The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
John David Washington tells Guy Kelly about becoming his own man
For years John David Washington lived in the shadow of his father, but now, as he stars in the most anticipated film of the summer, he’s taking on Hollywood on his own terms. He talks to Guy Kelly about proving himself, his experiences of racism, and lockdown with Denzel
It’s hardly ideal, but also not unheard of, to interview an actor without first being able to see the film they’re promoting. It’s less common to find the actor themself hasn’t seen the film. Rarer still is when the actor not only hasn’t seen the film, but isn’t 100 per cent certain what it’s about, and cannot be sure what cinemas will even look like by the time it’s released.
Such are the unusual circumstances under which I speak to John David Washington, whose next project, Christopher Nolan’s espionage action thriller Tenet, is Hollywood’s brave post-coronavirus canary down the coal mine. After the global shutdown, it will be the first major blockbuster on the big screen, and Washington the new world’s first action hero. No pressure, then.
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ Washington, who turns 36 later this month, says nonchalantly. ‘There’s also the feeling that we will be the only show in town…’
He is pathologically laid-back about the whole thing. We speak at the end of May, when he has been in lockdown in Los Angeles, at the home of his parents, Denzel Washington and his wife of 37 years, Pauletta.
Perhaps it’s his upbringing, watching his impossibly cool father, a man he cites as ‘one of the best actors that ever lived’, operate through life. Perhaps it’s just him. But Washington doesn’t seem like he could be flustered in a hurricane.
He normally lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York, enjoying the single life of a star in ascension. Friends, such as actors Zoë Kravitz (who like Washington has tussled with the gift /curse of a superstar father, hers of course being Denzel’s friend Lenny Kravitz) and Regina King, have marvelled at his work ethic and growing confidence, noting that his success is his own, rather than a by-product of his family name.
When lockdown started, though, Washington ‘got out just in time’ to stay at his parents’ sprawling home on the west coast, not far from where he and his three younger siblings (Katia, 32, a film producer, and 29-yearold twins Malcolm, a film-maker, and Olivia, an actor) grew up.
In the months since, America has seen two crises ripple through the nation. First the coronavirus, which continues to rage in many states, and then the murder of George
Floyd by a police officer in Minnesota, an event that led to a wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations all over the world.
Washington and I speak only two days after Floyd’s death, but protests have already started. The issues they are highlighting have been prominent in his career thus far: despite only having made a handful of films, in two of them – Spike Lee’s Oscar-winning Blackkklansman in 2018, and the smaller Monsters and Men in the same year – Washington has played a police officer wrangling with racial inequalities in both US society and the police itself. The latter saw him play an officer in a force under scrutiny for the killing of an unarmed black man; in the former, he portrayed the real-life figure Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1970s Colorado.
At the time of writing, Washington has elected against making a public statement on Black Lives Matter, only posting to his private Instagram account the famous image of ‘Gordon’ – an enslaved man who escaped a Louisiana plantation in 1863 – showing extensive scarring on his back from whippings received in slavery. The British actor David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King Jr in the 2014 film Selma, replied, ‘We still carry those scars.’
‘Monsters and Men deals with social issues that unfortunately are still current
current, we’re still going through,’ Washington tells me. Yet he was drawn to the idea of seeing the issues from the perspective of a black policeman.
‘[What appealed was], what about the African American cop, what are they seeing? Not just African American, but what about cops that are doing their jobs in the right way, putting their lives on the line for their communities? So it was to be a part of that narrative, showing how difficult it is for the police officers, and how thankless that job can be for the good ones out there.’
Washington has told the story of being stopped by police when driving a rented Jaguar on the way to an audition for Ballers,
the HBO comedy-drama that launched his acting career. He was in a tank top, playing rap music loudly, ‘looking maybe kind of gangsta’, when he was pulled over. The police asked if he knew why they stopped him, but at
‘There are good police out there that don’t see colour’
‘Pullquote herelibus estium fa cesti odi dolorum qui dundae’
that moment got another call and left.
‘I didn’t break any laws. Black guy in a Jaguar, I think that’s what it was,’ he has said.
He ‘absolutely’ has experience of the issue. ‘I don’t want to say it’s a rite of passage but, yeah, I have. It was not pleasant, it was unfortunate, but I have also experienced great encounters with police officers, ones that have encouraged me that there are good police out there that don’t see colour.’
In Washington’s world, lockdown has meant working out in the home gym, occasionally getting scared by articles about the pandemic, but ‘staying occupied, building a routine, trying to manage my feelings’ while enjoying time with the family.
‘We’ve not been together for this long since I was in high school, so it’s been an interesting experience. Mom’s cooking, I do some grilling… but I’ve been enjoying it. No arguments, we get along.’
Washington is at the family home with his parents and Olivia, who also lives in New York. Katia and Malcolm are at their own homes in Los Angeles, but have stopped by for barbecues. They’ve played games as a family, too. Katia has brought a giant outdoor Connect Four with her a few times. ‘I found it a little weird, because my brother beat me like 10 times. It almost depressed me, because I used to be so good at strategy. This Connect Four thing gave me a whole existential crisis…’ he says, a little forlornly.
But he’s also learnt other things about himself. ‘Mostly the importance of communication, and really taking my time with things… The conversation about patience has been brought up quite a lot in this, exercising that skill.’ He pauses to emphasise the point. ‘Having patience has to be a skill.’
Patience is certainly something he’s needed to exercise in the build-up to the release of Tenet. The film has already been delayed twice, thanks to the uncertainty surrounding when cinemas will reopen and when audiences will return. As it stands, only a handful of people have seen it, and Washington isn’t among them.
‘Uh, no, I have not seen it, no sir,’ he says, with a crisp rasp of laughter. ‘I was there, though! I promise you it happened.’
You mean, you just know it was shot? Another laugh. ‘Yeah. Have I seen Chris’s edited version? No. But I’ve seen it, sure.’
What we know is that Tenet is a highconcept, explosive, globe-trotting spy thriller that would be a major film event even if we weren’t in the process of easing a lockdown, given the critical and commercial success of Nolan’s other blockbusters, from Dunkirk to Interstellar to his Dark Knight trilogy. Washington didn’t audition beyond a mysterious meeting with the British-american director early last year, during which they talked about everything other than
Tenet. A few weeks later, he received a call offering him the part.
‘I was at my folks’ place at the time, and we were just screaming at the top of our lungs, it was quite the spectacle. We were charging up and down the halls, flipping papers, anything we could get our hands on. We were so excited – it was like I won the World Cup.’
He still didn’t know what the film was about until he and Robert Pattinson, his
Tenet co-star and now a good friend, were individually invited to read the script in a sealed room at Nolan’s offices.
‘It took me about four hours. I’d read maybe 10 pages, go back five, read another 10, go back two… I was playing classical music on my ipad to make me go slower, make me think I’m smarter. I tried everything – took my shoes and sweater off, did some stretches. I couldn’t believe I was locked in his office reading this script nobody knows about,’ he says.
OK, but what is it about?
‘Well, it’s about a guy who, um… Let’s see, what is it about? It’s about a guy who does stuff when he hears action, and stops doing stuff when he hears cut.’ Sounds great.
That rasp again. He is enjoying this. ‘I mean, that’s the movie I saw. No, it has a spy element, you can see that there are lots of
locations [footage was filmed in Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the UK and the US], and it’s about a man on a mission, who’s ready to fight, and perhaps give his life for that mission.’
So shrouded in secrecy is the film that even Washington’s double-oscar-winning, nine-times-nominated father hasn’t been told about the plot. ‘I would love to [tell Denzel], but I always feel he [Nolan] is looking at me. Like I’ve been bugged. Chris will know, it’ll get out. I don’t want to get waterboarded, so I always tell the truth, and I didn’t say anything.’
Hmm. Is it about the coronavirus? ‘Maybe, because we’re in it, you might be able to relate it to that. I didn’t think so when it was happening, but maybe [Nolan] saw this coming. Maybe that’s why he’s ahead of the game. But personally I didn’t think so.’
Damn, I thought I might be on to something there.
Washington hasn’t had a straightforward relationship with acting over the years. As a child, he was spellbound by his parents’ industry (Denzel and Pauletta, an actor and musician, met on the set of the TV movie Wilma in 1977), and he remembers his father playing a trumpet around the house in preparation for Mo’ Better Blues, and dyeing his hair and studying Islam to become Malcolm X.
He sat with his mother on set, watching in awe as Denzel emerged from the smoke and dust in full Civil War regalia on Glory.
‘In 1990, when my father did Richard III onstage in New York, he’d take me around the city, reciting his lines. I was six or seven and would try to memorise what he recited.
‘Football was my very bold swing at independence, a way to express myself’
When I saw him in it for real, I remember sitting there and thinking about how different he looked and sounded. Like, that wasn’t my father any more, that was somebody else. The limp, the tights, the mullet. I was captivated.’
A year later, Washington had an early taste of life on camera, when Spike Lee spotted him sitting quietly with Pauletta and asked if he wanted to recite a line at the end of Malcolm X. He made the final cut, adorable and high-pitched, proclaiming, ‘I am Malcolm X!’ in Lee’s momentary homage to Spartacus.
The Washingtons are a family of fine storytellers – John David, who has a poetic turn of phrase and immaculate comic timing, more than holds his own – so family parties, whether in Los Angeles, attended by acting and music royalty, or in North Carolina, where Pauletta is from, were filled with laughter and performance.
Driven by their Christian faith (Denzel’s father was a Pentecostal minister, and he has discussed having considered becoming a preacher), the family unit was so warm and loving that being ‘Denzel’s son’ rarely felt like an issue when Washington was a child. He still has many of the same friends he had in kindergarten, while to extended family he was just ‘John David’. Occasionally ‘JD’. Never ‘John’.
‘It was hard to trust people [in LA], but I spent a lot of time in North Carolina, and they didn’t care. I taught myself how to do a backflip there so I wouldn’t get beaten up. When you’re 10 years old, they don’t care if you’re Denzel’s son, they just want to know if you can do a backflip.’
As he grew older, the weight of expectation grew heavy. Denzel never dissuaded him from acting – once, when Washington expressed anxieties about ever trying it, his father pointed out that Michael Douglas might have had the same worries, and he turned out just fine. Still, in the 2000s, having previously told Denzel he wouldn’t consider becoming an actor because ‘your shadow is so big’, Washington veered away from showbusiness to pursue a career in American football.
‘It was my very bold swing at independence, a way to express myself without judgement. I just knew that if they see me out there taking those hits or scoring a touchdown, then I’ll be respected. That wasn’t the case,’ he says.
He treated football as a kind of therapy for those old anxieties. A record-breaking athlete at university, Washington spent six years as a professional, but if he thought that would help him get away from being known as ‘Denzel’s son’, it didn’t exactly work.
‘The more success I got, the more the story became, “Denzel’s son is a success.” I’ve always experienced success being more related to him.’
In 2013, a torn Achilles tendon saw him retire from sport early. He sulked for a long time, but it became a blessing: he’d told an agent friend that he’d perhaps consider giving acting a go one day, and was given an audition for the part of, yes, a handsome and charismatic American football player, on Ballers. Aged 30, he got it.
‘I was proving [I could do it] to myself before others, because no matter how good