America Ferrera Says Kerry Washington’s Help During Her Postpartum Return to Work 'Saved Me’ (Exclusive)

America Ferrera says Kerry Washington's candor about new motherhood helped give her the blueprint to return to work with confidence

America Ferrera says she gets inspiration from the mothers around her "all the time."

And it was one particular famous friend's advice that became a life raft when she first grappled with a postpartum return to work.

"When I first had my first child, my son, I went back to shoot on Superstore when he was 10 weeks old,” says the Barbie star, 39, who shares son Sebastian Piers, 5, and daughter Lucia Marisol, 3, with her husband, actor and director Ryan Piers Williams.

She continues: “I was so lucky to have Kerry Washington as a friend, who had two of her babies while she was on Scandal. I remember asking her, 'How do you do it? How are you on a TV show and have a newborn baby? What am I going to do?' And she gave me the most detailed instructions of every single thing that I was going to do to make my life easier, down to the exact Pack ‘n Play for my trailer.”

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It was Washington's refreshing candor that helped give Ferrera the blueprint to return to work with confidence. Washington’s shortlist included “her pumping and breastfeeding schedule on set and exactly what bra she bought to get for wardrobe. And it was like she just saved me,” adds Ferrera.

“I think all the time about how many tears and how much energy and how much money and how much trial and error she saved me by just telling me what she learned having done the same thing in the same position. And countless times, just in the almost six years that I've been a mom, it's other moms and other women who have saved me and kept me going and kept me feeling like I can do this," she says.

To film her role in Barbie as a low-level Mattel employee named Gloria who ultimately inspires Barbie (Margot Robbie) to throw off the newfound patriarchy taking over Barbie Land, Ferrera and her family relocated from New York to London. Her children, she says, “were young enough where I could do that, but still life happened," she says. "People get sick, your childcare falls through, and then your spouse has to step in and take the brunt of it."

It's all added "dimensions of complication" as she seeks her own formula of work-life balance, she acknowledges. "I feel like every old experience is now a new experience as a mother."

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Barbie ultimately became 2023’s highest-grossing film and also Warner Bros.' biggest movie ever. As awards season revs up, Ferrera’s standout performance, and her character’s searing monologue on the “impossible” task of being a woman today, could land her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, 22 years after her first breakout hit, Real Women Have Curves, hit theaters.

Championing Ferrera throughout has been Williams, who the Ugly Betty actress met in college when they were both film students at the University of Southern California and married in 2011.

“He is incredibly present and hands-on as a father, but he also just really cares about my dreams,” says the star. “He really wants me to be what I want to be in the world. And so he thinks of my dreams as his own. I think of his dreams as my responsibility, too.”

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