Denzel Washington: still striving
Hollywood superstar Denzel Washington talks about his latest project, which has scored him an Academy Award nomination, and reveals why, at 62, he’s still striving to make a difference every day
MORE than 30 years ago Denzel Washington had an extreme religious experience. “It did frighten me,” he says. His mother said he was being filled with the Holy Spirit, and he wondered, “Does that mean I can never have wine again?” In fact, he didn’t give up wine until he was 60, in 2014.
“When I turned 60 it was like, this ain’t no dress rehearsal. Life has four quarters, and I’m in my fourth quarter.
“In a game, like in basketball, if there’s overtime – and I figure everything after 80 is overtime – well, the only way you can get overtime, you got to be at least tied.
“So if you’re winning you’re winning, but if you’re losing there’s no way round it . . . ”
He doesn’t look over 60. He looks fit and well, except for a slight paunch, probably left over from playing patriarch Troy in his newest film, Fences. He says he’ll be in the gym the next day – he has to slim down for his next movie, Inner City.
“So,” he continues, “I’m preparing for 80 now. I’m more aware of what I put in my body and trying to be the most efficient and effective I can be. ‘How can I get better?’ Not ‘What more things can I acquire, or awards?’
“How can I get better and then how can I apply that to my life and work and family? The good thing about our job is you have to practise remembering – it’s good for the mind. It’s a muscle, and you have to keep working that muscle.”
“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” screen siren once Bette Davis said. You can say many things about Washington, but you certainly can’t say he’s a sissy.
He’s an actor of extreme versatility and technical skill; a burly man with a hotel-room-filling – actually, rooms-filling – voice and a raucous, thigh-slapping laugh. I tell him he reminds me of Tom Hanks, who al so booms in rooms. He looks baffled, perhaps slightly flattered. “Me and Tom? Oh, okay.”
There is also a Hanks-like solidity about him. With both actors, you feel they’ll turn up and do a great job – in life as in art – and you sense a certain moral grandeur about them. Hanks is America, and so is Washington. Both have been called, at one time or another, America’s
‘The good thing about our job is you have to practise remembering ‒ it’s good for the mind’
greatest actor.
Unlike Hanks, however, Washington has had only one wife: he married Pauletta Pearson (66) in 1983 and they have four children, two of whom are in the film business. Oddly, both Hanks and Washington have played pilots: the former played heroic Chesley Sullenberger in Sully last year; the latter the very tainted hero in 2012’s Flight.
FENCES is the third film Washington has directed, the other two being Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters. He has, in the past, found directing hard work, giving him anxious, sleepless nights. Not now. “Now I know what I don’t have to worry about. Then I thought I had to worry about everything; now I know you just get the best people around you and let them do what they do. I have to steer the ship but I don’t have to do every job.”
One of the 10 plays in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, Fences tracks black lives in an American city suburb over the course of the 20th century. Washington performed it on Broadway, winning a Tony award for best actor in a play, and decided to go on and do the movie, which has scored him Academy Award nominations for best actor as well as best picture.
The film sees him playing Troy, who works as a garbage man. In one scene he sits waiting for a meeting in City Hall at which he expects to be sacked. He’s neatly suited and fiddling with his hat. The bullying patriarch is suddenly small and shrunken, a figure in a crowd. Washington is delighted when I bring this up. “Yeah! All that talking and he’s just sitting there with his hat in his hand! I love that.”
The film is set in 1957, a crucial moment for America and especially for an industrial city such as Pittsburgh – it’s known as the Steel City. Twelve years removed from the end of World War 2 and just before the 1960s, the tensions are there. Troy, in his own little way, is a revolutionary – he wants to move up and he’s fighting against the system. But he’s from the era before. He can’t even see far enough to realise the importance of his son getting a good education.
“And we’re in Pittsburgh – workingclass, steel industry,” Washington says. “It was interesting when we were shooting there. Two of the biggest companies there are Google and Uber Technologies.
“The young people are getting into the technologies, the Troys are out of luck. Those jobs are never coming back. You see all those empty factories – those steel-mill jobs are never coming back. I don’t know how it’s going to get better.
“There’s graffiti there – ‘Destroy Google’. That’s the enemy. It’s a tough town.”
When Troy comes home from work with his friend Bono, he goes out into the backyard and pulls out a pint bottle of gin. Each time he shakes it, smacks the base three times, opens it and splashes a little on the ground.
What’s that all about? “It’s just something cultural we did as kids. You always poured out a little for the guys who were dead or for the guys who were upstate in prison. I personally at the time – when I was 15 or 16 – didn’t have anybody deceased or upstate, but it was just something you did. You all chipped in and you bought a pint.”
There is, you’ll gather, something autobiographical going on here. Washington was born and brought up in New York state, where his father, also Denzel, was a Pentecostal minister and worked for the water department. He was puritanical, preventing his son from going to the cinema. Over the years, Washington has expressed different views about his father, but these days he just says he was a gentleman – although evidently he exercised authority in a way similar to Troy.
Washington’s mother, Lennis, ran a beauty parlour where one day a seer was watching him in a mirror. She took a piece of paper, wrote “Prophecy” on the top, then: “You’re going to travel the world and preach to millions of people.” This at a time when he was just another kid, liable to go badly wrong. He still carries that paper with him everywhere.
His parents divorced when he was 14, and his teenage years seem to have been spent on the streets. He’s said a lot of the boys he knew in those days had been sent to prison, and today he adds, “A couple of them are dead now.”
His mother got him out of there to the upmarket Oakland Academy in New Windsor. People always say this saved him – but it’s not that simple.
“I didn’t realise it was an important moment at the time. I appreciate it now that my mother got me out. But you know, that ‘get you away from the drugs’ and all that . . . Well, the good stuff was up at the school anyway. The rich kids had all the good stuff, so actually it was worse!”
Now better educated, he was heading in the direction of being a lawyer or a doctor, but then while he was acting as a counsellor at a YMCA camp he was told he had a talent for being on stage. It was acting that saved him, not the smart school.
But it was also in a roundabout way his athletic gift. He was the best runner at college until a new boy arrived who was quicker. “The coach could see I was rattled by it so he told me that boy didn’t know how to run; he couldn’t do the corners. He told me a natural ability will only take you so far. I never forgot that.”
It made Washington realise that however talented he might be he had to work at whatever he did. And he still does, furiously. When I ask him what he does when he’s not working, he seems not to understand the question.
He’s earned his two Oscars (best supporting actor in 1990 for the historical war drama Glory, and best actor for his portrayal of a corrupt cop in the 2001 crime thriller Training Day), as well as countless other awards.
I also ask him about the difficulty of being a black actor in a very white industry such as Hollywood. This doesn’t go down well.
“I don’t know what that means, to be a black actor as opposed to being a white actor. First of all, we don’t have a meeting somewhere – you know, ‘How we doin’ this week? Not so good.’ There’s more work than ever before. There still may be a glass ceiling in the positions behind the camera – executives, people running studios. I don’t think it’s gotten worse; I don’t think it’s gotten better. It is what it is. Are you going to complain about it or are you going to do something about it?”
His point is that the way to deal with discrimination is to keep on insisting in word and deed that the colour of your skin is irrelevant.
Recently he found himself in political hot water when a rumour started circulating that he was a Republican – apparently a big no-no for a black man in show business – and that he was voting for Donald Trump. Now he brushes it all aside.
“Republican? I don’t know where they got that from. We live in a world where people make stuff up. We live in a world where it doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be first. I’m not going to live my life trying to clean up everything every Tom, Dick or Harry says. I’m an independent, I’ve never been registered to either party.” And Trump? “I’m not going to go any further.”
What Washington does talk about at length and with conviction is the faith that was burnt into him when, more than 30 years ago, he was filled with the Holy Spirit.
He goes to church, reads the Bible and each day tries to follow a message delivered by the Daily Word, an old Christian magazine.
“I like preachers who give me something I can use. Okay, I got that; I’m going to apply it to this week, just working at being better. The Daily Word gives me things I can use. One thing I read was, ‘Without commitment you’ll never start; without consistency you’ll never finish.’ I like that.”
Religion seems to be where and how he lives. It’s the source of the authority he exudes and it provides him with the organised, well-managed serenity with which he plans the fourth quarter of his life.
And he has a very good and usable tip for people who struggle to keep up their prayer practice. When you go to bed, push your slippers a long way under your bed, Washington suggests. That means you have to kneel down to get them in the morning so while you’re down there, pray.
“Just start by saying thank you,” he says.
When I ask Washington what he does when he’s not working he seems not to understand the question