As long-time fans of Kerry Washington, we were fairly excited to learn she would be starring in Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, in which she plays Kelly, a case worker who comes in and out of many lives of the other women in the film, played by the likes of Janet Jackson, Kimberly Elise, Thandie Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Anika Noni Rose and Loretta Devine. It’s a far cry from Ms. Washington’s own experiences playing troubled women, but she helps to act almost as the lynchpin who helps pull all of the separate stories together. Granted, it’s not nearly as flashy a role as some of the others, but as we’ve seen many times, just her presence in scenes can help other actors do their best work.

ComingSoon.net spoke on the phone with Ms. Washington earlier this week.

ComingSoon.net: I had a lovely conversation with Thandie last week and I found out how Tyler contacted her. It was a long 18-month process with a lot of scripts. How about yourself? Was it a bit simpler than that?
Kerry Washington: I had sort of heard a rumor that he had the material, that he was going to be doing the film, and I cornered him at an event in New York (laughs) and said, “What’s going on? What are you doing? Is it true? What’s happening?” At the time, he was really deep into a rewrite and didn’t really want to talk about it, and I said, “Okay, fine, but I would really like to be a part of it,” and then I got the call a few months later. He really wanted me to play the role of Kelly.

CS: I assume you were familiar with the play and Ntozake’s work beforehand.
Washington: Yeah, I was. I have never done a full production of the play, but I was familiar with it just from different acting classes and preparing for auditions and I’d seen other people working on the material.

CS: Was Kelly not in the original play or she’s a new character Tyler created for the movie?
Washington: None of us are characters in the original play except maybe Crystal. I guess some of the women are more closely based on poems than others, but none of the women in the play really have fully fleshed-out lives outside of the poems and most of them don’t have names.

CS: Right, most of them are named after colors, but while Kelly wasn’t in the play, the poem you perform was, right?
Washington: That’s right.

CS: Kelly’s an interesting character because she sees all the stuff going on and becomes the eyes of the viewer, what did you think of playing that role which ties all the other stories together?
Washington: Yeah, I loved that she was the through-line of these different women who all live in the same community, some of them in the same building or work in the same office, but haven’t really taken the time to get to know each other, and suddenly, because of the nature of her work, she becomes a witness of a lot of the journeys, which quite honestly was very fortunate for me at work every day, because I got to witness this incredible acting work unfolding in front of me constantly.

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Philly 360° catches up with Kerry Washington to discuss her current projects and what she loves about Philadelphia.

Another Tyler Perry movie is hitting theaters this weekend. “For Colored Girls” is a screen version of a twenty-year-old play created by Ntozake Shange that portrays various female characters dealing with their life’s hardships and ordeals.

Kerry Washington co-stars as a part of an all-star cast including some of the biggest names in Hollywood including Whoopi Goldberg, Thandi Newton and Loretta Devine. Kerry plays Kelly, a social worker pained by her inability to make a difference.

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When Kerry Washington was 17, she was not playing around when it came to sex. The budding starlet was hard at work on her craft as a teenager with an acting gig that educated as well as entertained audiences.

“I had this great job with a theater company called Star Theater,” Washington recalls on the latest episode of “When I Was 17,” premiering Saturday at 11 a.m. “We would go into schools and community centers, and we’d do this show about issues like sex and drugs.”

The job required Washington to instruct others on a very important skill — although it may have been an unorthodox extracurricular activity for a teen girl.

“So when I was 17, I was teaching other people how to put condoms on … bananas,” Washington remembers. The budding actress picked up a reputation as a teacher always armed for a lesson.

“Anytime anyone needed to know how to put a condom on, she would just pull out a banana and a condom and do a demonstration for us,” Washington’s pal Allison adds. “She was a sex-pert.”

The “For Colored Girls” star doesn’t deny her status as the go-to gal for learning how to get it on safely.

“I was kind of known, amongst my friends, as ‘the condom lady,’ ” Washington says in the episode, which also features Akon and Donald Glover. “Because of my job, I always had condoms and dental dams and pamphlets.”

Washington remains proud of the role she played both in and out of the theater company as a sex-ed resource.

“I did my job saving lives when I was 17,” she says.

Kerry Washington will be featured on the latest episode of “When I Was 17″ – a TV show on MTV.

The show airs Saturday, November 06th at 10:30 AM ET/PT on MTV.