“He had just made one film at that time”: Mira Nair always knew Denzel Washington would be a star
It’s one of the most well-worn cliches in the industry for a director who worked with a future superstar at the beginning of their career to look back and claim they always knew they were destined for the very top, but it’s nonetheless very easy to buy when that assessment is being made on Denzel Washington.
After all, it didn’t take him very long to go from unknown to in-demand before he evolved into an above-the-line megastar who’d then spend the next four decades refusing to come down from their perch at the summit of the A-list, but it wasn’t as if he was plucked from obscurity and placed there.
Not that it took him very long, either, with Washington earning the first Academy Award nomination of his career for 1987 drama Cry Freedom, which was only fourth big screen credit. On his second time being shortlisted he went one better and snatched the prize for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in Glory, which was still only his seventh feature-length appearance.
One filmmaker always had him in mind for their production, but by the time cameras eventually started rolling, Washington was already undeniable. When shooting on Mira Nair’s romantic drama Mississippi Masala began, he was already an Oscar winner on an unstoppable upwards trajectory. However, the writer and director had penned the screenplay years beforehand, and he was the only name in mind.
“I really always wanted Denzel, who was not a star at the time,” Nair admitted to Roger Ebert. “He had made just one film at that time which I had seen called For Queen and Country. He loved my first film, which was Salaam Bombay!, so he agreed to meet me.”
Mississippi Masala follows Sarita Choudhury’s Mina, who relocates from Uganda to the titular American state after being ousted by Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Once there, she quickly falls for Washington’s carpet cleaner, Demetrius, despite the opposition they face from their respective families.
For Nair, there was only one person capable of playing opposite Choudhury, and she was confident that big things lay in his future. “It was only while we were shooting out film that he became a star like he became with an Oscar nomination for Cry Freedom and all of that,” she said. “I have a good eye, I just knew he was going to be a megastar.”
That would be a considerable understatement when he’s one of the all-time greats who deftly toes the line between acclaimed thespian and box office-busting action hero, neither of which he’d experienced with any great deal of regularity before Mississippi Masala. Nair was ahead of the curve on that one, with Washington going on to eclipse even the most ambitious of predictions being made in the early 1990s.
