?
And and how did you navigate those if you did? Well? No,
because you know, you have to remember the very first
(26:40):
television show I wrote was Gray's Anatomy. That was my
first job writing TV, so I had never worked in
TV before. I didn't know how it worked, which was
a huge blessing in that naivete and ignorance of not
knowing how it worked. Casting was very simple. I knew
(27:00):
that I wasn't attributing any any attributes at all to
any of the characters except for Dr Bailey, who I
said was going to be a short, blonde hair, blue
eyed woman for some reason because I was calling her
the Nazi and somehow that made sense to me. But
everybody else I was like, can be cast by anybody.
(27:22):
So I remember saying, that's my casting director, like, we're
going to see anybody, and she kept saying anybody, And
I said anybody. And because she was Linda Lowe and
as brilliant as she is, she didn't say that's not
how it's done, or nobody does this. She was like, okay.
Agents would send slew of people who all the same
and she would send them back and she would say,
(27:45):
you know, where is everybody else? And so we got
this reputation very quickly at the very beginning of being
this show that was looking for actors of all kinds,
and really of all kinds. Nobody told me anybody had
to be prettier or thinner, or whiter or lighter or anything,
(28:07):
and that was fantastic to me. I will say, I
don't know that they expected the show to be the
success that it was. I think they thought they were
making themselves a nice little pilot and felt really good
about about the diversity they were showing. But it also
made clear and very early on, that that is it
(28:29):
was a financially viable model. And that's the thing I'm
most proud of is not just that we wrote a
show that people liked and wanted to watch. We made
clear that it was much more financially profitable to make
a show where you showed people who looked like the
world than it was to show a bunch of homogeneous
people who didn't look like very many people at all.
(28:49):
It's interesting thinking about changing, changing the game, and changing
the stories that we tell and how we tell them,
both on screen and off in writer's rooms. You know,
on Blow the line, hires like hair and makeup as
an example, right, is something that we've talked a lot
about still being a challenge on TV sets. Right. Still
very few people of color in those roles, and those
(29:10):
that are in those jobs aren't always prepared to do
brown skin and black hair, which can send a message
to talent into everybody else that brown skin and black
hair aren't the norm. I'm thinking about all of the
messages that get sent in and around a production, and
I'm curious what your thoughts are and how we begin
to challenge and change those dynamics. I think it's basic
(29:32):
and very simple. If you are looking around at a
crew and the crew all looks like the same cis gender,
straight line producer, male line producer that's standing in front
of you, and he is telling you he cannot find
some anybody else, I can't find anybody, then you need
(29:54):
a different line producer. That is how I've come to
look at things because the there are so many talented
people out there who are desperately looking for the opportunity
to work, who are crazy talented, who have amazing skills
to give, who have opportunities, and the assumptions that are made,
(30:16):
like the how dare somebody suggests that they should have
to have a special hair makeup person just because they
have black hair? Well, how dare you suggest that the
other people know what they're doing if they've never done
it before. And you want a fuller world, I want
a world in which everybody is given an opportunity. But
(30:37):
I also feel like different voices bring different things, and
I think that the challenges that come are a lot
of them are the fault of the showrunners and the
creators of the shows. A lot of them are the
fault of the line producers who have been doing this
for years and have their guys and their gang and
(30:57):
their people who are they're working with. And I don't
fault them in the way like I'm saying they're bad.
But if you've been working with the same group of
people forever, you call the same group of people every
time you're hiring. You know, you're you're crewing up a show.
So what you're asking people to do is to think
differently and to let go of maybe hiring your buddies
(31:18):
and hire a broader spot of people. You're asking people
to maybe train people. You're asking people to create opportunities
for people. You're asking people to think in a way
that makes room for the idea that they don't get
to hold all the cards and stand in all the spaces.
And it's wonderful when it can happen. I mean, we
(31:40):
haven't had much trouble with it, you know, especially in
the past five to six years when we've really had
the power to make it a priority. But in the
beginning it was an uphill battle. And so I really
understood how crewing up worked and that relationships are the
currency of every business, and in this business in particular,
that lack of access to those relationships or as you
(32:02):
were saying, sort of a familiarity in the constant way
that we're crewing up. It's an important conversation for us
to have and I look at and map some of
the progress that we're having across the board culturally, in
representation and television and film and we've done incredible I mean,
in such a huge part due to your work and
work of incredible visionaries. And yet I look at this
(32:25):
research that comes out right that talks about of black
girls and women on film and TV have lighter, medium
skin tones. And so when we start to look at
progress and where we need to go from here, I'm
curious your thoughts on the gate keeping that still exists,
on how much of a wider array of beauty we're
still seeing in media and how much further we have
(32:49):
to go, because I bring that stat into some places
where you know, I don't know that people are aware
of the impact of colorism. Yeah, we just did an
entire seminar for our company on colorism for this very reason.
And people have biases and they don't even know that
they have them. They're so deeply ingrained. And I don't
think that people are inherently bad, or people are inherently
(33:11):
racist or sexist or any of these things and are
trying hard to be gatekeepers and keep people out. It's
you know, the writer's room that says, well, we you know,
we hired this writer of color and she just didn't
fit in. And I'm like, well, yeah, because it's really
hard to fit in. If you're the only person in
the room and everybody else is, you know, a thirty
(33:33):
year old white guy, it's really hard to feel like
you're gonna just meld right in there, you know. And
I've heard that from so many female writers who were like,
I was a double, I was a lesbian and I
was a woman, so they hired me, and then it
was it. Those things are painful. It's a painful thing
to be, to be like the token person. And then
(33:56):
when it comes to two topics like size, you hear
people say things like and they mean it in the
most earnest way. They're like, you know, we really wanted
somebody who was sexy, and and then there's like a
pause and they're like, well, I mean we wanted somebody
was sexy. And you're waiting for them to really for
the penny to drop, your like pennies in the air.
(34:17):
Let's wait for the penny to drop, because you hear
what you're saying. What you're saying is is that there's
only one size of woman who is sexy to you,
Like are you hearing this? But they're not, like it
doesn't compute to them, and you know, oh, we found
this really beautiful woman of color, and you know, she
(34:38):
looks just like Halle Berry. Now, halle Berry is a
stunningly beautiful woman. Halle Berry would be annoyed to hear
that everybody thinks that the standard of beauty is Halle Berry,
do you know what I mean? Like, she's like, there's
only one met so people should come in all shades
and shapes and sizes, and that should be embraced in
(34:58):
the most amazing way. A And it's what we are fighting,
are these unconscious biases that people aren't even totally realizing
that they have. And the more you can show people
on screen who are different than these norms, and the
more that stops being the word that we have to use, norms,
(35:22):
the more we will figure out a way around this.
You know. I mean, the more it stops being a
thing when a singer loses a bunch of weight, the
more it stops being a thing when there is a
character who has a disability, an actor who has a
disability on a show, and that's all what anybody talks about.
We're in a hard place right now, and it's it's
(35:43):
a difficult spot. But I think that we are moving forward.
I do too. I call it the climb, and it's
like the hard part of like pushing this up the
hill is like, you know, unconscious bias. I also call
it unexamined bias, because I think in some ways, you know,
we kind of go okay with unconscious bias. We don't
know what we don't know. And then I'm interested now
and like, once you do know, what are you doing
(36:04):
about it? Right? How are we having these conversations that
are pushing us to go deeper? And that's what I
love and I want to kind of talk about in
the creation of Shonda Land and the world very real
and very imagined place that you've made where your characters
are not objects of somebody else's you know, story, their
subjects of their own, and there they have agency and
(36:26):
they're flawed and in a lot of times they're beautiful
women who do some very ugly things. And I'm curious
about that, Shanda, from an intentionality standpoint around writing, especially
female characters, where their beauty is a part of them.
Like oftentimes when you see women written and girls written,
it's often their their beauty almost precedes them walking into
(36:48):
a room, you know, it's almost like the first thing
we're asked to be looking at as an audience versus
being able to absorb this person hole. And I noticed
that a lot in your characters. I'm curious if there's
an intentionality around that. Well. I don't know how many
scripts you've read, but the number of scripts where a
woman is described as beautiful but she doesn't know it,
(37:10):
and that's her total character descriptions. He is one of
my favorite things ever, Like, what does that have to
do with anything? How is that a character trait? But
that is a a male gaze view of what a
woman is supposed to be. I've just never been interested
in that. You know. Yeah, I'm gonna put a lot
(37:32):
of amazing capes on Olivia Pope and let her come
stomping into a room, and yeah, the women of Britain
are going to wear some amazing gowns and killer wigs.
But it's not going to be about I've never once
thought to myself like is this woman pretty? And once
again it goes back to the way I was raised.
(37:54):
It's just never It literally has never occurred to me.
I thought, God striking, their interesting, they're witty, they're funny,
they're such good actors. But I'm not thinking like pretty
is their character. When you do have a character for
whom pretty is the attribute that you're dealing with, I
(38:16):
usually only have it there because it's the burden that
they carry. It's the albatross that's been placed around their
neck that they've been forced to handle because that is
the only way they've learned how to value themselves. And
let's examine that. But to me, I don't know any
women who spend all of their time thinking about the
(38:39):
size of their butt and what their lipstick looks like
and if a boy thinks they're cute. So since that's
not a thing for me, I'm much more interested in
how we're relating to the world, and we're relating to
one another, and we're relating to the other women in
our lives and the men in our lives and running
things and taking care of things, and who we are
(39:01):
as three dimensional people. Yes, because that's who women are, period, Yes, period,
full stop. There's a quote that you have in your
of Yes that I wrote out and have it on
a post it by my by my computer in my office.
You said, you know that you do a lot of
talking in your writer's rooms about how images matter. The
images you see on TV matter. They tell you about
(39:23):
the world, They tell you about who you are and
what the world is like, and they shape you. And
I was thinking about your incredible formidable characters. I'm wondering
if when you see your characters after you've created them,
they've come to life, whether it's Christina Yang or Miranda
Bailey or Olivia Pope or Antalie's Keating, do you ever
(39:43):
think to yourself, Shonda, that this representation, this person, I'm
a representation because they are this character person is single
handedly shaping the trajectory of how another woman or girl
or human will see themselves in the world. Does that
gravity of that connection come through to you personally? I
don't think I'm ever thinking that specifically. Um I think
(40:07):
if I was, I'd probably be paralyzed and being able
to do anything. But I do think that there is
a power that I see in the women who portray them.
And I really know that Sandra Oh and Carrie Washington
and Viola Davis fully felt and understood the power and
(40:31):
the implication of who they were representing, and Chandre Wilson
of who they were representing and what that means out
in the world because so for me, I'm at home
in my pantry typing basically, But they go out into
the world and they are wearing that character's face. Yeah,
and so they get the full force and the full
(40:52):
impact of what it means, all of the incredible talent
and work that they bring to building that care after
because it's not just the writing that is done, it
is the acting that is done that builds the power
of who those characters are. They're very aware of that
people relate to them in a way that is very different,
(41:13):
and they're very aware of what that kind of representation means,
especially when a woman like Christina Yang has not been
seen on television, or or you know, a woman like
Olivia Pope is the first woman of color to being
a leading role on a show, or a woman like
Analyst Keating, those roles are rare, and they can feel
(41:34):
the rare air that they're breathing, and I, you know,
I can see it in them. They feel a weight
to that. I was going to say, that seems like
such an extraordinary burden as well as an extraordinary opportunity
to embody that kind of meaning for people. Yeah, Hey,
where are you going? There's so much more this juicy
(41:54):
convo coming right up. Welcome to the other side of
the ad break. Now let's get back to the show.
(42:21):
I want to circle back to the girl in the
pantry and then again the woman in the kitchen making
Thanksgiving dinner with your sisters, and your oldest sister, Dolores
tells you, Shanda, you never say yes to anything, and
that one comment catapults a character arc for you in
your life that is so compelling and inspiring to read
(42:41):
in this book. And as I was thinking about the
conversation we were going to have today, I was thinking
that year of Yes, and even especially now that I
read it a second time, is inherently too about you
confronting some of your dominant stories that you had. Maybe
you certainly didn't call them that, but the belief around
like I'm too shy to attend things, or I'm afraid
to speak in public, or I'm not fancy enough to
(43:02):
accept these invitations, or the universal thing I think we
all feel like I can't say no to people. I
need to be nice all the time. But all of
these stories that sort of end up running our lives
if they don't get examined right and and if they
don't get challenged and ultimately changed. What was a story
that you had that you essentially changed and rewrote and
(43:23):
what did that transform for you on the inside. Was
it the Dartmouth commencement speech that was the real kickoff
point for that or are there other stories that you've
now noticed that you've been able to rewrite. I think
my entire narrative has been rewritten. I mean the idea
that you can truly rewrite the story of who you
are is a fact. I mean that really truly happened
(43:46):
for me with this book and this idea that there
were all of these things that I could not do,
and most of them came from the idea that honestly
I wasn't interesting enough in my own head, Like my
characters were very interesting. But like I remember thinking about
(44:09):
that invitation I had to go to the Kennedy Center
and sit in the presidential box. I thought, why would
they want to talk to me? Like what am I
going to have to say? Like the idea that I'm
would fail socially somehow that I am yeah, and that
the awkward, weird, strange, interesting creature that I am is
not okay because, by the way, I'm still the exact
(44:31):
same person, just as awkward, just as weird, just as strange,
just as prone to say something that makes people go what.
But somehow it still works. They still keep inviting me
back places, So it's okay. And what I've learned is
that it's okay to be that person, like that person
(44:52):
is as interesting as the next person. And perhaps most
people think to themselves, I can't believe I just said that.
I can't believe I'm just doing this. I can't believe
I'm feeling this way. Maybe they don't have that inner
voice in their head but I do. Or maybe they
do have the inner voice in their head, but they're
still out there doing it. It's just the very act
of living and having these experiences, so many experiences that
(45:15):
I never would have had. Had I not just decided
to spend a year saying yes two things that terrified me,
I wouldn't be doing a podcast right now. I was
not a person who was going to speak in public.
So no, you know, my answer to everything was no,
and my excuse was I have too much work to do.
And the reality of it is is it just kept
(45:37):
me from both enjoying the magical amazing experience that writing
these shows has given me, but also it just kept
me from living my life to the fullest. You know,
you had another one of the things that we read
about we hear about in the book is after you're
really digging through these limiting beliefs, one of the things
(45:59):
that starts to happen for you is you have this
physical transformation. And you wrote something Shonda that I had
to literally stop, take a breath, underline it, dog ear it,
and then like read it again. And you said, you
can say it or you can eat it. Yeah, And
of course, you know, you were talking about the tendency
that some folks have to use food to cover up
(46:21):
difficult emotions or uncomfortable situations, or feeling like we can't
ask for what we need when we need it, and
adding that food as a layer on top of that discomfort.
And as you began to shed those stories, you also
shed not without hard work and intentionality. You shed over
a hundred pounds. And earlier this year we knew and
I were chatting at the Virtual Dove Summit. You shared
(46:44):
something that really did stick with me about what your
experience was like after you had that physical transformation. So
I just want to play a really short clip of
that from what you shared. Okay, losing weight was like
discovering that nobody had ever noticed me before, because people
treat you in a completely different way when your body
is different. And that was both really upsetting and really
(47:07):
revelatory for me to discover, like how much I had
been or can continue to be judged based on how
you know, how my body shows up in the world.
What do you think about when you hear that? Now?
Do you still feel that way? I find it stunning
that we live in a world in which we tout
(47:32):
phrases like body positivity. The people who are like, how
dare you fat? Shame me? I'm really proud of my
size and both. But the reality of the situation is
is in all of those conversations, you're still focused on
someone's body, and we rarely do it with men. People
(47:52):
spend a lot of time they're obsessively discussing the waistlines
of women, the size of women, the value of women
when they go from one size to another. It's ludicrous
in a way that I find really sad, not sad
for me, but sad for the fact that for most
(48:16):
people like this is what you spend your time focusing on,
like focusing on the size of someone's butt or the
size of someone's waist, and that to you tells you
their value. Because that was what was fascinating to me,
was that people treated me as if I had more
value because my body was a different size, which is
(48:39):
just pathetic. I haven't spoken a lot about this publicly,
but I also have, you know, released a significant amount
of weight from my body, in large part due to
facing my own limiting, dominant stories. And I had a
friend who would also lost a lot of weight who
said to me, oh, just you wait, people are going
to even pay you differently. And I was like, now,
(49:00):
that's not going to happen, and by got Shanda, it happened.
Oh yeah, my value in market, I got paid differently.
I have been treated differently. It is like getting access
to a club that you knew existed to some degree.
But I never really felt as as much as my
appearance was a big driver in my life. As a
young woman, I lived a very happy, blissful life in
(49:22):
a larger size body that didn't prohibit me from having
love and sex and success and all these other things.
But when I released this amount of weight there was
like I entered into another paradigm where I thought, oh
my god, like am I knew here? Like what is happening?
I genuinely felt ashamed for people with how they came
(49:44):
at me, like the energy with which they came at me.
I was like, I have won awards, I have raised children,
I have made shows and broken records, but my but
is a different size, and you are treating me as
if I have won the Nobel Prize like it is shocking, Yes, shocking.
(50:06):
So in all of this work and this rewriting your
life's narrative as you talk about, and and the lessons
that you learned in saying yes, do you ever still
wrestle with a dominant story now and then? And curious
if you do, what are the tools that you use
to silence or to soften those voices? Now? You know,
I always never really believed it, but people would always
(50:28):
say to me, like, you know, like the real wisdom
comes as you get older, like it really does, like
you just stopped caring, you do. And I was like,
I'm never going to be that person and driven, But
what's happened to me? And maybe it was the pandemic
the slowing down of that. You know that the pandemic
brought along. But for me, the new dominant story for
(50:50):
me is what makes me happy, Like that's the most
important thing at this point. What makes me happy, what
makes my family happy? How am I going to define
the rest of my life? And it's not about what
anybody else thinks, And it's not about what I think
I'm supposed to be doing, or what I think I'm
(51:13):
supposed to be saying, or what I think the definition
of success is supposed to look like that no longer
matters to me, so in a weird way, like I'll say,
I should be calling it like the decative note, because
also I know what the drop of the hat to something.
Because I no longer feel like I'm supposed to do
something or I'm obligated to be a certain way or
(51:35):
act a certain way. I am very unapologetic about just
being myself at this point, and I feel really proud
of that. And the last chapter of Year of Yes
is called Saying Yes Too Beautiful, and you talk about
who you are after this period of changing your life
by changing your stories, and you again said something that
(51:57):
really stuck with me. You said the cruelty in which
I treat did myself is no longer tolerated. The pantry
door is open. I am out among the living. And
I think so much of our beauty is bravery and
adventure and our flaws and being open, isn't it? It
is so much more than what we talk about in size, shape,
(52:19):
or appearance. Well, yeah, I mean it's interesting. Somewhere during
the pandemic, I stopped wearing makeup all together. I often
stopped coming my hair altogether, but I stopped really caring
about like what I was wearing in like a crazy
serious way, and I stopped thinking that I had to
(52:42):
be this way or that way, or do this thing
or that thing, and and just started living at bought
a cello, you know, like just things that I would
never have done. And I have to say, I feel
more beautiful than I ever have. And I don't mean
in the pretty girl way. I mean just I feel
(53:04):
like I have a light in me that feels more
beautiful than I ever have. And that probably just comes
from being happy and confident and comfortable in my own skin.
And is that how you talk about the concept of
beauty and confidence with your girls? Is that kind of
a framework for them to be thinking about this journey
(53:25):
in their lives. I talked to them a lot about
who you are is beautiful. How you are is beautiful,
what you do is beautiful, how kind you are is beautiful.
Like once again, pretty is not a compliment. Pretty isn't
an attribute that you know. That's like saying you have toes,
that's great toes, you're pretty, your hair, whatever. But being
(53:49):
beautiful is how you treat other people. Being beautiful is
how you treat yourself, the courage that you show. We
talk a lot about courage in my house because I have,
you know, these these little ones who you know, went
through the pandemic and are re emerging into the world
like little butterflies, And so you know, beauty is being courageous,
(54:10):
I mean. And to me, they're always beautiful. There's never
a moment when they're in any of their struggles or
whatever that they're not the most beautiful people in the world.
And as my nineteen year old will tell we'll tell
you if she'll say, would you please stop saying that?
But I think it's true, Shawanna. As you dream about
the future of TV and film and the kinds of
(54:31):
stories that we will share and the writers who will
share them. What makes you hopeful about how we will
continue to rewrite beauty and the concept of it on
screen and off. You know, it's interesting. The people telling
stories that are coming up now are so fascinating. They
don't seem to carry a lot of the same baggage
(54:53):
that our generation carried at all. They don't even seem
to be interested in a lot of the same into
that our generation was interested in. They seem I used
to think that they were more fragile because they used
to think, like, my god, their feelings get hurt so easily.
But no, it's not that they're fearless. And because they
(55:15):
feel things so strongly, they are like willing to confront
those things that bother them more. And they've grown up
in a less stable world than we did and have
the ability to look at it and through very different eyes.
I'm excited for them. I'm excited by the stories that
they tell. And the one thing that I know that
(55:37):
I feel really great about is is I have no
idea what's coming like, I have no idea what kind
of stories they're going to tell. I feel like I'm
gonna be one of those people sitting there going like,
oh my god, I can't believe somebody came up with that.
That's exciting to me. Full originality is coming to us.
I love that. I think so too. I think when
I think about our future storytellers and all of the
(55:59):
access they have to the materials to storytell now, and
the way that they're out in the world and exposed.
But I also think about the seeds that have been
planted by you and by others that are shaping their
world and their experience and giving, you know, giving permission.
As you talked about these images, they shape us, and
I think ultimately they change us. Shanda, I adore you.
(56:19):
I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time with me,
your imagination, and your beauty with us all. And I'm
just really really grateful for this conversation. Oh I love
talking to you. You know that this is so much fun.
This has been great. Thank you, Thank you. Holy Hot.
(56:43):
There are some beautiful jebs in this conversation that are
going to stick with me for a while. Okay, one
big takeaway I'm going to be thinking about is Shanda's
description of her upbringing and being in a family that
encouraged all of the kids to, you know, focus more
on being smart and courageous and curious and kind versus
(57:05):
putting beauty as an aspirational attribute. And for me it
was a big aha, because I think I just grew
up in a very different family environment. My parents did
put a premium on appearance mattering, and so I think
about all the labor and time and effort and energy
that I've spent focused on pleasing somebody else about my appearance,
(57:27):
and how much I could have been developing and doing
for my own growth. I also from an industry perspective,
when Shan had just laid it out that like, look,
the people who are surprised of a lack of representation
are usually the people who are most represented. That is
a very good refresh for the fact that those of
(57:47):
us who have often seen ourselves represented don't notice when
others are not. And this is a really good call
to action for us. Actually, regardless of what industry you're in,
whether you work at entertainment or tech, or finance or retail,
look around you. Look at who you're hiring. Are they
looking like you? Are they there because they know you?
I mean, I think really challenging and examining is a
(58:09):
really important unlock for us to change who we see
around us in the world and certainly in the entertainment
industry on screen. We also talked about her dominant story
is changing to be more about focusing on like, what's
gonna make me happy? How am I going to define
the rest of my life? I think Shonda and her
stories that she shared in the book Year of Yes
(58:30):
are really kind of a beautiful case study in how
we can all rewrite the story of our lives no
matter where we are in our lives at any time,
we can focus more on what makes us happy and
living a life we love on our own terms. Certainly,
challenging and changing dominant stories most definitely changes our lives.
(58:51):
And then, you know, lastly, I think something Shawnda said
that really is tickling me and how we both shared
this experience of watching TV with our mom and because
of the time of which we grew up, that's how
we were watching TV. But we had the benefit of
the commentary of our parents and what their values are
and the stuff that we're watching. And now media consumption
has changed quite a bit. You know, families are often
(59:14):
in different rooms on different devices, watching different things. But
if you want to have a deeper conversation with a
young person in your life about the impact of the
images that they're seeing in the media, about social media,
about media literacy. I think that we've got some tools
that can help you do that. So if you're a parent,
or an educator or a mentor, I want to encourage
you to go to Dove dot com back slash the
(59:34):
Selfie Talk. We've got great curriculum and content there that's
designed to help you start this conversation with a young
person in your life and to really talk about the
impact of media and social media on building self esteem
and confidence. So again, you can go to Dove dot
com back slash the Selfie Talk. And if you're interested
in learning more about dominant Stories and how you can
(59:56):
change them, I teach workshops and courses that you can
sign up for at j Weiner dot com. Um you
can also follow me on Instagram and I'm Jess Weiner.
And as always, if you want to tell me more,
you can email me at podcast at Dominant Stories, or
you can leave me a voicemail at two one three
to five nine three oh three three. Don't worry if
you didn't catch all that info I'll put it into
(01:00:16):
the show notes. I remember, we are always learning, we
are always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess Weiner is a
(01:00:41):
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
I'm Shonda Rhymes and we're bringing the Dominant Stories created
by SHAWNA. Land Audio in partnership with the Dove Self
Steam Project. We live in a world in which we
tout phrases like body positivity and the people who are like,
how dare you fat? Chained me? And I'm really proud
of my side. But the reality of the situation is
(00:22):
is in all of those conversations, you're still focused on
someone's body and we rarely do it with men. Hey,
I'm Jess Wiener and this is Dominant Stories, the podcast
that helps us reclaim and rewrite the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves, about our bodies, our beauty, our creativity,
(00:47):
and our identities. You know, I've mentioned this before, but
when I was a little girl, I was completely obsessed
with TV. And because I was a kid who grew
up in the eighties, we literally only had four networks
to watch, and so I also consumed every single show.
(01:07):
I mean, anything on TV was magic and power to me.
And of course, now we know that the images that
we consume on a regular basis can help shape our
view of ourselves and shape our identity. And I actually
feel like that was true for me because when I
was watching all of that media as a kid, I
paid attention to whose stories were being told, who was
(01:30):
considered beautiful and worthy, and as such, how are they
treated by the world around them. I sort of searched
all of those programs for faces that looked like me,
or looked like my friends, or looked like my family,
because we know that when you don't see yourself reflected
in the media that you consume, you can feel invisible, unworthy,
(01:50):
not beautiful. So today's conversation is with somebody who has
absolutely changed and evolved the rules of TV. She has
created characters that we see ourselves in because they are
a reflection of the world around us, their sisters, friends, lovers,
and mothers who are complex and naughty and flawed and searching,
(02:13):
and they stay with us well after the episode ends.
My guest today has no doubt rewritten our concept of beauty.
I am so incredibly excited to be joined by the
indomitable Shonda Rhymes. She is our prolific writer and executive
producer and creator of the record breaking series Gray's Anatomy,
(02:33):
oh and Scandal and bridgertain and the upcoming series Inventing Anna,
which will premiere on Netflix on February eleven, And of
course I'm here even doing this podcast in part because
of the wonderful partnership with Shonda ly and Audio. So
I cannot wait for you to hear this convo. And
as always, if you're loving the podcast, let me know
what you think by subscribing and writing a review wherever
(02:56):
you're listing. Are you ready, let's dig it? So, Shanda,
I just reread Year of Yes, and I found so
much more in this reading, as we can often do,
(03:17):
about the stories that you share around the year that
you decided to say yes to the things that scared you.
And one of the things that you're very generous about
talking about little Shanda and how much you lived in
your head and in the pantry, the kitchen pantry, telling
stories and letting your imagination sort of lay out these
worlds that you lived in for hours. And so I'm
curious in those worlds that you created when you were
(03:39):
a little girl, who were the heroes of your stories
that you were making up, and what kind of recurring
themes were happening in those stories. You know, I honestly,
I'm not sure that I could tell you because I
was such an introvert and telling stories was just who
I was, and so the stories were always changing. Being
in the pantry was a trill place to be for me.
(04:01):
It was like a comfortable, like little haven, cozy space.
And it's funny now because my kids like climbing little
closets to read all the time now and I and
I get it. I love that and the rich imagination
that you talk about as a child, I know you
were also a voracious reader. What kind of books were
you drawn to? Was there a genre that you particularly loved.
(04:22):
My parents had a rule which was that I could
read anything. There wasn't a off limits or this is
too old for you, or this is not appropriate kind
of reading book for me. So I was the kid
who walked to the park for a South library in
Illinois and would clear off the shelf of new books,
(04:44):
much to the librarian's dismay, and take them home on
a weekly basis. You know, I remember reading like the
French Lieutenants woman when I was eight. To ask me
my mother some very some very saucy questions, and she
would just point to the dictionary and say the dictionaries
over there, go look, get up, and I would and
the books had very different meanings for me when I was,
(05:05):
you know, six seven and eight that they were when
I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, But I still read them.
And because nothing was off limits to me, I felt
like I could read anything in the world was completely open.
So there wasn't a kind of book I loved the most,
although years later I realized and I don't know if
(05:25):
this is a function of the kinds of books people
right for children when you think about Disney movies, or
if it's just what I was drawn to. I read
so many books about children with no parents. I think
it's just how stories are told. I mean everything from
Harry Potter too. I remember that there was this book
(05:45):
called Adopted Jane. When I was little. There were just
all of these books about children with no parents that
were classics that everybody read. You're so right, that's definitely
a trope of kids books and stories. In some ways,
it's like our worst fears when we're kids, right, is
that we're going to lose a parent, or that we
kind of have to find a new family. I was
very similar interesting my mom. So my mom was a
(06:07):
big romance novel reader, and so I remember like tons
of books that were certainly probably inappropriate for me in
the house, but those were some of the books that
I would read at a very early age too. And
I loved unusual female protagonist. Like I was always looking
for the girls that the world didn't think we're beautiful,
or they were finding their voice, or they were fighting
back against people being cruel to them. And obviously, now
(06:30):
I look back at that, and I think a large
part of that was I was looking for stories where
girls were embracing and finding their own beauty because I
was struggling with that myself when it came to that
kind of relationship to beauty and appearance. For you, did
did you have a sense of what your beauty was
as a little girl or even as a you know,
a young teen, Like, how was beauty even talked about
(06:52):
or approached in your family life? I mean, we were
raised I'm the youngest of six. We were raised by
two very intellectual people who being pretty was not a
thing that was talked about in my household. And it
was certainly not for better or for worse. You know,
for some people, being pretty was not a compliment interesting.
(07:15):
It was not a word that was used in a
complimentary way. In my house, you were smart, you were powerful,
you were interesting, you were intelligent, you were witty. My
sister was really musical. You were musical, you were athletic,
you were strong. But being pretty was not a compliment
because it didn't require anything of you other than I
(07:38):
guess an accident of genetic So that was not part
of the conversation. And I'm wondering what that feels like. Then,
as you grow up and go out into the world
in which pretty is an attribute and an aspiration that
is put upon for women to aspire to in a
lot of ways, did you feel or experience a rub
(07:58):
of that awareness that this was not how you were
cultivated at home to think about beauty. But then there
is this world at large that does put a premium
on women's appearances. I remember being confused by it in
a lot of ways. You know. I had these friends
who growing up as we hit puberty, who were very
(08:18):
invested in how they looked to boys and how boys
thought of them, and how how their appearance mattered in
ways large and small. And it was like over my head.
I mean, my mother sold all of our clothes. We weren't,
you know, fashion wasn't a thing. We weren't allowed to
wear makeup. I wore my hair into gorn rose down
(08:41):
the sides of my head for most of my childhood
life up until I was in high school and didn't care.
I lived my life in my head a lot, and
I feel in a lot of ways, I feel fortunate
about that because it allowed me to be a much
freer person. I think my value never came to me
(09:02):
based on what somebody else thought about how I looked.
That is a huge gift when I think about the
amount of time I spent or my friends spent obsessing
about looks or being distracted by searching too, you know,
to be approved of by other folks. Like, there's a
tremendous amount of labor and time that goes into that distraction.
(09:22):
I think that's a really makes a ton of sense,
the freedom that you get from not searching for that
or chasing that in that way, and this rich world
that you were able to create for yourself. But even
more powerfully, like I think about this a lot. If
you are a girl, from the moment you are born,
you are generally raised to behave in a way that
(09:47):
is in relation to how a man will want you. Yes,
you know, I always say that that game there's a
dirty word in there, but Mary blank kill um that game.
That game is not a game. So you can either
be the kind of girl someone wants to marry. You
can be kind of a Marilyn Monroe kind of girl,
(10:08):
or you can be somebody who is useless to a
man and therefore fall into the kill category. And I
think that we are taught to behave in ways that
you know you will be quiet, be nice, be sweet,
don't be too loud, don't be too awful, don't be
too dangerous, be polite, let him talk. All of these
things that women are told. I grew up in a
(10:30):
house where we just weren't told those things, and my
father thought we were all fantastic. I mean, I have
a dad who when I got ready to go off
to college, before he wrote my tuition check, was like,
don't become a housewife, Like that's not a thing. I
was really raised in a way that now I look
at it, it's unapologetically feminist, but at the time it
(10:53):
really wasn't. It was really just parents of color making
sure that their child had everything she needed to succeed
in the world. I wrote this thing for Papa Pope
to say in Scandal, where he says, um, I spent
my life shining other people's shoes, so you could do
nothing but see your reflection. And I think I was
raised my parents who worked very hard to make sure
(11:15):
that I did nothing but see my reflection in the world.
And so we are these very strong, very unapologetic women
who never felt like we were required to behave in
a way that made other people more comfortable with our presence.
And you think about all of those stories dominant stories too,
(11:36):
that women have in your right in relationship to mail
gaze and mail approval. Tom like a kid from late
seventies and eighties, and absorbing the content of that time
is also very unique. There were like four networks available
at that time. You had to watch everything. You had
no chance to skip commercials. So like, I devoured every
single thing on television because everything coming out of TV
(11:59):
was magic for me and powerful for me. And I
was always looking for characters that reflected or represented or
sounded like my my people. What characters did you relate
to in the media that you consumed growing up. Were
there characters that really stood out for you that were
important there were I mean, at a certain point in time,
(12:21):
television really shifted and you could start to see people
who were like you. But there were four channels. That
was it. But because there were four channels, when you
watch television, you sat on the floor and your parents
sat behind you. My mother was always, you know, she
sat behind me on the sofa. She was doing something else.
She was maybe reading a book, she was knitting, or
(12:42):
she was going to college for a while, so she
was studying, and she would give a running commentary telling
me like that's girls not gonna come to any good.
Or that was really stupid, or I can't believe that happened,
or you know, want to end up like that? Or
she married him like she married that one, like all
(13:03):
of that. Those stories were in my head while I
was watching television. So I never watched television just through
the lens of whatever man wrote the show. And then
I find myself doing that now to my kids, whether
they like it or not, yes, because I have this
thing where I'm like, you can't go off and just
(13:23):
staret and I've had in a corner because I don't
know what you're watching. So these kids will be watching
something and I'm like, well, she's not going to come
to any good because I mean, she's really not getting
an education, and they're just like, what are they annoyed
by that? Or do they like it? I think they're
just startled by it. I mean, I'm the mom who
says things like, why don't we like princesses, and my
(13:45):
kids are like, because princesses don't have jobs, and I'm like, exactly,
princesses don't have jobs. But in a larger sense, that
really influenced how I looked at characters, and I don't
think it was until and I know, you know, we
all have our Cosby show the feeling that that has
(14:06):
been tainted. But I will forever love Claire Huxtable and
feel like she was America's mom because she both reminded
me of my mother but also showed me what a
working woman was like who to become. You saw an
example of somebody out there in the world who spoke
her truth and was herself, so it was exciting to see.
(14:28):
And then then Oprah was on television, and then you know,
there are different women on television at different times. That
suddenly seemed like it was expanding the definition of who
could be on television. Will Be Goldberg was on Broadway
on HBO. It was exciting to watch. You're making me
remember something. I don't think I've ever actually like spoken
about this out loud, but like, because my mom was
(14:49):
a big romance buff, we watched soap operas. That was
our bonding time in the afternoons after I got home
from school. And much like your mom and the running commentary,
I watched him all the ABC shows, so it was
General Hospital and all my children in One Life to
live my mom and that was how she grew up
with soap operas with her mom, and they also had
kind of a running commentary. But I remember being a
(15:12):
very like I was young. I was probably eight, nine, ten,
and through my middle school years where my mom used
the soap operas that we were watching to teach me
things that like nobody was talking about with my friends.
I knew what infidelity was, I knew what an affair was.
I you know, sometimes when those people would kiss and
then like fall down the door, I'd be like, what
(15:32):
are they doing? Like where are they going? And she,
you know, and she would talk about they're making love,
like and she would give me all the proper terms
around that. I had very good sex education as a
kid in middle school because we watched soap operas. And
I just put that all together. As you're talking about
your mom's running commentary, I'm like, God, I did that
every day at three o'clock after school. You had that time. Yeah,
we had that time. It's an interesting thing. And like
(15:53):
television used to be a family time where values were imparted. Yes,
it was, in fact equivalent of sitting around a camp fire.
There is no longer that thing happening. Now your kid
goes in one room and watches one thing on their iPad,
and the other one goes in the other room and
gets on Discord, and somebody else goes and gets on Minecraft,
(16:13):
and then somebody's watching the Disney Channel, and you're in
your room watching you know, something on Netflix, and none
of you were watching the same thing. And it's no
longer a generalized camp fire, and no wisdom is getting
passed down or the wisard that's getting passed down, and
stuff that you aren't totally aware of. Yeah, and parents
most definitely are not in the know about all the
things their kids are looking at these days. Um, I
(16:36):
want to return to the respite of your imagination and
the power of the stories that you're telling. And I
want to fast forward a little bit to college, Shonda,
which I found myself thinking about a lot in year
of yes and you were student at Dartmouth. You were
engaged in the Black Underground Theater Association, and you were
directing and performing student productions and writing fiction. And I'm
(16:57):
at that point in your life, Shanda, like, what was
coming alive inside of you? What were you discovering about
your voice as a storyteller, specifically as a college student.
I think more than anything during that time in college,
I was learning that I could be a leader. It
was the first time I had done anything in a
leadership capacity. You know, I was in plays and therefore
(17:21):
speaking in front of audiences, but then I was the
director and therefore choosing plays, casting plays, teaching other people
how to act, making all the decisions about design and
set and all those things. I was discovering how to
be a leader and how to lead people, and how
hard it was and how important it was, and what
(17:41):
morale meant, and how really didn't matter if I was tired.
You know, you still have a show to put on.
All of those things were vital to me really understanding
you know, what I was called the business of show.
It was really profound and powerful because I gained so
much confidence in myself. You know, you believe in yourself
(18:04):
and you have these ideas about what you're capable of.
But that as an intro, that was the opposite of
anything I'd ever believed that I was capable of doing.
And what was the hardest leadership skill for you to
learn in that space? Do you remember a stumble over
or struggle over a certain part of that journey? For you?
I think at the very beginning, it was this idea
that when you're when you're in a pantry making up stories,
(18:26):
all the stories are your own, and all the characters
say what you want them to say and do what
you want them to do. It is the idea that
a good idea can come from anywhere, and that every
person truly is the star of their own story. So
whatever is going on with somebody that day is vital
to how you should be relating to them. So to me,
(18:49):
that was part of what I was learning, and to
see things in in shades of gray and not to
just assume that people were one way or people were another.
I met so many people I never would have met,
and related to them in ways I never would have
related to them, and learned so much about observing people
and how they are in their vulnerable moments and in
(19:11):
their angry moments and in their strong moments. Things that
really served me well as a writer. Later, I bet
you know, my activism side came alive in college. I
was also a founder of a theater company at Penn
State that was focused on activist issues and talking about
sexual assault and discrimination and eating disorders. And that experience
(19:31):
as a founder and as a playwright at that time
changed the whole trajectory of my life. I think, discovering
how to create and marry the meaning with the work
that you know I had been kind of struggling with
in my earlier life, that was just a big aha
moment for me. But I loved that whole world. But
I think one of the reasons that in my career
that I didn't continue to pursue performing as an actor
(19:53):
was the thought that somewhere somebody would decide whether I
was beautiful enough to be on stage or on screen,
you know. I think, unfortunately for me, I did have
some experiences with manipulative male directors who made sure that
every woman working with them knew that they were only
as good as their looks were desirable. This made me
think about in your trajectory before you were Shonda Rhymes,
(20:15):
in the way that you are now as you're beginning
to work professionally in the industry, was that kind of
judgment present, Like, I think a lot of people are afraid,
and you know, I've had a lot of conversations that
that's a barrier of entry to this industry a lot
of times, is the fact that appearances could be a
non starter for a lot of folks. That's a powerful,
(20:37):
powerful statement and a powerful question that you're asking. I
think that there are two pieces to this. I think
that you are as welcome in a room as you
allow yourself to be welcome in a room one, but two,
sometimes you have no control over the attitude that are
going to come at you when you enter a room
(20:58):
and people make assumptions about you. Um. And I've talked
about this before. I had sort of a number two
male writer who worked with me on Scandal. Now keep
in mind we're talking about Scandal at this point. I've
already made Grey's Anatomy, a huge hit show. I would
enter a room and people would only talk to him
because he was a tall white man, and he would
(21:21):
be very uncomfortable and unsure, like not even sure where
to look, because like they're not they're ignoring his boss.
What I learned from it was in the beginning, when
I would enter a room and people would underestimate who
I was, I would use that to my advantage. I
always felt like, this is great, Like I'm a stealth warrior,
(21:41):
like standing in their midst because people look right past you,
they look over you, they look through you, they don't
see you. I always used to call it sort of
the the bounties of casual racism that I was going
to reap later, in the sense of like ignore me
at your peril, Like that's okay, you don't want to
notice me right now, that's fine, but you will. And
(22:06):
it was always there was always like a wonderfully surprising
moment when they realized that they had been rude, or
that they had been ignoring me, or that they had
been dismissive, and that maybe I was the person who
was going to be giving them a job. And it
was always I felt like a very powerful lesson for them.
But if I had been a person who would come
(22:26):
into the room and had been treated that way, and
instead of thinking ignore me at your peril, thought, oh
my god, I don't belong here. They're treating me badly.
I feel unseen. Maybe I'm not seen. I should go.
Where would I be right now? Wow? And that is
like a perfect embodiment of the stuff we've been talking
(22:48):
about on this show around the dance with that voice
and that dominant story of like, if you would have
listened to that voice or believed in that voice, it
changes the whole trajectory of your life. Hey, y'all, don't
go anywhere. This conversation is getting so good. You know
(23:20):
what I need? I need more of this epic conversation.
Let's go. You know, as your building career in the
beginning and as you're learning this industry, was there a
moment in time that you look around and like there
isn't representation around you, both as a writer and TV programming, Like,
(23:44):
can you talk a little bit about what that realization
felt like at that time and how you noticed the
lack of diversity and representation in the world in which
you're wanting to work in. I mean, I think you
have to understand, and I don't mean this to sound
dismissive of this. I pretty much always been one of
(24:07):
the only black girls in the room, you know what
I mean. I went to Catholic school. I went to
Dartmouth College, which was like bless Its Heart, Fat Boy Heaven,
which I loved once I was there, but you know,
it was a very white male and had a conservative
even reputation at the time. I was not surprised to
(24:28):
discover that there was a lack of representation. I think
the only people who are surprised to discover that there
was a lack of representation are people who are represented.
People who are used to seeing their faces are the
only people who are ever surprised to discover that there's
a lack of representation of other people's faces because they're
not noticing, they're not looking. I was very used to
(24:50):
the fact that I was going to be the only
face in the room, and that my job was to
make sure that there were other faces in the room
that looked like me. That was not a bird. It
was not a fear, it was not a pressure, it
was not a pain. It was just a fact of
life that is America. So if that is the case,
(25:11):
and I am in this job where I have suddenly
found that I am thriving and writing television like it's working,
Like I'm writing TV shows and people are liking them
and I'm enjoying them and I'm getting a little bit
of power, then it's only natural that I am telling
stories about people who look like me. That was the
other thing that I found fascinating. People were like, how
(25:32):
did you decide to do that? I was like, I
was telling stories about people who looked like me, the
same way you tell stories about people who look like you.
I wanted to see my world represented on screen. There's
no magic formula. It's not special, it's not different. It's
just that you guys never thought of it before, is
what I always wanted to say to TV executives, Like,
(25:54):
for some reason, you thought that there only needed to
be one person of color character on every show, and
that person could only talk about being a person of color, correct,
which is not how the world works. And so when
I was writing, I wanted to write people who were
people that I knew, who felt like people that I knew,
who were interesting to me in ways that people that
I knew were interesting, Right, What about when you began
(26:18):
to cast your own shows? And in the beginning, were
there elements in the in casting as an example of
like dominant stories of like this person has to be
thinner or taller or lighter skinned, or look like a
model or younger, Like did you hear those come up?
And and how did you navigate those if you did? Well? No,
because you know, you have to remember the very first
(26:40):
television show I wrote was Gray's Anatomy. That was my
first job writing TV, so I had never worked in
TV before. I didn't know how it worked, which was
a huge blessing in that naivete and ignorance of not
knowing how it worked. Casting was very simple. I knew
(27:00):
that I wasn't attributing any any attributes at all to
any of the characters except for Dr Bailey, who I
said was going to be a short, blonde hair, blue
eyed woman for some reason because I was calling her
the Nazi and somehow that made sense to me. But
everybody else I was like, can be cast by anybody.
(27:22):
So I remember saying, that's my casting director, like, we're
going to see anybody, and she kept saying anybody, And
I said anybody. And because she was Linda Lowe and
as brilliant as she is, she didn't say that's not
how it's done, or nobody does this. She was like, okay.
Agents would send slew of people who all the same
and she would send them back and she would say,
(27:45):
you know, where is everybody else? And so we got
this reputation very quickly at the very beginning of being
this show that was looking for actors of all kinds,
and really of all kinds. Nobody told me anybody had
to be prettier or thinner, or whiter or lighter or anything,
(28:07):
and that was fantastic to me. I will say, I
don't know that they expected the show to be the
success that it was. I think they thought they were
making themselves a nice little pilot and felt really good
about about the diversity they were showing. But it also
made clear and very early on, that that is it
(28:29):
was a financially viable model. And that's the thing I'm
most proud of is not just that we wrote a
show that people liked and wanted to watch. We made
clear that it was much more financially profitable to make
a show where you showed people who looked like the
world than it was to show a bunch of homogeneous
people who didn't look like very many people at all.
(28:49):
It's interesting thinking about changing, changing the game, and changing
the stories that we tell and how we tell them,
both on screen and off in writer's rooms. You know,
on Blow the line, hires like hair and makeup as
an example, right, is something that we've talked a lot
about still being a challenge on TV sets. Right. Still
very few people of color in those roles, and those
(29:10):
that are in those jobs aren't always prepared to do
brown skin and black hair, which can send a message
to talent into everybody else that brown skin and black
hair aren't the norm. I'm thinking about all of the
messages that get sent in and around a production, and
I'm curious what your thoughts are and how we begin
to challenge and change those dynamics. I think it's basic
(29:32):
and very simple. If you are looking around at a
crew and the crew all looks like the same cis gender,
straight line producer, male line producer that's standing in front
of you, and he is telling you he cannot find
some anybody else, I can't find anybody, then you need
(29:54):
a different line producer. That is how I've come to
look at things because the there are so many talented
people out there who are desperately looking for the opportunity
to work, who are crazy talented, who have amazing skills
to give, who have opportunities, and the assumptions that are made,
(30:16):
like the how dare somebody suggests that they should have
to have a special hair makeup person just because they
have black hair? Well, how dare you suggest that the
other people know what they're doing if they've never done
it before. And you want a fuller world, I want
a world in which everybody is given an opportunity. But
(30:37):
I also feel like different voices bring different things, and
I think that the challenges that come are a lot
of them are the fault of the showrunners and the
creators of the shows. A lot of them are the
fault of the line producers who have been doing this
for years and have their guys and their gang and
(30:57):
their people who are they're working with. And I don't
fault them in the way like I'm saying they're bad.
But if you've been working with the same group of
people forever, you call the same group of people every
time you're hiring. You know, you're you're crewing up a show.
So what you're asking people to do is to think
differently and to let go of maybe hiring your buddies
(31:18):
and hire a broader spot of people. You're asking people
to maybe train people. You're asking people to create opportunities
for people. You're asking people to think in a way
that makes room for the idea that they don't get
to hold all the cards and stand in all the spaces.
And it's wonderful when it can happen. I mean, we
(31:40):
haven't had much trouble with it, you know, especially in
the past five to six years when we've really had
the power to make it a priority. But in the
beginning it was an uphill battle. And so I really
understood how crewing up worked and that relationships are the
currency of every business, and in this business in particular,
that lack of access to those relationships or as you
(32:02):
were saying, sort of a familiarity in the constant way
that we're crewing up. It's an important conversation for us
to have and I look at and map some of
the progress that we're having across the board culturally, in
representation and television and film and we've done incredible I mean,
in such a huge part due to your work and
work of incredible visionaries. And yet I look at this
(32:25):
research that comes out right that talks about of black
girls and women on film and TV have lighter, medium
skin tones. And so when we start to look at
progress and where we need to go from here, I'm
curious your thoughts on the gate keeping that still exists,
on how much of a wider array of beauty we're
still seeing in media and how much further we have
(32:49):
to go, because I bring that stat into some places
where you know, I don't know that people are aware
of the impact of colorism. Yeah, we just did an
entire seminar for our company on colorism for this very reason.
And people have biases and they don't even know that
they have them. They're so deeply ingrained. And I don't
think that people are inherently bad, or people are inherently
(33:11):
racist or sexist or any of these things and are
trying hard to be gatekeepers and keep people out. It's
you know, the writer's room that says, well, we you know,
we hired this writer of color and she just didn't
fit in. And I'm like, well, yeah, because it's really
hard to fit in. If you're the only person in
the room and everybody else is, you know, a thirty
(33:33):
year old white guy, it's really hard to feel like
you're gonna just meld right in there, you know. And
I've heard that from so many female writers who were like,
I was a double, I was a lesbian and I
was a woman, so they hired me, and then it
was it. Those things are painful. It's a painful thing
to be, to be like the token person. And then
(33:56):
when it comes to two topics like size, you hear
people say things like and they mean it in the
most earnest way. They're like, you know, we really wanted
somebody who was sexy, and and then there's like a
pause and they're like, well, I mean we wanted somebody
was sexy. And you're waiting for them to really for
the penny to drop, your like pennies in the air.
(34:17):
Let's wait for the penny to drop, because you hear
what you're saying. What you're saying is is that there's
only one size of woman who is sexy to you,
Like are you hearing this? But they're not, like it
doesn't compute to them, and you know, oh, we found
this really beautiful woman of color, and you know, she
(34:38):
looks just like Halle Berry. Now, halle Berry is a
stunningly beautiful woman. Halle Berry would be annoyed to hear
that everybody thinks that the standard of beauty is Halle Berry,
do you know what I mean? Like, she's like, there's
only one met so people should come in all shades
and shapes and sizes, and that should be embraced in
(34:58):
the most amazing way. A And it's what we are fighting,
are these unconscious biases that people aren't even totally realizing
that they have. And the more you can show people
on screen who are different than these norms, and the
more that stops being the word that we have to use, norms,
(35:22):
the more we will figure out a way around this.
You know. I mean, the more it stops being a
thing when a singer loses a bunch of weight, the
more it stops being a thing when there is a
character who has a disability, an actor who has a
disability on a show, and that's all what anybody talks about.
We're in a hard place right now, and it's it's
(35:43):
a difficult spot. But I think that we are moving forward.
I do too. I call it the climb, and it's
like the hard part of like pushing this up the
hill is like, you know, unconscious bias. I also call
it unexamined bias, because I think in some ways, you know,
we kind of go okay with unconscious bias. We don't
know what we don't know. And then I'm interested now
and like, once you do know, what are you doing
(36:04):
about it? Right? How are we having these conversations that
are pushing us to go deeper? And that's what I
love and I want to kind of talk about in
the creation of Shonda Land and the world very real
and very imagined place that you've made where your characters
are not objects of somebody else's you know, story, their
subjects of their own, and there they have agency and
(36:26):
they're flawed and in a lot of times they're beautiful
women who do some very ugly things. And I'm curious
about that, Shanda, from an intentionality standpoint around writing, especially
female characters, where their beauty is a part of them.
Like oftentimes when you see women written and girls written,
it's often their their beauty almost precedes them walking into
(36:48):
a room, you know, it's almost like the first thing
we're asked to be looking at as an audience versus
being able to absorb this person hole. And I noticed
that a lot in your characters. I'm curious if there's
an intentionality around that. Well. I don't know how many
scripts you've read, but the number of scripts where a
woman is described as beautiful but she doesn't know it,
(37:10):
and that's her total character descriptions. He is one of
my favorite things ever, Like, what does that have to
do with anything? How is that a character trait? But
that is a a male gaze view of what a
woman is supposed to be. I've just never been interested
in that. You know. Yeah, I'm gonna put a lot
(37:32):
of amazing capes on Olivia Pope and let her come
stomping into a room, and yeah, the women of Britain
are going to wear some amazing gowns and killer wigs.
But it's not going to be about I've never once
thought to myself like is this woman pretty? And once
again it goes back to the way I was raised.
(37:54):
It's just never It literally has never occurred to me.
I thought, God striking, their interesting, they're witty, they're funny,
they're such good actors. But I'm not thinking like pretty
is their character. When you do have a character for
whom pretty is the attribute that you're dealing with, I
(38:16):
usually only have it there because it's the burden that
they carry. It's the albatross that's been placed around their
neck that they've been forced to handle because that is
the only way they've learned how to value themselves. And
let's examine that. But to me, I don't know any
women who spend all of their time thinking about the
(38:39):
size of their butt and what their lipstick looks like
and if a boy thinks they're cute. So since that's
not a thing for me, I'm much more interested in
how we're relating to the world, and we're relating to
one another, and we're relating to the other women in
our lives and the men in our lives and running
things and taking care of things, and who we are
(39:01):
as three dimensional people. Yes, because that's who women are, period, Yes, period,
full stop. There's a quote that you have in your
of Yes that I wrote out and have it on
a post it by my by my computer in my office.
You said, you know that you do a lot of
talking in your writer's rooms about how images matter. The
images you see on TV matter. They tell you about
(39:23):
the world, They tell you about who you are and
what the world is like, and they shape you. And
I was thinking about your incredible formidable characters. I'm wondering
if when you see your characters after you've created them,
they've come to life, whether it's Christina Yang or Miranda
Bailey or Olivia Pope or Antalie's Keating, do you ever
(39:43):
think to yourself, Shonda, that this representation, this person, I'm
a representation because they are this character person is single
handedly shaping the trajectory of how another woman or girl
or human will see themselves in the world. Does that
gravity of that connection come through to you personally? I
don't think I'm ever thinking that specifically. Um I think
(40:07):
if I was, I'd probably be paralyzed and being able
to do anything. But I do think that there is
a power that I see in the women who portray them.
And I really know that Sandra Oh and Carrie Washington
and Viola Davis fully felt and understood the power and
(40:31):
the implication of who they were representing, and Chandre Wilson
of who they were representing and what that means out
in the world because so for me, I'm at home
in my pantry typing basically, But they go out into
the world and they are wearing that character's face. Yeah,
and so they get the full force and the full
(40:52):
impact of what it means, all of the incredible talent
and work that they bring to building that care after
because it's not just the writing that is done, it
is the acting that is done that builds the power
of who those characters are. They're very aware of that
people relate to them in a way that is very different,
(41:13):
and they're very aware of what that kind of representation means,
especially when a woman like Christina Yang has not been
seen on television, or or you know, a woman like
Olivia Pope is the first woman of color to being
a leading role on a show, or a woman like
Analyst Keating, those roles are rare, and they can feel
(41:34):
the rare air that they're breathing, and I, you know,
I can see it in them. They feel a weight
to that. I was going to say, that seems like
such an extraordinary burden as well as an extraordinary opportunity
to embody that kind of meaning for people. Yeah, Hey,
where are you going? There's so much more this juicy
(41:54):
convo coming right up. Welcome to the other side of
the ad break. Now let's get back to the show.
(42:21):
I want to circle back to the girl in the
pantry and then again the woman in the kitchen making
Thanksgiving dinner with your sisters, and your oldest sister, Dolores
tells you, Shanda, you never say yes to anything, and
that one comment catapults a character arc for you in
your life that is so compelling and inspiring to read
(42:41):
in this book. And as I was thinking about the
conversation we were going to have today, I was thinking
that year of Yes, and even especially now that I
read it a second time, is inherently too about you
confronting some of your dominant stories that you had. Maybe
you certainly didn't call them that, but the belief around
like I'm too shy to attend things, or I'm afraid
to speak in public, or I'm not fancy enough to
(43:02):
accept these invitations, or the universal thing I think we
all feel like I can't say no to people. I
need to be nice all the time. But all of
these stories that sort of end up running our lives
if they don't get examined right and and if they
don't get challenged and ultimately changed. What was a story
that you had that you essentially changed and rewrote and
(43:23):
what did that transform for you on the inside. Was
it the Dartmouth commencement speech that was the real kickoff
point for that or are there other stories that you've
now noticed that you've been able to rewrite. I think
my entire narrative has been rewritten. I mean the idea
that you can truly rewrite the story of who you
are is a fact. I mean that really truly happened
(43:46):
for me with this book and this idea that there
were all of these things that I could not do,
and most of them came from the idea that honestly
I wasn't interesting enough in my own head, Like my
characters were very interesting. But like I remember thinking about
(44:09):
that invitation I had to go to the Kennedy Center
and sit in the presidential box. I thought, why would
they want to talk to me? Like what am I
going to have to say? Like the idea that I'm
would fail socially somehow that I am yeah, and that
the awkward, weird, strange, interesting creature that I am is
not okay because, by the way, I'm still the exact
(44:31):
same person, just as awkward, just as weird, just as strange,
just as prone to say something that makes people go what.
But somehow it still works. They still keep inviting me
back places, So it's okay. And what I've learned is
that it's okay to be that person, like that person
(44:52):
is as interesting as the next person. And perhaps most
people think to themselves, I can't believe I just said that.
I can't believe I'm just doing this. I can't believe
I'm feeling this way. Maybe they don't have that inner
voice in their head but I do. Or maybe they
do have the inner voice in their head, but they're
still out there doing it. It's just the very act
of living and having these experiences, so many experiences that
(45:15):
I never would have had. Had I not just decided
to spend a year saying yes two things that terrified me,
I wouldn't be doing a podcast right now. I was
not a person who was going to speak in public.
So no, you know, my answer to everything was no,
and my excuse was I have too much work to do.
And the reality of it is is it just kept
(45:37):
me from both enjoying the magical amazing experience that writing
these shows has given me, but also it just kept
me from living my life to the fullest. You know,
you had another one of the things that we read
about we hear about in the book is after you're
really digging through these limiting beliefs, one of the things
(45:59):
that starts to happen for you is you have this
physical transformation. And you wrote something Shonda that I had
to literally stop, take a breath, underline it, dog ear it,
and then like read it again. And you said, you
can say it or you can eat it. Yeah, And
of course, you know, you were talking about the tendency
that some folks have to use food to cover up
(46:21):
difficult emotions or uncomfortable situations, or feeling like we can't
ask for what we need when we need it, and
adding that food as a layer on top of that discomfort.
And as you began to shed those stories, you also
shed not without hard work and intentionality. You shed over
a hundred pounds. And earlier this year we knew and
I were chatting at the Virtual Dove Summit. You shared
(46:44):
something that really did stick with me about what your
experience was like after you had that physical transformation. So
I just want to play a really short clip of
that from what you shared. Okay, losing weight was like
discovering that nobody had ever noticed me before, because people
treat you in a completely different way when your body
is different. And that was both really upsetting and really
(47:07):
revelatory for me to discover, like how much I had
been or can continue to be judged based on how
you know, how my body shows up in the world.
What do you think about when you hear that? Now?
Do you still feel that way? I find it stunning
that we live in a world in which we tout
(47:32):
phrases like body positivity. The people who are like, how
dare you fat? Shame me? I'm really proud of my
size and both. But the reality of the situation is
is in all of those conversations, you're still focused on
someone's body, and we rarely do it with men. People
(47:52):
spend a lot of time they're obsessively discussing the waistlines
of women, the size of women, the value of women
when they go from one size to another. It's ludicrous
in a way that I find really sad, not sad
for me, but sad for the fact that for most
(48:16):
people like this is what you spend your time focusing on,
like focusing on the size of someone's butt or the
size of someone's waist, and that to you tells you
their value. Because that was what was fascinating to me,
was that people treated me as if I had more
value because my body was a different size, which is
(48:39):
just pathetic. I haven't spoken a lot about this publicly,
but I also have, you know, released a significant amount
of weight from my body, in large part due to
facing my own limiting, dominant stories. And I had a
friend who would also lost a lot of weight who
said to me, oh, just you wait, people are going
to even pay you differently. And I was like, now,
(49:00):
that's not going to happen, and by got Shanda, it happened.
Oh yeah, my value in market, I got paid differently.
I have been treated differently. It is like getting access
to a club that you knew existed to some degree.
But I never really felt as as much as my
appearance was a big driver in my life. As a
young woman, I lived a very happy, blissful life in
(49:22):
a larger size body that didn't prohibit me from having
love and sex and success and all these other things.
But when I released this amount of weight there was
like I entered into another paradigm where I thought, oh
my god, like am I knew here? Like what is happening?
I genuinely felt ashamed for people with how they came
(49:44):
at me, like the energy with which they came at me.
I was like, I have won awards, I have raised children,
I have made shows and broken records, but my but
is a different size, and you are treating me as
if I have won the Nobel Prize like it is shocking, Yes, shocking.
(50:06):
So in all of this work and this rewriting your
life's narrative as you talk about, and and the lessons
that you learned in saying yes, do you ever still
wrestle with a dominant story now and then? And curious
if you do, what are the tools that you use
to silence or to soften those voices? Now? You know,
I always never really believed it, but people would always
(50:28):
say to me, like, you know, like the real wisdom
comes as you get older, like it really does, like
you just stopped caring, you do. And I was like,
I'm never going to be that person and driven, But
what's happened to me? And maybe it was the pandemic
the slowing down of that. You know that the pandemic
brought along. But for me, the new dominant story for
(50:50):
me is what makes me happy, Like that's the most
important thing at this point. What makes me happy, what
makes my family happy? How am I going to define
the rest of my life? And it's not about what
anybody else thinks, And it's not about what I think
I'm supposed to be doing, or what I think I'm
(51:13):
supposed to be saying, or what I think the definition
of success is supposed to look like that no longer
matters to me, so in a weird way, like I'll say,
I should be calling it like the decative note, because
also I know what the drop of the hat to something.
Because I no longer feel like I'm supposed to do
something or I'm obligated to be a certain way or
(51:35):
act a certain way. I am very unapologetic about just
being myself at this point, and I feel really proud
of that. And the last chapter of Year of Yes
is called Saying Yes Too Beautiful, and you talk about
who you are after this period of changing your life
by changing your stories, and you again said something that
(51:57):
really stuck with me. You said the cruelty in which
I treat did myself is no longer tolerated. The pantry
door is open. I am out among the living. And
I think so much of our beauty is bravery and
adventure and our flaws and being open, isn't it? It
is so much more than what we talk about in size, shape,
(52:19):
or appearance. Well, yeah, I mean it's interesting. Somewhere during
the pandemic, I stopped wearing makeup all together. I often
stopped coming my hair altogether, but I stopped really caring
about like what I was wearing in like a crazy
serious way, and I stopped thinking that I had to
(52:42):
be this way or that way, or do this thing
or that thing, and and just started living at bought
a cello, you know, like just things that I would
never have done. And I have to say, I feel
more beautiful than I ever have. And I don't mean
in the pretty girl way. I mean just I feel
(53:04):
like I have a light in me that feels more
beautiful than I ever have. And that probably just comes
from being happy and confident and comfortable in my own skin.
And is that how you talk about the concept of
beauty and confidence with your girls? Is that kind of
a framework for them to be thinking about this journey
(53:25):
in their lives. I talked to them a lot about
who you are is beautiful. How you are is beautiful,
what you do is beautiful, how kind you are is beautiful.
Like once again, pretty is not a compliment. Pretty isn't
an attribute that you know. That's like saying you have toes,
that's great toes, you're pretty, your hair, whatever. But being
(53:49):
beautiful is how you treat other people. Being beautiful is
how you treat yourself, the courage that you show. We
talk a lot about courage in my house because I have,
you know, these these little ones who you know, went
through the pandemic and are re emerging into the world
like little butterflies, And so you know, beauty is being courageous,
(54:10):
I mean. And to me, they're always beautiful. There's never
a moment when they're in any of their struggles or
whatever that they're not the most beautiful people in the world.
And as my nineteen year old will tell we'll tell
you if she'll say, would you please stop saying that?
But I think it's true, Shawanna. As you dream about
the future of TV and film and the kinds of
(54:31):
stories that we will share and the writers who will
share them. What makes you hopeful about how we will
continue to rewrite beauty and the concept of it on
screen and off. You know, it's interesting. The people telling
stories that are coming up now are so fascinating. They
don't seem to carry a lot of the same baggage
(54:53):
that our generation carried at all. They don't even seem
to be interested in a lot of the same into
that our generation was interested in. They seem I used
to think that they were more fragile because they used
to think, like, my god, their feelings get hurt so easily.
But no, it's not that they're fearless. And because they
(55:15):
feel things so strongly, they are like willing to confront
those things that bother them more. And they've grown up
in a less stable world than we did and have
the ability to look at it and through very different eyes.
I'm excited for them. I'm excited by the stories that
they tell. And the one thing that I know that
(55:37):
I feel really great about is is I have no
idea what's coming like, I have no idea what kind
of stories they're going to tell. I feel like I'm
gonna be one of those people sitting there going like,
oh my god, I can't believe somebody came up with that.
That's exciting to me. Full originality is coming to us.
I love that. I think so too. I think when
I think about our future storytellers and all of the
(55:59):
access they have to the materials to storytell now, and
the way that they're out in the world and exposed.
But I also think about the seeds that have been
planted by you and by others that are shaping their
world and their experience and giving, you know, giving permission.
As you talked about these images, they shape us, and
I think ultimately they change us. Shanda, I adore you.
(56:19):
I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time with me,
your imagination, and your beauty with us all. And I'm
just really really grateful for this conversation. Oh I love
talking to you. You know that this is so much fun.
This has been great. Thank you, Thank you. Holy Hot.
(56:43):
There are some beautiful jebs in this conversation that are
going to stick with me for a while. Okay, one
big takeaway I'm going to be thinking about is Shanda's
description of her upbringing and being in a family that
encouraged all of the kids to, you know, focus more
on being smart and courageous and curious and kind versus
(57:05):
putting beauty as an aspirational attribute. And for me it
was a big aha, because I think I just grew
up in a very different family environment. My parents did
put a premium on appearance mattering, and so I think
about all the labor and time and effort and energy
that I've spent focused on pleasing somebody else about my appearance,
(57:27):
and how much I could have been developing and doing
for my own growth. I also from an industry perspective,
when Shan had just laid it out that like, look,
the people who are surprised of a lack of representation
are usually the people who are most represented. That is
a very good refresh for the fact that those of
(57:47):
us who have often seen ourselves represented don't notice when
others are not. And this is a really good call
to action for us. Actually, regardless of what industry you're in,
whether you work at entertainment or tech, or finance or retail,
look around you. Look at who you're hiring. Are they
looking like you? Are they there because they know you?
I mean, I think really challenging and examining is a
(58:09):
really important unlock for us to change who we see
around us in the world and certainly in the entertainment
industry on screen. We also talked about her dominant story
is changing to be more about focusing on like, what's
gonna make me happy? How am I going to define
the rest of my life? I think Shonda and her
stories that she shared in the book Year of Yes
(58:30):
are really kind of a beautiful case study in how
we can all rewrite the story of our lives no
matter where we are in our lives at any time,
we can focus more on what makes us happy and
living a life we love on our own terms. Certainly,
challenging and changing dominant stories most definitely changes our lives.
(58:51):
And then, you know, lastly, I think something Shawnda said
that really is tickling me and how we both shared
this experience of watching TV with our mom and because
of the time of which we grew up, that's how
we were watching TV. But we had the benefit of
the commentary of our parents and what their values are
and the stuff that we're watching. And now media consumption
has changed quite a bit. You know, families are often
(59:14):
in different rooms on different devices, watching different things. But
if you want to have a deeper conversation with a
young person in your life about the impact of the
images that they're seeing in the media, about social media,
about media literacy. I think that we've got some tools
that can help you do that. So if you're a parent,
or an educator or a mentor, I want to encourage
you to go to Dove dot com back slash the
(59:34):
Selfie Talk. We've got great curriculum and content there that's
designed to help you start this conversation with a young
person in your life and to really talk about the
impact of media and social media on building self esteem
and confidence. So again, you can go to Dove dot
com back slash the Selfie Talk. And if you're interested
in learning more about dominant Stories and how you can
(59:56):
change them, I teach workshops and courses that you can
sign up for at j Weiner dot com. Um you
can also follow me on Instagram and I'm Jess Weiner.
And as always, if you want to tell me more,
you can email me at podcast at Dominant Stories, or
you can leave me a voicemail at two one three
to five nine three oh three three. Don't worry if
you didn't catch all that info I'll put it into
(01:00:16):
the show notes. I remember, we are always learning, we
are always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess Weiner is a
(01:00:41):
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, visit the I
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!