Kerry Washington Wears Slinky Swimsuit For ‘Vanity Fair’ Cover

Kerry Washington has been busy lately — but not too busy to get sexy in a swimsuit.

In a surprise announcement on Tuesday, People revealed that the 36-year-old Scandals star had slipped away to marry 31-year-old San Francisco 49ers cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha on June 24 in Hailey, Idaho. Yet even amid her secret wedding preparations, Kerry Washington still found time to appear in a photo shoot for the August 2013 cover of Vanity Fair.

The wedding was reportedly extremely low key, with Washington’s mother and father appearing as witnesses. If anyone else attended, the secretive couple seems to be keeping that information to themselves.

However, Washington puts considerably more of herself on display in the current Vanity Fair. The cover features a smoking hot image of the shapely star in a white swimsuit in a shimmering blue pool.

She also seemed to open up more than usual to contributing editor David Kamp. In a preview of the interview posted online at the Vanity Fair website, she talked quite a bit about the impact of her role playing Washington, DC fixer Olivia Pope on Scandals. She noted that women, including white women, of all ages have approached her saying that they wanted to be Olivia Pope.

Here’s an excerpt of the thoughts she shared with Vanity Fair:

“It’s especially profound in a place like South Africa. It’s called The Fixer over there, and it just started its second season. The fact that white women can see this woman of color as an aspirational character is revolutionary, I think, in the medium of television. I don’t think white women would feel that way about Olivia if her identity as a woman, period, wasn’t first in their mind.”

She also revealed an unexpected way that she trained as an actor as a teenager. She explained that she worked as a teen safe-sex advocate, visiting schools and other community centers to perform in skits that she wrote herself:

“We would stay in character after the show, and the audience would interact with us. It taught me the importance of really understanding everything about who you’re playing, because you never knew what question was going to come.”

Washington has remained socially conscious and is now a member of the V-Counsel, which advises V-Day, a worldwide movement to prevent violence against women and girls. A campaigner for President Obama, she also spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

You should go to the Vanity Fair website to see their video slideshow of the Kerry Washington shoot by photographer Norman Jean Roy.

[Kerry Washington photo by Rena Schild / Shutterstock.com]