“Don’t touch me again”: Denzel Washington’s petty exercise in egomania
You don’t become a star as big as Denzel Washington and stay one for as long as he has without possessing at least some degree of ego, even if he’s always come across as a humble chap.
He doesn’t even consider himself to be a Hollywood guy or a movie star, with the two-time Academy Award winner insisting that he’s a stage actor who occasionally makes films, even if he’s made a lot more films than he has stage productions over the last 40-odd years.
How many Oscar-winning A-listers have directed an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, for fuck sake? Only one, his name is Denzel Washington, and he took some shit from Ellen Pompeo, of all people, who decided to try and establish on-set dominance over one of the most celebrated thespians in modern cinema.
At no point has he ever been perceived as a vainglorious narcissist, like so many of his highly-paid peers, but he did pull a stunt ripped straight out of the Fast & Furious franchise when he stopped a stuntman dead in his tracks and said there was no chance they wouldn’t be scrapping onscreen as equals.
In the never-ending action saga, it’s become clear that the dicks are as small as the heads are shiny among the largely chrome-domed crew of beefy lads who’ve become staples of the series, with Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel stipulating that they landed an equal number of blows on each other during their fight scene in the fifth instalment.
When Washington was shooting his forgettable thriller Safe House alongside Ryan Reynolds, he issued a similar edict after noticing that the choreographed sequence he was preparing to shoot saw his opponent hit him six times, while he only landed a measly quintet of punches to his faceless enemy.
“I’m the star of the movie,” he said in no uncertain terms. “Don’t touch me again.” Stunt coordinator Oliver Schneider tried to placate the leading man, informing him that he was winning the fight anyway, but Washington refused to be swayed: “He hits me five times, and I’ll hit him five times.”
In the grand scheme of things, it’s an absolutely pointless request that audiences wouldn’t even notice, never mind give a shit about, especially when it’s a Denzel movie, and history has conditioned them to know that unless his character gets killed off, he’ll be the one emerging victorious from any brawls.
And yet, in the name of all things being fair and equal, Washington demanded that one of his opponent’s strikes be chalked off, putting him right up there with Diesel and ‘The Rock’ in the insecurity stakes.
