Bitten by the Bard bug ... Denzel aims for King Lear
FILM legend Denzel Washington has got the Bard bug bad, following his acclaimed screen performance, full of menace, as the slasher Scot Macbeth.
Now, Washington has revealed that he has his eye on another great Shakespearean role: King Lear. And this time, he wants to play him on stage. ‘The L word!’ the actor roared.
‘That’s the good stuff. These are great parts — and the greatest challenge.’ He said that playing the ageing, troubled king was ‘absolutely something I want to do’.
And the two-time Oscar winner did not rule out the possibility of bringing Lear to London. Though he cautioned: ‘Yeah, but you’ve got to talk to the money people. I’m just an actor for hire.’
If he does play Lear, it would not happen until 2023, at the earliest, because he’s committed to a new film. ‘After all this high falutin’ Shakespeare, I’m doing The Equalizer 3. That’s showbiz,’ he said, laughing down the line from his home in Los Angeles (we were speaking on the phone ... old-school ... no Zoom for Denzel).
The latest instalment in the film series in which Washington plays Robert McCall, a retired CIA assassin (it’s inspired by the 1980s TV series starring Edward Woodward), is ready to shoot in the autumn.
‘Mixing it up,’ as he described his varied projects, stops him from getting bored. At 67, he’s been trying to cut his film roles down from two to one a year. ‘I’m doing more, but acting less,’ he said, explaining that these days he spends more time directing (he was behind the camera on A Journal For Jordan, starring Michael B. Jordan, which is out now), and producing.
He’s planning to produce a film version of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, to star Samuel L. Jackson — and his son, John David Washington — after it has had a run on Broadway, where it’s due to open this autumn. (It was delayed from 2021.)
LaTanya Richardson, Jackson’s wife, will direct the show on stage.
Washington has been charged by Wilson’s estate to make films from the playwright’s cycle of ten plays about the black experience in 20th-century America. He’s already made Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The Piano Lesson will shoot, if everything stays on schedule, next year.
But Washington ruled out doing the ‘murder movie’ — as Macbeth director Joel Coen termed his magnificently shot, black and white version, which also starred his missus Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth — on the boards.
‘I felt like I lived it already,’ he said, ‘so I would rather start on stage with Lear and really live it — then hopefully make a film of that one day.’
COEN’S rigorous preparations for the film ‘were like putting it up as a play’. Eight months before filming started, he joined McDormand and Coen for a rigorous read-through; five months after that, the full company joined in.
Denzel described McDormand as ‘a force of nature’, adding that when ‘you work with Fran, sparks fly — and it’s exciting’.
The murderous couple they play are older than usual interpretations. ‘It just raises the stakes,’ Washington argued. ‘They don’t have time to waste, literally.’
He was full of admiration for the film’s supporting cast, which included many actors from our shores. He cited Kathryn Hunter, who plays all three witches; Bertie Carvel as Banquo; Alex Hassell as Ross; and Harry Melling as Malcolm.
All schooled in the classics, ‘they knew how to rinse the words around in their mouths’, as he put it, to make them accessible. Coen (wisely) told them not to worry about accents, ‘as long as there was no stick-up-the-butt acting’, Washington recalled. ‘Sure, they’re precious words,’ he continued, ‘but they have to be spoken in a style that modern audiences can follow’.