Denzel Washington: Nowhere to Hide

Is he uncomfortable with strutting his macho allure in love scenes and nudity on-screen? After all, his Mo' Better Blues co-star Cynda Williams believes that Washington doesn't want to do anything in movies he wouldn't want his kids to see. He and Mimi Rogers reportedly shot a torrid scene for The Mighty Quinn, and I had heard that Washington's dis¬comfort was so obvious filming the scene, it virtually guaranteed that--as he is supposed to have told Rogers--it would never make the final movie. "Who told you that, the infamous 'they'?" he asks, shaking his head in disbelief. "That's just newspapers and magazines. I haven't had that many love scenes. The last one I did was in Mississippi Masala, and I wasn't uncomfortable. In Cry Freedom, my butt was naked, too. If it has something to do with the scene, I have no problem with it. If it's just about being naked for the sake of running around naked, what's the point? I guess I'm somewhat old-fashioned. I don't think we make films anywhere near as good as films used to be in the '30s and '40s. You never saw anyone's backside then. You don't need to, you know. Last Tango in Paris was a great film and you never saw Marlon Brando's backside."

I'm guessing Washington has forgotten that Brando, in fact, pulls down his pants to moon a woman at one point, but I know what he means: we saw lots of Maria Schneider's everything. "We don't have imaginations anymore." he insists. "Now, the idiot box gives us everything and you sit there like a dummy. Our imagination muscle is underused. That's reflected in film, the popular culture. We've succumbed to the lowest common denominator. I mean, some of these things that are going on, like the controversy about funding the National Endowment for the Arts and public television. Do people think that science can exist without art? They don't realize they're heading down a deadly path. Without philosophy, without theology, without artistic expression, there's no opinion. And what's replacing it? Murder and mayhem."

Washington stares across the room at a framed poster of Big, with Hanks's beaming face staring out from it, and says, grinning, of his Philadelphia co-star. "I was just thinking about Tom and realizing the reason this guy is so popular, so famous, is because he's a really good person. And what you see comes off on-screen. He's a good man and it's no coincidence mat he's on top of the game. He's grounded. I mean, now that he's so [famous], he's obviously got a whole new set of prob¬lems, but I think he's prepared. I saw something the other day on one of these [TV] shows talking about The Three Hunks,' and it mentioned Jim Carrey, Tim Robbins and Brad Pill. Is Tim Robbins considered a hunk? Who knows? Anyway, I worry about a guy like Jim Carrey--I mean, I've been at it for 20 years; it ain't like I got here last week. But, boy, though Carrey has been around for a while, it's, like, boom!" He adds, in a hoarse, almost inaudible whisper, "I pray for a guy like that. But Tom Hanks, what his success says to me is you've gotta be honest with yourself and your life and that's what people will find attractive."

Speaking of Hanks, I ask Washington whether he got any homophobic flak for playing the lawyer coming to terms with his biases and sexual identity in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. It's clear he savors having made this movie, so much so that, when I tell him how much I loved a single moment in the otherwise muddled movie, he rises and reenacts (splendidly) the instant his character hovers ambiguously outside of the apartment door of Hanks, who, in the previous scene, has touched him. physically and emotionally. Washington rises, "thinks" about knocking, stops himself, hitches up his trousers and walks away. It's a privileged moment, played to an audience of one.

"Nothing but positive responses." Washington assures me. "One smart thing that Jonathan [Demme] told me early on was, This is not about 'Joe Miller' changing 360 degrees so that he's leading the gay and lesbian parade by the end of the movie. That would let the Joe Millers of the world off the hook.' I can't say that I know exactly what it means, but a lot of guys come up to me and say, 'Man, you know. I like that guy. I like what you were saying.' And I say, 'Well, which part are you talking about?' And they go--" Washington pulls a perfect take on shuffling, hypermacho befuddlement, then says, 'Hey, you know what I'm talking about,' You see, they're still not knocking on the door. They're pulling up their trousers and walking away."

So, clearly, Washington got it. But if so, then why did he advise "Don't be kissing no man," when Will Smith balked at being asked to do that in the movie version of John Guare's acclaimed play Six Degrees of Separation? "I don't want to keep talking about that because it keeps growing," he says, but then takes pains to explain his stance. "He had a lot of reservations and he called me and basically what I said was, 'If you don't feel good about it, if you feel you needed to call me or anyone, if you're in doubt, then don't do it.'"

Oh, c'mon, I say to Washington, homophobia is homophobia: would Smith, I ask, have phoned Washington if he was being asked to blow-away someone in a movie? I suggest to Washington, "Might much better advice have been, 'Either get over your discomfort or let an actor who doesn't have those issues take the role'?" He counters, "It's easy for me to say what I would have done if the pan had been offered to me. I saw the play. It was great. But he was already six weeks into shooting when he called me. He was concerned about his image--he didn't come from theater, but from the music business, the TV show. It was his first movie. As an actor from the theater, I'd have chewed it to pieces. And if kissing was part of it, I'd have kissed the hell out of the guy. But Will called me. I didn't call him and say, 'Hey don't do that, don't kiss him.' I said, 'If you don't feel good about it, don't do it.'" Washington breaks off a moment, then confides, "I would have loved to have played the part Tom Hanks did in Philadelphia. Not to knock what he was doing, but I think it was much more difficult to play the part I played."

Since we've been talking about deciding for and against doing certain roles, what actually happened on Love Field, the Michelle Pfeiffer project set after the Kennedy assassination? In production at Orion while the company was going down in financial flames, the movie suffered a setback when Washington--as reported in the papers--quit and another actor with less marquee value replaced him. Did Pfeiffer, as I've heard, come to Washington's North Carolina hotel room on location and, in effect, fire him? "Who told you that?" he says, looking slightly thrown. "I quit. I quit. I quit. [Pfeiffer] did do that, but .she asked me to stay. Well, I don't even remember if she said 'stay' because it was over by that time. They kept saying there were [script] changes coming and nothing came for the last two or three weeks prior to us starting rehearsal. When I got the script two days before rehearsal started, I shot to New York--one of my best friends was getting married--and went right back down to North Carolina. I didn't read the script 'cause I had a feeling."

The "feeling," according to Washington, was confirmed by the read-through, "I didn't give a good reading 'cause I just couldn't deal with the material," he recalls. "It was bleeding-heart liberal nonsense. We finished the reading and I said, I don't know if you guys are going to sue me or whatever, but I cannot do this. This is not real.' I didn't like the message it was sending. They were going to call me 85 'niggers' and I said, 'I'm just not having it. I haven't been called this many niggers in my life and I'm not going to be called this many niggers in a movie." And they screamed at me and said, 'Are you out of your mind?' or whatever. I wish they would have fired me. That would have taken me off the hook. But, you know what? Had I done the film, it wouldn't have helped it any."

Right now, Washington appears poised to do just about any film he pleases. Because he has said that he wants to work for the best directors in the best roles, I ask him how he reconciles doing Virtuosity, a virtual-reality thriller, for director Brett Leonard, who helmed the less than best The Lawnmower Man? This is a role, after all, out of which Michael Douglas wriggled. He takes pains to point out that, practically up until this instant, he's been offered far more Amos & Andrew-level movies than really big shows. "Yes, I want to work with the best directors and all that," he explains. "I guess people might mean by that the "big name, A' directors. Well, a whole bunch of 'em haven't called me, ever. I can't sit around waiting for them to call. They're waiting on Tom or Brad or somebody. A lot of people in this business figure they've got to have the type of actor who's going to appeal to the highest number of people. A lot of people don't feel that's a black actor.

"I was real reluctant about Virtuosity? Washington admits. He quickly adds, "ft doesn't bother me that they were talking to Michael Douglas for a long time. Maybe in my younger days it would have bothered me more. But, hey, you can't assume when you get the call that you're the first choice. I imagine Tom Cruise gets first dibs at everything, although maybe now Brad Pitt might be getting some of his thunder. Everything's probably coming to him first. But, there's 10 other guys there next to Brad and they're not getting the call. But I am concerned with the fact that my butt's on the line and I want a good product to come out. [Brett Leonard] did another film called Hideaway which I think is pretty good. Still, it's my butt on the line with the product, Nowhere to Hide."

Well, no matter how his upcoming movies turn out, at least one place to which he can retreat is Georgia, the stupendously popular--and stupendously artery-clogging--Melrose Avenue restaurant in which he is a major investor. Having chowed down there plenty myself and having overheard patrons saying, I wonder if Denzel might come in tonight, I ask, does he? "Are you kidding?" he says, incredulously. "Sure, I go. Free food." When he does venture out, to a restaurant or mall or whatever, do his fans intrude on his privacy? "Nobody chases me around, but people do say, 'Hey, it's Denzel.'" he responds. So, no particularly pushy fans and no, heaven forbid, stalkers? "I think that happens probably more with women," he observes, adding with a rumbling laugh, "I travel with some rough individuals, some partners of mine, that I don't think anybody would stalk.

"It was never my dream to be famous," he says, as we head our separate ways. "I didn't start acting to be a movie star. I started in the theater and my desire was to get better at my craft. It's still my desire. I don't consider myself a movie star, nor do I really have the desire to be one. I'm just an entertainer. An actor who works hard at his craft. Whatever labels people give me, that's not really me or part of my process. Come and talk with me again on my 50th birthday and I may feel differently, but right now, I'm just taking the lesson from one of my old teachers who said, 'Don't be afraid to fail big.'"

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Sandra Bullock for the April Movieline.

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