The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘You’ve got to be able to look yourself in the mirror’
The son of a preacher, 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 – we were British, after all – 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 up in the gods, 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; next week, 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 Washington 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 one afternoon, 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. He laughs.
“My mother saw where I was headed, and took me out and put me with the really crazy white kids! The real drug addicts! ’Cos they had money, too.” His ninth grade English teacher made him read The New York Times from cover to cover each day, a habit he keeps.
Washington’s 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: “You can’t take it with you.” 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
To some people Denzel isn’t really an actor or director – he’s a belief system