For a two-time Academy Award winner, the most Oscar-nominated Black actor in history, an acclaimed director and on-screen leading man equally adept in commercial hits or specialised fare like The Tragedy Of Macbeth, Denzel Washington is remarkably down to earth about it all.
He has recited Shakespeare multiple times in his career, donning tunics and brandishing swords or soliloquies in college (Othello), film (Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing) and Broadway (the lead in Julius Caesar). Asked what appealed to him about returning to the playwright, he replies: “Well it’s Shakespeare, it’s Joel Coen and it’s Frances McDormand, so that took care of that.”
Fair enough. No need for embellishment in such exalted company and Washington isn’t about to offer any. Serious acting chops have put him in that rare place where he can pick and choose roles. Yet there is no trace of ego and while much of his late-January conversation with Screen International is framed within a polite yet guarded demeanour, Washington enjoys a giggle and through economy of language offers insights into where he — and Hollywood — stand today.
Diversity of roles
It has been quite the journey. Washington studied journalism at Fordham University in New York and attended American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. He bagged the breakout role of Dr Philip Chandler in TV’s St Elsewhere in the 1980s and landed a first Oscar nomination in 1988 for playing anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom. Then came the flood, playing all sorts in Mo’ Better Blues,Malcolm X, Devil In A Blue Dress, The Bone Collector, Man On Fire, et al. He has worked with Spike Lee, Ed Zwick, Tony Scott and Ridley Scott, won Academy Awards for Glory (supporting, 1990) and Training Day (lead, 2002), and earned five Oscar nods in the past decade adding up to a record 10 in all.
The most recent of these came in February when Washington was nominated for his lead performance as the titular warrior consumed by ambition in The Tragedy Of Macbeth, Coen’s trim adaptation for Apple and A24. Yet when asked by Coen, making his first feature without the involvement of brother Ethan, to play the lead, Washington admits the play was new to him. “I had never seen a production of Macbeth,” he says. “It just turns out that I’d never seen it, nor had I read it. Read a lot of other Shakespeare but for some reason I just didn’t read that.”
The rehearsal time was thorough. Washington sat down with McDormand, who would play Lady Macbeth, and her husband Coen and the three of them “digested” the script some eight months before full rehearsal. This Macbeth and his wife have reached a mature age, which lent a sense of almost desperate urgency to their plan to kill the king. “This was it for them, you know,” Washington says of Macbeth and his wife. “Here’s the big shot. They’ve won the war and done everything they needed to do… It ramped up the stakes, you know, the fact they literally don’t have time to waste. It has to be now.”
Full cast rehearsal with the likes of Kathryn Hunter, Brendan Gleeson and Alex Hassell lasted more than three weeks in the run-up to production on the Warner Bros lot in early 2020, a process that was interrupted by Covid-19 in March and resumed in July. “One of the things that Joel mentioned early on was he wanted to find middle ground in terms of accents. At first it was going back and forth with British accents, American accents and then it sort of just landed at what felt comfortable… But I remember them making a point of saying no stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting.” He is chuckling. “No posing.”
What did he think when Coen wanted to shoot in black and white? “You trust him. I don’t know where he’s going with it but he’s done pretty good before, he’s done alright without me. And you know, Shakespeare, he’s a good writer, he’s had success,” says Washington. More giggles. “I’m making fun of it but the fact of the matter was it was partly about making sure I cover myself, making sure I’m doing my part.”
Shakespeare’s play was set in 11th-century Anglo-Saxon Scotland although Coen’s version avoids specifics and Washington does not bother himself with the whys and wherefores of who should play the lead. “I didn’t even think about that. I did Julius Caesar on Broadway [in 2005] and didn’t think about it then. I’ve been in Richard III, I didn’t think about that. It’s about the material and about interpreting the role. It’s like, I tell people, you don’t have to kill someone to play a murderer. It’s acting.”
And there it is. Later he will say, “You look for different challenges” but beyond that there is no elaboration. One gets the sense he relishes the challenge of complicated men like Macbeth, Alonzo in Training Day, Malcolm X or Whip Whitaker in Flight and prefers to let the work speak for itself.
Washington, currently in training for a third instalment of The Equalizer, admires James Earl Jones and the late Sidney Poitier and, inevitably, in the early stages of his career he walked in the latter’s shadow. They lived close by and became firm friends. “We would talk about a lot of things,” he says. “Anything and everything, professionally and personally.”
Over time Washington moved into directing (Antwone Fisher, The Great Debaters, Fences and 2021’s A Journal For Jordan) and has been entrusted by the August Wilson estate with shepherding the late playwright’s work to stage and screen — under his belt so far are Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which he produced. Just don’t ask if he sees himself as a role model. “I don’t even know what that means. That therefore I should do what? I should not do what? It’s not like there’s a committee.”
One younger man he would like to act with one day is his son John David Washington, who has made a name for himself in BlacKkKlansman, Tenet and Malcolm & Marie. “I don’t know if I can fit into his schedule,” says Washington with another laugh. “[John’s] popular. He’s shooting a movie right now… So yeah, I guess down the line when the time is right, the roles are right, if I don’t get too old. We better hurry up.”
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