The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
30 Years Ago, Much Ado Marked Denzel’s Bard Debut
Denzel Washington’s passion for Shakespeare is clearly not as fleeting as, to borrow from a certain playwright, a walking shadow. The two-time Oscar winner currently stars opposite Frances McDormand in The Tragedy of Macbeth, director Joel Coen’s take on the Shakespeare staple that’s now available on Apple TV+, and for which Washington earned a SAG Award nomination. But it was 1993’s star-studded Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Kenneth Branagh (whose latest, Belfast, is in the awards race alongside Macbeth), that introduced moviegoers to the actor delivering the Bard’s lines. Washington played nobleman Don Pedro, who overcomes the villainous scheming of his brother Don John (Keanu
Reeves) to foil his matchmaking between two couples, Benedick (Branagh) and Beatrice (Emma Thompson) and Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard) and Hero (Kate Beckinsale, in her big-screen debut). The project, which also featured Michael Keaton, filmed at a Tuscan vineyard in Chianti, and Washington remembers the wine flowing during the convivial shoot. “I did a lot of sword-leaning,” he tells THR jokingly. Also making a lasting impression on the cast was the intense heat from shooting in the dead of summer in 1992. “I remember having to wrap a wet towel round my head in order to sleep at night,” Thompson recalls. “Denzel would lie under any bush he could find, trying to escape the Tuscan glare. Mind you, he was in leather trousers.” More recent period productions, such as Netflix’s Bridgerton, have earned praise for inclusive casting, but for Much Ado’s team, hiring Washington, who wasn’t known for Shakespeare or comedy, was a no-brainer. “We weren’t aiming specifically at blind casting — we were just aiming at good casting,” producer David Parfitt says. “Denzel has that nobility in him, and you absolutely believed him as a prince.” Thirty years later, the chemistry among the cast endures. “I [recently] saw Keanu in New York, and I was like, ‘Ah, he’s got a little gray in the beard there,’ because I hadn’t seen him in such a long time,” Washington says fondly. “It was like we picked up where we left off.”