Clare Longrigg Profile
What defines Denzel Washington as an actor? Some say it’s his intense, brooding stillness, others that it’s his laser-beam focus. Or his way of drawing words out of a deep gravelly well within him. But most people will tell you it’s the vest.
In the noir thriller Devil in a Blue Dress he was the sex god in a singlet. He’s said he doesn’t like to be viewed as a sex symbol, and hates doing steamy nude scenes, which he considers exploitative. He once told Spike Lee he wouldn’t take his shirt off seductively in a scene for Mo’ Better Blues.
At $4,5-million a movie, he is the highest-paid black actor in Hollywood, and he is eager to promote his craft, not just his colour. He points out that these days he is in a position to take on any character in any film: it no longer has to be a role defined by being black.
He is exacting of his interviewers, and won’t let himself be prompted, or corralled into trotting out worthy sentiments. Colour can’t be ignored, he points out, nor should it be overlooked. “I don’t know that I want colour- blind casting. I’m proud of the roles I’ve played as specifically African-American – I don’t look at them as something less. It goes beyond colour, it’s cultural. Bobby de Niro plays Italians from Brooklyn. And I like to think I’ve had just as good parts as Bobby De Niro.”
It has taken Washington some effort to escape the pigeonhole of Mr Black Biography and focus his public on the actor. “After playing Malcolm X, I was asked to play Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson, and I was like, `Come on, I can’t be all these people.’
“It has more to do with my desire to do different things than getting away from the racial issues. I’m just looking for new territory. How many ways can you attack the same subject? Racism’s racism.”
Washington is famous both for his solid 14-year marriage and his Christian beliefs. He and his wife, singer and pianist Paulette Pearson, have four children. He was brought up in New York City, in the bosom of a church-going family. After his parents split up, he ran wild with the other neighbourhood kids, and two of his friends ended up in jail for armed robbery. He admits things could have gone a very different way for him had his mother not taken a firm hand and redirected him, as he has done with his own children.
It’s a moral tale for many young men living on the edge of crime, and Washington has, inevitably, been typecast as the good guy, the leader of men. Now he is rebelling. He would like to play a bad man, to get his feet dirty, kick off and drown out the voices remonstrating with him to set a good example to African-American youth.
Being who he is has been good for Denzel. He has always dismissed the Hollywood circus, including the Oscars, as unimportant. His recipe for success? “Keeping a positive outlook, the grace of God, keeping perspective, working hard at what you do. Understanding that it’s not rocket science, you’re not saving thousands of lives, it’s just entertainment.”
In Fallen, which opened in South Africa last week, Washington plays John Hobbs, an incorruptible cop chosen to do battle with the devil. Directed by Gregory Hoblit, known for TV work including NYPD Blue and LA Law, Fallen is a clever, supernatural thriller, which makes him both comic and creepy. When a series of murders leads him towards the supernatural, the detective finds himself required to do much more than “bring in the bad guys”.
Washington is at home with the spiritual message in Hobbs’s battle with Beelzebub. His father was a Pentecostal preacher, whose hell-fire and damnation sermons instilled a lively sense of good and evil in young Denzel. “Evil exists. It’s obvious in our world that evil exists, but what are you going to do about it? Just give in and be afraid, or be a powerful force against it? Would you be willing to go this far for what you believe in? That’s the question. Then again, it’s just a movie.”
Washington insists that he chose this picture because it’s a good story. He doesn’t want people to believe in him because he means it; he wants them to believe in him because he is a good actor.
It’s a personal crusade he is in danger of winning.