After back to back hits like The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia, Oscar-winner Denzel Washington finds he doesn't much like being the center of attention everywhere he goes. "It was never my dream to be famous," he claims. "I didn't start acting to be a movie star."
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"I thought we were here to talk about movies and stuff," says Denzel Washington, shooting me a lightning-bolt look that could melt plutonium. "What you're asking about. That's... private." Well, now. I'd been apprised that Washington, the well-thought-of Oscar winner, can be fiercely testy when interviewers attempt to probe his offscreen life.
And, Lord knows, I've ruffled celebrity feathers before, but never with such an innocuous question. It's not that I haven't come prepared with a slew of potential feather-rufflers. Such as how Washington, a married men and father, feels about being cited by People magazine as one of Hollywood's more unfaithful stars. Such as whether he quit, as the press reported, or was fired by Michelle Pfeiffer, his intended co-star of 1992's Love Field. Such as whether he is trying, Harrison Ford style, for a Big Movie Star-type career with a slew of commercial-sounding movie projects to follow his new nuke submarine thriller Crimson Tide. Such as why he, one of Hollywood's best-looking men, has made such a fuss about not wanting to appear nude in movies when, in fact, he already has. But all that is to come later.
We've been holed away for maybe 10 minutes in a conference room in the offices of Washington's publicists. I've been listening to his by-the-numbers, I'm-here-to-support-my-new-movies-but-I'ss-be-dammed-if-I'll-do-much-else sorts of responses to my question, while trying to overlook hoe I've caught him eyeing his watch. Now I've become acquainted with the unmistakable get back bristle that lives just below Washington's charm-guy surface. In a second he can go from the deliberate, diligent Washington of Malcolm X, Philadelphia and Cry Freedom to the edginess of Mo' Better Blues and Glory.
The interview has been going along like so, Me: "I read that your wife once said that you are impatient and want it all, yesterday. How close are you to having everything?" Him: "Impatient? Hmm. I don't even know what 'everything' means. So, I can't say I want everything." Then comes a pleasant smile, a couple of blinks of the eyes and a stare that asks, Next? Me: "Well, career-wise, you've got a deal at TriStar and your next few years booked with such projects as Virtuosity, probably The Bishop's Wife and maybe A Star is Born-both with Whitney Houston-possibly a Jackie Robinson bio-flick with Spike Lee, plus a multimillion-dollar thriller script in which Fox boss Laura Ziskin hopes you'll star... " Him: "Well, there's a lot of talk about a lot of movies now. Not all those films are slated to go. Even if I had all of those, I don't think that's everything. There's a lot to life other than..."
"Movies?" I offer, to which he nods assent. That's when I make this offending comment: "I've heard that your father was a Pentecostal minister. How does a young man learn about the facts of life from a religious father?" He chides, "I'm not really into talking about my father. That's kind of private. And he's passed away, so we let him rest in peace."
With that, he falls silent. As he's mulling this whole interview thing over, with a look that seems to say, Oh, man, bring me in another interviewer, I'm mulling it over too, thinking, I guess there goes my question about the rumor that Washington's mother is holed up in Florida, busily knocking out an autobiography that the privacy-obsessed Washington surely must hope will not see the light of print. But, since someone has to break the silence, I decide I have nothing to lose--he's already clammed up, right? So, I go for broke, and ask, "How does a married father of four respond to turning up on the cover of People magazine described as one of Hollywood's 'most unfaithful celebrities'?" Instead of standing up and splitting, which is pretty much what I'm expecting, something curious happens. Washington grins slowly, settles back into the couch, and declares, "A Jamaican woman told me years ago. 'When you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud, too.'" "And," I add, "with the mudslinging." Washington takes a good, slow, deep breath and, I realize, decides at that instant to hold up his end of the interview after all.
"This 'famous' stuff, I guess you can get caught up in it," he says. "You can even get caught up in fighting it, pretending it doesn't exist. But it already alters who you are, just in the fact that you're trying to deny it. I just turned 40 and my wife and I had a quiet getaway. I didn't want a big party or anything. I just wanted to reflect on what I've done with the first 40 years and what I want to do now. I think I'm just starting to figure out how to do it, you know, how to simplify things in life. Around my birthday, I was listening to this motivational speaker, Les Brown, who made this analogy about ghosts around his bed. He was saying when you die, imagine you had these ghosts around your bed that represent your unfulfilled potential. Things that should have been done, should have been experienced. How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes? People can say about me or anyone, 'Oh, you're great at this,' but you have to look at yourself and say, 'How do I feel about what I've done?' That's all that matters."
And has he found ways to simplify his life? "Keep it simple, you know?" he replies.
"Just try to keep your head on straight and listen a little bit better to those around you and see if they're really for you or are they just... well, you know. Which is a tough one, because you can't become paranoid, where you're always going, 'Now, what did he really mean?" When you're in the focus, in the public eye, I guess it's the nature of the beast, when someone gets there, to start throwing rocks at them."
"Better prepare yourself for the rock storm," I tell him, which provokes a warm, booming laugh that fills the room. "Oh, it's started with me, definitely. [People] took a quote out of a TV interview I did three years ago with Barbara Walters that was shown the night of the Oscars and [People] attached something to it, put something behind it. I said, 'Hmm,' but then I thought, 'They're trying to sell newspapers, magazines. I'm a person in the public eye and they think saying that about me or about whoever else they had on [that cover] will sell magazines.' I assume millions and millions of people see Barbara Walters, but the interview was done three years ago [and] nobody wrote about it then. Maybe nobody cared then, now, all of a sudden..." Now, all of a sudden, lots more people care, especially once one has starred opposite Julia Roberts in a popular John Grisham potboiler or with Tom Hanks in a movie that made close to $80 million and received Oscar attention.
I've heard that since The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia. Washington has declined plum roles played instead by Morgan Freeman, Laurence Fishburne, Ray Liotta and Forest Whitaker, among others. I mention this to Washington and he appears genuinely fascinated, laughing, "Where do you hear all this stuff?"
While he pooh-poohs it all as "agent talk," he doesn't deny that "magazine talk," about his being one of Hollywood's most desirable sex gods, takes its toll. "Let me tell you, it's 10 times tougher on my wife," he asserts, referring to musician-singer Pauletta Pearson, whom he met when both were making the 1977 bio-movie Wilma for TV. "She's a solid woman. Really strong. [But] it's tough, real tough. We've been blessed with a lot of things, too, you know. We do get the private jet. We do get the cars, the jewelry. She does get to buy and to go anywhere she wants."' He's not understating the case. In true "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" fashion, Washington's known to enjoy summering off the coast of Italy on the family yacht, the "boat," as he calls it, which is large enough to sleep not just the wife and kiddies but also such playmates as Debbie Allen and husband Norm Nixon, their children, plus a platoon of employees. But, Washington hastens to point out, ''some other parts come with it, too, because you can't go, 'I only want the good stuff. Everybody leave me alone, I want my privacy.' I think I've learned not to take it too seriously."
In fact, Washington takes oh-so-seriously what he sees as America's obsession with gossip in tabloid magazines, on TV and in politics. Voice ringing, he asserts. "This [rumor] stuff has always been done with movie stars, but I worry that we're all just going down and down and down. We've succumbed to the lowest com¬mon denominator. There's a nastiness going around that I think has to do, basically, with the fact that we ain't what we used to be as a country. This country peaked, economically and otherwise. 20 years ago. We ain't the best on the block no more, There's all kinds of challenges from the right and left, but everybody's looking over [their shoulder] going, 'Well, at least I'm better than them' instead of saying, 'Let me take a look at me. Let's see how I can be a better me.'"
Washington sounds so impassioned, so utterly sincere, it occurs to me that if he ever decided to run for office, he might easily be formidable. But, I say, just as a sop to those poor souls still obsessed with details of other people's muck and mire, are rumors of his being unfaithful just rumors? He says, "I wouldn't qualify what they talk about or what anyone's talked about in a newspaper or magazine. What goes on between me and my wife goes on between me and my wife. It's our business and not anyone else's. So, I wouldn't even begin to talk about what I did. didn't do, with whom, without whom. Because that's just giving power to people who run and talk about more stuff, regardless of what I say and do. We [as a family] just sort of circle the wagons a little bit, which is all you can do. And you realize that this [rumor] business, really, it's good because it puts you in check. You've got to reassess and go, *Wow, you just can't go out and think you can just do... whatever,' because people are gonna talk about you and say, 'He's doing this or that,' or 'Let me tell you who I saw him with.' It's sad, but that's part of [fame], too."
His fame may well soar even higher right about now. After all, he won the lead role opposite Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide, which director Tony Scott calls, "The Caine Mutiny on a nuclear sub," over contenders like Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia and Val Kilmer. He can't exactly rave about a movie he claims he has not seen yet, but he will say, "Crimson Tide was a real, real thrill because I got to work with Gene Hack-man, who can flat-out act. I feel I can act, too. But I hadn't really worked with a quote-unquote master before, and he is a master. Gene is in there with Marlon Brando, Pacino: I don't consider anybody better than him. It's going to be a good summer kind of movie, with just the right combination of things, the drama, the actors--and Tony Scott can really turn on the action. With Jerry and Don [producers Bruckheimer and Simpson, respectively] behind him, we've got all the right elements."
All the right elements, perhaps, for a flow of future Tides? "That sequel stuff scares the heck out of me and, besides, I just don't plan that far in advance." he demurs. Even though director Scott, too, calls the movie "too classy for that." much about the project seems to shout "tentpole." How sequel-wary could Washington be, anyway, considering he made the mayhem-by-numbers Ricochet for producer Joel Silver, of the famously successful franchises Die Hard and Lethal Weapon? And what, if not an attempt at another poten¬tial franchise, is the long-delayed Devil in a Blue Dress. Carl Franklin's movie version of one of Walter Mosley's terrific books, in which Washington plays cool, brainy "Easy'" Rawlins, the detective who runs with danger and racism in post-World War II L.A.? He insists, "I didn't take [Crimson Tide or Ricochet] with that in mind." conceding that Devil was indeed intended as a run-it-up-the-tentpole-and-see-if-it-flies project. "It's just about variety. I met Joel Silver at Spago the night of the Academy Awards with the Oscar sitting on the table. And he was like. 'I've got eight scripts I want you to do. Pick any one you want,' I shouldn't say Ricochet was a mistake, but it's not one of my favorite films. But I talk, to people and some go, "Man, that was one of the best movies you ever made,' so who am I to say? You think it's lousy, this other one thinks it's great. When the movie's done, when I've done all I can do with it and/or for it. I move on. You pay your $7.50 you've got the right to feel what you feel. 'Cause you couldn't tell me there was a greater film made than Superfly when I was 18."
So, is his Devil in any way a throwback. a gentle nod to such cinematic African- American icons as Superfly's Ron O'Neal and Shift's Richard Roundtree? "Those were the movies that my friends and I were interested in growing up during the 'black exploitation' times," he recalls. "Across 110th Street, Three the Hard Way, all of them."
What, exactly, has happened with Devil in a Blue Dress, made a year ago with Jennifer Beals? "We just shot a scene with me and Jennifer over again that hadn't clicked before, but I think we nailed it this time." he says, assuring me that we will be able to judge for ourselves come fall when TriStar will finally release the film Washington's production company, Mundy Lane Entertainment, produced. "They want to enter the movie at Cannes and I think it's gonna be a good movie. Carl had done one film, One False Move, before, basically, and I said, 'I think that my clout, if you will, can get this film done and get Carl a budget he deserves." My having done some films, not at all for business reasons, but some of them having turned out to be really good business, it was the right moment to do Devil."
Given his clout, his star power and his sex appeal, isn't it time to do the provocatively intimate scenes from Mosley's novel that spark between his character and the one Beals plays? One hears those scenes will not be in the film. "It's Carl's vision, it's his film," he asserts. "Those [sex] scenes you talked about were never in the script." Faced with his look. which seems to ask, "So, what arc you driving at?" I say, "Given the fact that you are perceived as a fine actor, are you at all uncomfortable with also being perceived as. well, fine?" As Spike Lee put it, inimitably, "Women love them some Denzel."
Washington declares, shirking it off, 'There was nobody knocking when I was a senior in high school, a freshman in college. Where were they then? Power is attractive. That stuff just sort of feeds onitself. It doesn't really have anything to do with me. It just becomes 'something' all on its own. I know that, for African-American women in particular, there's not many black men for them to look at on-screen. So, you know, I just sort of, I guess, accept it. It doesn't really blow my mind. That's a part of the business."
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.