*WILL BE CONTINUOUSLY UPDATED THROUGHOUT THE EVENT*
Sunday, March 8th (7:00pm)
Moderator: Jimmy Kimmel (Host, Jimmy Kimmel Live)
Panelists: Kerry Washington, Guillermo Diaz, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Katie Lowes, Joshua Malina, Jeff Perry, Darby Stanchfield, Bellamy Young, Joe Morton
The ABC Scandal program is beginning! Last week’s episode of Scandal is screening for the PaleyFest audience. The panel, moderated by Jimmy Kimmel, will begin at 7:50 PDT / 10:50 EDT.
UPDATED AT 7:05 PDT
“Scandal” star Kerry Washington on the Purple Carpet (c) The Paley Center
UPDATED AT 8:00PM PDT
- Jimmy Kimmel hosts the Scandal panel. “I’m not that busy to be honest, and I work right across the street so what the hell.” Kimmel introduces the cast, possibly just as excited as the audience.
- Did you know (as I did not) that there is a huge fandom base-breaking debate over whether Fitz or Jake is better? (Jake. It’s Jake.)
- Kimmel references the episode just livestreamed at the event as “heavy.” I believe they screened the episode from this past week which was…. interesting…. and very specifically referencing police violence and racial profiling. Kimmel asks if the episodes feel different to shoot when they reference headlines. Washington says when it aired, the Twitter culture of the show: “wasn’t like a Twitter party, it was more like a period of reflection.”
- Washington has laryngitis.
UPDATED AT 8:05PM PDT
- Kimmel starts off with questions from Twitter, which is appropriate given the prevalence of Twitter in Scandal‘s culture.
- “What is your favorite episode from beginning to end?” Foley says “752”
- “Scott makes that fart noise between every single take, and it never gets old.” -Washington, on the weird noise Foley is currently making
- Who all in the cast knew each other before the series: Goldwyn and Washington, Goldwyn and Foley, and Young and Goldwyn (I believe, though that went by fast.)
UPDATED AT 8:13PM PDT
- Famous fans of the series: Rihanna, Bill Clinton, Lena Dunham, a lot of NBA players, Foley claims Justin Bieber, Iman and David Bowie.
- Kimmel says “Are you aware of the fan fiction that people write?” OH GOD, KIMMEL, DON’T GO THERE.
- Kimmel discuss fandom ship names, with the best one being “HuckleberryQuinn”
- Molina: “Now that I’m not longer with Abby, my relationship name is ‘David.'” That’s the best.
- Molina is commonly asked what happens to David’s dog. “That bitch died.”
- Asking where the baby characters are in, since they rarely appear on the show. “Baby Teddy is in boarding school.” -Goldwyn
- Tony Goldwyn says fantasy guest stars would be President Obama or any of the Clintons.
- “If Beyonce was on the show would you want her working with OPA or the White House?” Olivia Pope and Associates, duh!
UPDATED AT 8:20PM PDT
- “There’s a thing called ‘Scandal Pace’ where we all talk really fast.” -Stanchfield.
- Washington and Goldwyn had known each other before Scandal from politics. Shonda Rhimes was very excited by the chemistry she saw when they started talking on set.
- They’re playing a video of Katie Lowes’ audition tape and casting decisions. They set up a video camera where they tricked her into coming in for “a second reading” and told her that she couldn’t read again because they were going to give her a part. That is so adorable, omg.
- Rhimes gave the entire cast background checks before hiring them, calling it “the no A-hole policy.”
- The cast gets together to watch the show, but the episodes get finished so last minute that lately none of them could get the DVDs.
- Kimmel asks if its true that no one at the network sees the episodes before they air. None of the cast knows.
- “It’s not called ShondaLAND for nothing,” -Washington
UPDATED AT 8:31PM PDT
- Kimmel asks if any of them have any of them have disagreements with Shonda. They all immediately say “NO.”
- “When your wife cast you on the show did she at that time know your character was gay?” (Perry’s wife is the casting director for all of Shondaland)
- Perry says he’s not supposed to know the things between his wife and Shonda so he can hear her reading things off in another part of the house and letting out yelps when she reads things.
- Washington crosses her fingers hard when Kimmel brings up Melly as candidate for president.
- The cast knows what happens “10-14 days” before the public.
- People always ask them “where do you think the arc of the season is going to end?” And they have no idea.
- “Occasionally I get these very strange questions from [Rhimes] like ‘are you okay running barefoot?'” etc. -Washington
- One of Goldwyn’s cryptic questions from Rhimes was “What sports do you play?” and he replied “Anything but basketball.” So the next episode that’s what he was doing.
- Kimmel asks Diaz about the way Huck speaks. Apparently one of the crew during the pilot was like “Look, he’s doing this thing where he’s, like, not mentally stable.” And the producers were like “yeah, that’s cool.”
- “Seems like a promise that was made to be broken,” Kimmel, regarding Huck’s promise to no longer kill.
- “It is an unusual situation to be rooting for someone who is truly psychopathic.”
UPDATED AT 8:36PM PDT
- Molina’s favorite scenes to shoot are “phone scenes, because you don’t have to work with anyone else.” Molina apparently had a big beer before this panel.
- Bellamy Young ate literally all of the fried chicken that they made for her during Melly’s mental break earlier this season. Young is vegan, so it was vegan fried chicken.
- The cast discusses the props they’d want to take from the show when it’s over. Diaz mentions the Twizzlers at OPA and Lowes says “Those are from the Pilot, don’t eat those!”
- Goldwyn lists the various countries that they’ve made up for the series.
- “Do you think Olivia Pope was sufficiently impressed that you declared war on a country?” Goldwyn says, no “I was expecting a little more sugar.”
UPDATED AT 8:46PM PDT
- Washington discusses the idea of, in the midst of begging the media to pay attention to hundreds of black women who are missing, having the president go to war for one woman becomes the epitome of #BlackLivesMatter
- Diaz says his process of getting into character is complicated and he just goes off alone for a moment.
- Everyone was shocked when they found out that Henry Cusick was returning for an episode of Scandal. (Which was frickin’ perfect and amazing by the way.) Washinton and Cusick didn’t even talk beforehand because what they felt as people at their reunion was what their characters were supposed to feel.
- “I’m gross, I eat pickles and hummus all day long.” -Lowes
- Audience member: “Don’t come for me when I’m holding the mic unless I send for you, Jimmy!”
- “Since the show is called Scandal how does the cast adapt to real life scandal?” Kimmel replies “That’s a good question that no one is going to answer!”
- Washington’s answer: “Everybody who’s in this family is in this family no matter what.”
- A ten-year-old boy in the audience has a question: “Does Huck ever see his family again?”
- “It’s definitely not a closed subject.” -Diaz
UPDATED AT 8:56PM PDT
- Shows the cast is a fan of: The Fall, The Divide, a variety of talk shows.
- Goldwyn’s hardest scene is all of the stuff in the episode where his son died.
- Katie Lowes has a massive amount of gum stuck to the bottom to her shoe. Kimmel’s comment: “Wasn’t the cast of Girls here earlier?”
- An audience member asks a very wonderful question about Kerry Washington as a lead black woman in a TV show, but that Olivia “is not a black woman, but a woman who happens to be black.” The question becomes about most recent episode (regarding Ferguson and police violence) and how it felt for Washington to come to that storyline. She replies that the story was a journey for Olivia herself and that it became a story that transcended race to be about lives mattering.
- “How is it for you all to play women who might not be the role models we’d expect women on TV to be?” Young replies: “I love the agency,” and discusses how she loves that she plays a complex human character.
- “If you could be Shonda for a day, who would you pick for Olivia?” Washington says she would pick Judy Smith to be Olivia. I think she very deftly, here, sidestepped an intense ship-war question that might have resulted in blood.
Dana Leigh Brand | Contributor
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