The movie Denzel Washington didn’t want to stop shooting: “I just kept going and going”
Most people don’t want to be at work any longer than they have to, and they definitely don’t want to take their work home with them, but Denzel Washington became so invested in a movie that he wasn’t ready for it to end when it was time for the cameras to stop rolling.
Obviously, acting isn’t the regular Dolly Parton shift, and the biggest stars get handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Practitioners of the method spend months immersed in their characters to the point their colleagues barely even know them at all, but Washington has never been beholden to that style.
He turns up, does the work, and goes home. That’s putting too fine a point on it when he’s one of the all-time greats with two Academy Awards to his name and a reputation for mastering both prestige drama and blockbuster thrills to equally successful degrees, but for the most part, when the director calls it a wrap he knows his work is done.
There are always exceptions to the rules, though, and in Washington’s case, it applied to one of his finest-ever turns. It was the 12th feature of his career, and he already had an Oscar under his belt, but Spike Lee’s incendiary and powerful biographical drama Malcolm X was an experience unlike any he’d ever had before.
“This was the first film where I did not want to stop shooting,” he admitted to Roger Ebert. “Especially the speeches. Once I got used to it, I just kept going and going.” He was so committed to the part and desperate to do it justice that if Lee wanted to keep rolling for 24 consecutive hours, he wouldn’t have heard a hint of protestation from his leading man.
“Throughout the film, I lived Malcolm’s life, whether the cameras were on or off,” Washington continued, revealing it to be one of the few times he went full-blown method. “The guys who were my bodyguards in the film went with me everywhere in the course of the day.”
There’s a case to be made that Malcolm X is the definitive performance of Washington’s storied career, and it’s evidently one he struggled to let go at the end of any given day. Carrying the weight of expectation that came with embodying such an iconic and important figure could have drowned a lesser actor, but he was so dialled in that he didn’t want to give it up at the end of principal photography.
It was viewed as something of a shock when Al Pacino took the ‘Best Actor’ prize at the Oscars for Scent of a Woman when Washington was considered by many to be the overwhelming favourite, but his view of the movie and the character he played were never going to be defined by the size of his trophy cabinet.
