Denzel Washington names the most controversial movie of his career: “The film was touchy”
When you think of controversial actors or actors who take on controversial subject matter, Denzel Washington is pretty far down on the list. Unless you’re counting nearly every actor in Hollywood, he probably isn’t even on the list. He doesn’t have Gaspar Noé or Harmony Korine on speed dial, and he’s never shown any interest in being in a Lars von Trier film.
From the beginning of his career, Washington has played complex figures – some have been heroes, others have been antiheroes, and some, like Alonso Harris in Training Day, have been outright villains. But there has rarely been any controversy surrounding his movies. He holds a similar place in the industry as Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep. He is one of the great icons of his generation, and his character seems pretty unassailable.
However, it’s impossible to be in show business for as long as he has without ruffling a few feathers. In a 2010 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Oscar winner reflected on some of his most famous roles, and discussed the one for which he received significant pushback.
In 1999, nearly a decade after winning his first Oscar for Glory, Washington appeared in The Hurricane, a biopic about the boxer Rubin ‘The Hurricane’ Carter, who was convicted of murder in 1967 and released nearly two decades later when a court overturned the ruling. It was a high-profile case. Carter was accused of murdering three people at a bar in New Jersey and was handed a life sentence. He appealed, and was convicted a second time, finally gaining his freedom in 1985.
Directed by Norman Jewison, who had made the seminal Sidney Poitier film In the Heat of the Night in 1967, The Hurricane courted controversy by omitting unsavoury elements of Carter’s life and taking the complexity out of the case. It also portrayed the ordeal as a straightforward example of one cop’s overt racism rather than as a cautionary tale about the structural racism in the American justice system more broadly.
“We’ll never know, will we?” Washington said when asked about the movie’s alleged historical inaccuracies. “The film was touchy because people were murdered and a lot of people felt that Rubin did it. So you’re opening old wounds. Malcolm X was more dangerous, but Hurricane might have been more controversial.”
Interestingly, Jewison had been the one to sign on to make Malcolm X and had recruited Washington to star as the famous civil rights activist. After widespread condemnation about having a white filmmaker helm the project, however, Jewison stepped aside and Spike Lee stepped in. He also faced a powerful backlash, largely because Black activists worried he would take the edge off of Malcolm X’s legacy to make his story more palatable to white audiences.
Presumably, when Washington described the film as ‘dangerous,’ he was referring to the immense responsibility of faithfully distilling the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most famous figures into a Hollywood movie. Ultimately, he earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal, and did so again for The Hurricane. Perhaps the takeaway from all of this is that Washington should have courted controvery a little more regularly.
