Kerry Washington Is Hounded in New Confirmation Trailer

Get a sneak peek at the new HBO movie about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas

By Chris Harnick Feb 12, 2016 7:11 PMTags
Kerry Washington, ConfirmationHBO

Kerry Washington's new role is still quite scandalous. The Scandal star will play Anita Hill in HBO's Confirmation, a flick about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings in the early 1990s. Get a sneak peek at the intense new HBO movie below.

Hill, then a law professor, accused Thomas of sexual harassment and was called to testify before the Judiciary Committee. According to HBO, the "film details the explosive 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, which brought the country to a standstill and forever changed the way we think about sexual harassment, victims' rights and modern-day race relations."

The Wire's Wendell Pierce plays Clarence Thomas, Greg Kinnear plays Joe Biden with Jennifer Hudson, Malcolm Gets, Eric Stonestreet, Grace Gummer, Erika Christensen, Kimberly Elise, Bill Irwin, Zoe Lister-Jones, Treat Williams, Alison Wright, Peter McRobbie and Jeffrey Wright also starring. Susannah Grant of Erin Brockovich fame wrote the script directed by Rick Famuyiwa.

Washington told us she was excited to step into a new role outside the Scandal world.

"I haven't done a feature since Django because in the hiatus before this one I had a baby, and the one before that I got married, so I'd been busy producing other things," she said. "But it was really wonderful to be able to step into another pair of shoes literally and figuratively and Anita is so different from Olivia in a lot of ways, so that was fun for me, too, to be another woman in Washington but in a very different way and with a very different relationship to that town and how it works."

Confirmation premieres Saturday, April 16 on HBO.

Watch: Kerry Washington Dishes on All New Olivia Pope