Denzel talks on his life’s work
The son of a preacher, ebullient Denzel Washington burns with a reformer’s zeal and, he tells Gaby Wood, he wants his new series of films to inspire a generation
PEOPLE like me,” Denzel Washington said last week. He was on stage at the National Theatre, promoting his new film, Fences .
The audience laughed at what seemed like boasting and Washington looked around as if to say: “What?”, as if he wasn’t really expecting to have to pause at that point.
It was purely a statement of fact: people like him, so he can afford to play characters who are unappealing.
He smiled his bright white smile, and it became instantly true: even in the seats right at the back of theatre, where you could barely see what he was wearing, Washington’s charisma caught you in the gut.
DenZEL, as he is known, with no need for a surname, is a bona-fide star.
Now 62, he is of the generation between Harrison Ford and George Clooney – his contemporaries include Bruce Willis and Michael Keaton, excellent actors who are nevertheless in a category entirely different from Washington’s.
Though he is sometimes seen as following in the footsteps of Sidney Poitier (he was the second black actor, after Poitier, to win a Best Actor Oscar) his career is really more like those of Robert De Niro, Clark Gable and Beyoncé rolled into one; tomorrow he may or may not win a third Oscar for Fences.
He has had a primary school in New York named after him. Ten years ago, the Colombian FARC guerrillas insisted they were only prepared to release three hostages if Washington was their negotiator.
DenZEL isn’t really an actor, or a director. To some people, he’s a belief system.
So what, you might ask, is he doing in the Corinthia Hotel in London, answering impertinent questions from me?
“What kind of father am I?” he repeats, taken aback. “You’d have to ask my children.”
Washington has two sons and two daughters with Pauletta Pearson, whom he married 34 years ago, before his film career began. “
“I’ll tell you this,” he goes on, “four college graduates. Yale, Penn, Morehouse, NYU. My oldest daughter’s associate producer of this film. My oldest son’s played in the National Football League – now he stars with The Rock on a show called Ballers.
“My daughter just had a film in the Sundance film festival, and now she’s going to be starring in another film.
“My youngest son has got his master’s from the American Film Institute in directing, and just finished working for Spike Lee. So: not bragging, and I’m not saying what kind of father I am. But for sure, that’s what kind of mother they have. I just try to do my part.”
The question has arisen because Fences, originally a play by the American dramatist August Wilson, tells the story of Troy Maxon, a rubbish collector in Pittsburgh who has narrowly missed a career in baseball then spent time in jail, and who crushes the hope of his sons in turn.
At a critical point in the plot, Troy – played by Washington – reveals that he can’t read.
This was more or less true of Washington’s own father, as he has said on several occasions. But he’s quick to point out that his father was “a gentleman”.
Although he had modest ambitions for his son – he thought Denzel might get a job in the water department, like him – “he’s not the man Troy was at all”.
The importance of education was inculcated in Denzel by his mother, who sent him to a private high school because, as he explains, “I was getting in a little trouble in the streets”.
“My three closest friends did 40, 50 years in a penitentiary,” Washington adds, though he won’t be drawn on the nature of their crimes.
His ninth grade English teacher made him read The New York Times from cover to cover each day, a habit he keeps.
His father was an ordained preacher, and occasionally a flavour of this will emerge from his son – a motivational tone, or a mixture of philosophy and haranguing.
“Don’t confuse movement with progress, ‘cos you can run in place,” he’ll say. Or: “This ain’t a dress-rehearsal.” “How are YOU using your gifts?” he asks me at one point. “Um, me?” I reply. “Who knows?”
“YOU know,” he says. “You gotta look in the mirror, so you do know. Don’t say ‘ who knows’ – you know.”
Things have become a little tense because I’m trying to get him to describe the political views that have evolved from his experiences, and he thinks this is a stupid question.
“What does one have to do with the other?” he says.
Well, I suggest, he might have come to care about some things more than others – education, or poverty, or discrimination . . .
Many of the films he’s made would suggest that, too – from Cry Freedom and Glory to Malcolm X, Antwone Fisher and now Fences . It is, perhaps, an offensive line to tread. “Forget about carin’ about it,” Washington says, his smile now vanished. “What are you doin’ about it? Talk is cheap. I been doin’ things about it for a long time. Those that you know and those that you don’t.”
Washington, for the record, has donated millions of dollars to causes such as hospitals for servicemen and children in South Africa.
He has also “put many kids through school”. Some of them have become doctors. “I done a lot of different things,” he grumbles.
Then he says, for the fourth time in 10 minutes: “But talk is cheap.”
About two years ago, when Washington turned 60, August Wilson’s widow approached him and asked if he’d take care of Wilson’s “century cycle”, a famous series of 10 plays about African American lives in the Deep North, each set in a different decade of the 20th century.
The plays are not remotely underrated, Washington points out, but they are “underknown”. Wilson died in 2005, and Washington had met him not long beforehand, when they discussed the possibility of a part Wilson might write for him, and never did.
After Wilson’s death, Washington played Troy in Fences on Broadway, and the rights to that were held by the producer Scott Rudin, with whom he went on to make the film. But the other nine had never been filmed.
He then made a deal with HBO to film the other nine plays and embarked, in his own description, on his life’s work.
Fences has now exceeded, in box office terms, every other film made from a play except three.
It “belongs to the people now”, Washington says.
Glory, he points out, has been used in schools to teach children about the army unit it depicts – a group of black soldiers in the American Civil War.
“I’ve met men and their sons who learnt about that group through seeing that in schools,” he says.
Wilson is known in the States as “the American Shakespeare”, because, in the words of New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley, “there is a sort of Shakespearean heightening of the vernacular going on”.
“There’s a rhythm to it,” Washington explains, demonstrating with one of his own lines, “and if you follow it, and invest in it like Shakespeare, it will lead to emotional truths. That’s the genius of August Wilson”.
Wilson also revealed real voices and lives that hadn’t been represented on stage before.
As Washington’s co-star Viola Davis put it, “he honoured the average man, who happened to be a man of colour”.
Long-term “Wilsonian” Ruben SantiagoHudson, who is co-writing the screenplay of Washington’s next Wilson work, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, said when he first saw the play in 1984 he recognised its characters.
“I knew these people,” he said. “The first voices I heard from birth were of Northern coloured people who’d come from the South.”
Washington’s film of Fences shows quite starkly how both of these things can be true.
While Washington plays the music of Wilson’s words, Davis naturalises them. Washington is like a performance poet, celebrating Wilson’s writing; Davis is in a movie, transmitting a woman’s woe from her heart. It’s what has won her every award going this season, and will probably win her an Oscar.
“There are a lot of great parts in these next nine plays,” he tells me. At the National Theatre, he put it a little differently. “Look, black people,” he said, adopting his signature motivational tone, “don’t be talkin’ about what the white man won’t give you. I got ROLES . . .” — The Daily Telegraph
Denzel moments: eight of the best
Glory – 1989 Malcolm X – 1992 Philadelphia – 1993 The Hurricane – 1999 Training Day – 2001 Man on Fire – 2004 American Gangster – 2007 Flight – 2012